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Jorge O. Castro
Director of Dinosaurs
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Bluefin Autumn 2025: We visit the Bazaar

· 13 min read
Jorge O. Castro
Director of Dinosaurs

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Guardians, today Bluefin GTS switched its base from Fedora 41 to Fedora 42. The gathering of raptors has begun. In a two weeks Bluefin (aka bluefin:stable) releases on Fedora 43 and we will start the cycle all over again!

Looking for Fedora 43? That's here too in bluefin:latest, and will roll out to bluefin:stable users in 2 weeks. It's tough to write two of these, so we'll likely just move to spring/autumn announcements and whenever major things land. When bluefin:stable upgrades I will post it as an addenum in the discussion thread for this post.

Introduction

As it ends up F43 will be coming to bluefin:stable while we're in Atlanta, GA, for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, come say hello! As a bootc reference architecture we tend to align with the release cadence of other projects. This usually means that I'm on the road when there's a Bluefin release happening, so we do status reports like this depending on where we are in the world at the time, and to ensure transparency. It's also our chance to gather with attendees and get feedback on how we can make Bluefin better and gather feedback.

You'll receive this update during your next update window, or you can run an update manually by clicking on this icon:

update

If you've never experienced a Bluefin upgrade before, McPhail has a full writeup. Here's the major release information:

What is Bluefin?​

Bluefin is an operating system for your computer. It is designed to be installed on a device upgrade for the life of the hardware – we accomplish this by sharing the maintenance and care of our systems together as a community. It is designed to be as “zero touch” as possible by providing a curated GNOME experience.

Bluefin GTS (aka bluefin:gts) is our standard release, designed to be one cycle behind the most current Fedora release. This one's been in the oven for about six months and is ready to go. In a few weeks the bluefin:stable branch will move on to Fedora 43. If you're brand new you can use the website to pick the right image or select from the grid below:

VersionGPUDownloadChecksum
Bluefin GTSAMD/Intel📥 bluefin-gts-x86_64.iso🔐 Verify
Bluefin GTSNvidia📥 bluefin-nvidia-open-gts-x86_64.iso🔐 Verify

Welcome to Bluefin

theclueiscollapse

This unidentified Dromeasaur is by Dr. Natalia Jagielska, a world renowned expert paleontologist and paleoartist! We reached out to work with her on bringing her artwork and style to Bluefin, and she said yes! This rendition will be revealed in November, or you can just manually pick it in the wallpaper chooser.

I am so stoked about this, an actual scientist! We're retconning that this is just Bluefin enjoying a nice day at the lake. We have two more wallpapers from her coming soon. I have come to really appreciate the world of flying reptiles. They are terrifying.

Natalia's artwork was vectorized and remastered by Delphic Melody, please consider donating so that the collaboration can continue!

Major Changes​

There are a few major changes from a Bluefin perspective that we've been looking forward to:

Installation Experience​

  • The Anaconda web-ui installer is now the default installer, dramatically improving the experience. We say goodbye to the old GTK Anaconda installer.
  • We'll be automatically refreshing all the Bluefin ISOs once a month to ensure the installation media is fresh.

Introducing Bazaar

Bazaar makes its debut in Bluefin GTS! All Bluefins are now just using the Bazaar flatpak. You're in for a treat:

bazaar1 bazaar2

It's been super awesome seeing Bazaar move from a random project we found on r/gnome to what is effectively now the premier app store experience for FlatHub and Linux. You can help out tremendously by sponsoring the author.

This is also a major milestone for Bluefin since we've effectively done our part for the GNOME and FlatHub ecosystems and can now consider application installation a solved problem, we can introduce new things into Bluefin as a flatpak to begin with and move us away from distribution specific formats.

I am finding more applications now than I ever have. It's also a milestone for all Linuxes since flatpak's upcoming release gives us the flexibility to do this in a proper way with full lifecycle management. We can now be more flexible with the applications we can ship mid-cycle by plopping a file in /etc/preinstall.d. Those of you making custom images will really take advantage of this!

Shoutout to Sebastian Wick for this work in Flatpak and working on the next release of this cool tech!

What makes us different?

We're committed to a future where authors deliver their applications how they see fit. This should be decoupled from the operating system.

Homebrew

Speaking of packages, we've been doing more work engaging with Homebrew developers, check out this interview I did with Workbrew talking about our hopes and dreams:

Let us know if you're interested in working on Homebrew for Linux, we have opened a homebrew tap so that we can interate on bringing cool new things to you. A huge shoutout goes to Yulian Kuncheff and Ahmed Adan for spearheading this effort, please consider donating!

Fonts

The fonts have been a disaster for a long time, we're finally ripping the bandaid off and removing a bunch of fonts from the image. For you command line nerds you can install any of the fonts listed in Homebrew or use a tool like Embellish to install more fonts.

If you're in developer mode you can bring the monospace fonts back with ujust bluefin-fonts.

Tailscale

We've dropped the GNOME Quick Settings extension for tailscale in favor of the upstream system tray implementation. For more information, check the docs, this requires manual set up.

The tailscale experience is still not where it needs to be, but now that Tailscale has started work on an official system tray implementation we expect this to solidify over the next few upstream releases.

ujust commands returning

After a hiatus we've finally refactored the Homebrew management in Bluefin. We're adding back some convenience commands:

Removal Notices​

Extinction is a natural part of life. After a deprecation cycle the following images are now removed:

  • Nvidia Closed Images: Due to Nvidia's software support changes we can no longer support the older closed modules for Nvidia cards. Not many people are using these, either migrate to the nvidia-open images or move to a stock image to use the built in kernel drivers.
  • Bluefin HWE Images: Not many people were using these, they have also been removed.

Repository Changes

As usual most of the changes we do in GitHub to deliver Bluefin and not so much in the image itself. Major parts of the Bluefin repository have been cleaned up to align with the improvements and lessons learned from building Bluefin LTS earlier in the year. This has been the bulk of the work in the past few weeks.

Bluefin has significantly been simplified, now would be a great time to contribute as we've brought the repository up to the state of more modern bootc projects like Bluefin LTS.

  • bluefin:gts and bluefin:stable will be publishing on Tuesdays from now on instead of Saturdays. Publishing on Saturday nights is an artifact of pre-automation "reserved time" for testing before a weekly release. This matches the same release schedule as Bluefin LTS.

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More Information​

Bluefin is a deinonychus, and may snap at you occasionally. Four year olds can get feisty of so there might be issues that you discover that we haven't seen before. Filing issues is always appreciated.

We also accept donations to sponsor the infrastructure and artwork.

Helping FlatHub

Sometimes starting in open source can be a real barrier if you don't know where to start. Don't have the skills to do cloud native things yet? Here's a good way to help out FlatHub. Flatpaks rely on what we call "runtimes" to ensure that the application has the dependencies it needs to run. Do a flatpak list to check them out:

flatpaklist

Flatpak Tracker is a site we made that will check all of the applications we ship in Bluefin and see which runtimes need to be updated. We label them by image, here's the the list of applications that need to be updated.

flatpak tracker

This is important work because we want applications to be updated to the latest runtimes for security reasons. As it turns out, many of these applications have OPEN PULL REQUESTS already with people updating the runtime, you just need to find the app, run the updated version by following the instructions, and then report back to the Flatpak maintainer that the new app is working great (or broken!). Since GNOME 49 just released, there's plenty to do, so feel free to dive in and get started! Also remember, this work helps all of FlatHub, we're explictly sending new volunteers to help upstream.

FlatHub is critical to the desktop

We choose to help move application development forward via FlatHub instead of fragmenting the ecosystem with distribution-specific packaging. This includes shipping a premier FlatHub experience out of the box. You do not have to worry about misconfigured and low-quality Fedora flatpak remotes and packages on Bluefin systems.

Find your favorite app and see if there's a test build available for a new runtime. And if you have the skills to port applications to new runtimes, now is the time to flex. 😄

store.projectbluefin.io

Check out store.projectbluefin.io and pick up some dino merch. Thanks to John Johnson for ensuring our coffee mug game is up to snuff:

mugs

Is that it?​

Nothing makes ops people happier than uneventful things.

Today is really like any other, we just updated a few tags, you always have the option to go to any version we support at any time. Wether you like the chill vibe of bluefin:gts or the refined aggresiveness of bluefin:stable , the raptor abides.

Here's the current lay of the land:

gts (default)stable or stable-dailylatest
Fedora Version:424243
GNOME Version:484849
Target User:Most usersEnthusiastsAdvanced users and testers
System Updates:WeeklyWeekly or DailyDaily
Application Updates:Twice a DayTwice a DayTwice a Day
Kernel:GatedGatedUngated

NOTE: The stable and stable-daily branches will move to F43 in two weeks.

Desktop DevOps folks wanted!​

Bluefin is an active predator and is constantly hungry. You can help keep Bluefin healthy by becoming a contributor! We are an open source project and accept contributions:

As a cloud native project we are always looking for contributors with skills in Podman, Docker, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, and good ole bash.

Bring on the Charts!

Let's take a look at our contributor health, and celebrate the amazing folks who have come together to bring you Bluefin! We use LFX Insights to measure our project health. First note that my results here are skewed, since I am either usually just merging or telling a bot it's ok to do something. This also does not include the rest of Universal Blue. Yes, Aurora people basically maintain both, haha.

lfx1

This next one surprised me, I was expecting 20 or 30ish at best. Nice work ya'll!

active contributors

Haha yep, I can't hide from the data though, free me from this!

jorge

Feel free to browse around and learn cool things about Bluefin's creators.

What's Next?​

After KubeCon we head into the holidays, where things will slow down significantly. We've been in the lab with mad doctor Timothée Ravier and have been cooking up something. We expect that this will change the course of Bluefin for the better, forever. We can't wait to show you, until then, enjoy!

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Discussion Thread

Bluefin LTS: Reinventing the Steel

· 12 min read
Jorge O. Castro
Director of Dinosaurs

Achillobator giganticus

achillosmall

After nine months of development Bluefin LTS and Bluefin GDX are now Generally Available(GA). The reign of Achillobator has begun. Find the download links on the website, or snag them below.

Bluefin LTS is a workstation designed for people who prefer Long Term Support but desire a modern desktop. This species of raptor is for users who prefer a slower release cadence, about a three-to-five year lifespan on a single release. Like other Bluefins it features first-class support for Flathub via Bazaar, Homebrew, ZFS, and all the other goodies.

Pasted image

Bluefin LTS is composed of:

  • Mostly the same packages of Bluefin and Bluefin GTS, but built with CentOS Stream 10 and EPEL for extra packages.
    • The same features since they share the same source RPMs, just built on CentOS
  • A backported GNOME 48 desktop
  • ARM (aarch64) based images

Bluefin LTS also offers a hardware enablement branch (bluefin:lts-hwe) with:

  • Updated Linux kernel, currently 6.15.9.
  • Toggle between branches with ujust rebase-helper.
  • Dedicated HWE ISOs for newer kit

Rationale

Bluefin LTS ships with Linux 6.12.0, which is the kernel for the lifetime of release. An optional hwe branch with new kernels is available, offering the same modern kernel you'll find in Bluefin and Bluefin GTS. Both vanilla and HWE ISOs are available, and you can always choose to switch back and forth after installation.

I have been dogfooding Bluefin LTS for most of this year. This is the most "work focused" image and is suitable for "set it and forget it" style desktops. We are proud of this one!

Here's how I pitched the idea earlier this year:

A modern GNOME Desktop

Bluefin LTS provides a backported GNOME desktop so that you are not left behind. This is an important thing for us. James has been diligenlty working on GNOME backports with the upstream CentOS community, and we feel bringing modern GNOME desktops to an LTS makes sense. I may be old but I'm not dead!

A very special thanks to Jordan Petridis from GNOME for technical advice and review.

New Installation Experience

Installation is via a live session with the new Anaconda webui. This installer is miles better than the ones we used to ship, thanks to the Anaconda team.

Secure boot and all those goodies are available:

live session live session installation

Update Cadence

Updates will come as often as we need them for now and will settle into weekly releases on Tuesdays. Follow updates on changelogs.projectbluefin.io.

Errata

There are a few lingering issues that will take more time:

What is Bluefin GDX?

Bluefin GDX is designed to be an AI Workstation by providng Nvidia drivers and CUDA in one image. It combines Bluefin LTS with the Bluefin Developer Experience. There's no cool expansion of GDX: GPU Developer Experience I guess. Maybe someday we'll call it Bluefin CUDA Edition. (Jensen call me!)

The reason we brand it differently is that it is designed for AI and Machine Learning professionals. Instead of a multitude of Nvidia images like Bluefin we will concentrate on this one image to focus on one thing: this is our platform for open source AI. Improvements made in GDX will make it's way into Bluefin's developer mode. GDX gives us a place to rev fast with some new friends:

Teamwork ...

We are happy to announce that we've formed a community partnership with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Command Line Assistant team. We are collaborating on upstream and open source AI and ML tools to provide system-wide inference and an enhanced experience for Bluefin LTS and GDX users.

This will be the lab that will keep Bluefin on the leading edge of open source AI. Here's Mo Duffy on Destination Linux to give you an idea of what we're thinking about.

Features

  • Nvidia CUDA and VSCode integrations and full secureboot support out of the box. There are many parts of the CUDA ecosystem that need to be included, but the raw core is there and ready to be expanded upon.
  • Ramalama for local management and serving of AI models
  • uv for Python package management
  • ... and more! Check the AI and Machine Learning section for more!
  • We are looking for AI/ML enthusiasts with strong opinions who want to be involved! Inquire within!

Bluefin GDX at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU

You can find Bluefin GDX on the conference circuit!

What this all means

Bluefin LTS will end up being way more sustainable than Bluefin and Bluefin GTS from a developer perspective. It's more of an initial setup and then we don't touch it as often. We have had periods in beta development where we didn't need to touch it for weeks. If you look changelogs.projectbluefin.io you'll soon notice the pattern, mostly minor version bumps. Nice.

It's also much more advantageous for us to derive off of a base image that ends up being a commercial product -- there is no doubt that CentOS and Red Hat have their weight behind these base images, whereas we are unable to get that level of commitment from Fedora. And as Steven Rosenberg pointed out, Fedora isn't really improving in this area, and with bootc's composefs work coming along nicely we now have multiple base images to choose from. It will be an interesting year!

What does this mean for Bluefin GTS?

As it turns out, Bluefin LTS HWE is in the exact same ecological niche as GTS. They will end up being competitors. There's no death knell or anything like that, once development moves on it doesn't cost us much to keep it running. And we do love our pets. Check out the awesome brand new image by Delphic Melody and ahmedadan:

image chooser

As you can see, it's getting a bit crowded. We'll see how people react to LTS, and I expect we'd hide the GTS option from the website but continue to offer it.

With bootc we can deliver a desktop experience with the latest GNOME, and a new kernel -- but on a solid base with less regressions. The previous generation of thinking kept CentOS in a very locked set of use cases. The old boring ones. Now with bootc + containers + flathub + homebrew, we feel that this less churny base makes for a compelling desktop. We'll see how they compete!

Less bitey Bluefin and Bluefin GTS

Since Bluefin LTS is "bootc natural" and not a transplant, it comes with less compromises out of the box. Bluefin LTS doesn't support local layering at all and AppImages don't work either. (Told ya'll those things were not gonna make it lol.) Bluefin LTS also does not support older machines with v2 CPU instructions.

This also lets us be less strict in Bluefin. We've decided to leave local layering enabled by default in Bluefin and Bluefin GTS. There are users who use that ecosystem, so no worries there. Savages. The Fedora based images will continue to serve these use cases. James also has his own tunaOS, which offers a wide variety of Bluefin-derived variants, including an AlmaLinux based sister to Bluefin LTS. That covers just about everybody - The bootc community around CentOS is quite diverse, and offers a variety of options.

The downloads page is looking pretty good these days but I am very interested to see what you decide since we do measure everything, so feel free to peruse that list. 😄

Merch

Now let's get on to the good stuff. store.projectbluefin.io will take you to the new Bluefin store, which has a ton of awesome items!

We celebrate this release with this T-shirt, the "Reign of Achillobator", signifying Bluefin LTS's role in this ecosystem as a top predator, along with some other goodies:

Reign of Achillobator Rawr!

And of course we've got stuff for the kids, and some other weird things! Currently this store is US only for now.

kids soap! backpack

Proceeds from the store items will go towards paying for more paleoartwork. I think this is a fair deal, Bluefin would have never gotten this far without the work of these fine artists. Having a way for the community to sponsor the artwork in return for the awesome comfort of an Achillobator giganticus hoodie? Peak Linux.

Special Thanks

Bluefin is brought to you by Tulip Blossom and James Reilly. The team grew this cycle with some fantastic new folks helping out to finish Bluefin LTS:

Yulian Kuncheff (Daegalus) hopped in to help with the GitHub actions and the lts-hwe branch. Ahmed Adan and M. Gopal (Delphic Melody) round out the new team with fantastic work on the artwork, website, documentation, and testing. And don't forget to check out the new coloring book!

Special thanks to Carl George, Laura Santamaria, Shaun McCance, and the entire bootc team for their (continuing) support of this project! The game has started. The clue is: Gardener

The Road Ahead

And lastly, there is some missing functionality compared to the Fedora build as there are some creature comforts that are missing. We call these parity bugs, so if find them, file them. There are some things that won't be coming with; CentOS Stream's focus is on long term support, so we may choose to drop a feature if it's not straightforward to bring to Bluefin LTS.

Imagine choosing between LTS, GTS, and stable with just a slider on an update page in a control panel. They should feel and act the same as each other. I'm pretty much there with my personal machines, sometimes I have to check which machine is which because it doesn't really matter. I feel the pain on the infrastructure side instead. 😄

Shred to Achillobator

Two new soundtracks accompany this release, enjoy!

Downloads

warning

Remember you cannot rebase between CentOS and Fedora Bluefins, ain't no one testing that. Beware. Also this is the new installer -- you'll love it.

Download Bluefin LTS

The long term support experience.

📖 Read the documentation to learn about features and differences.

VersionGPUDownloadChecksum
Bluefin LTSAMD/Intel📥 bluefin-lts-x86_64.iso🔐 Verify
Bluefin LTSARM (aarch64)📥 bluefin-lts-aarch64.iso🔐 Verify
Bluefin LTS HWEAMD/Intel📥 bluefin-lts-hwe-x86_64.iso🔐 Verify
Bluefin LTS HWEARM (aarch64)📥 bluefin-lts-hwe-aarch64.iso🔐 Verify

Download Bluefin GDX

The AI workstation with Nvidia and CUDA.

📖 Read the documentation to learn about features and differences.

VersionGPUDownloadChecksum
Bluefin GDXAMD/Intel + Nvidia📥 bluefin-gdx-x86_64.iso🔐 Verify
Bluefin GDXARM (aarch64) + Nvidia📥 bluefin-gdx-lts-aarch64.iso🔐 Verify

Discussion

GitHub Open Source Fund

· 2 min read
Jorge O. Castro
Director of Dinosaurs

Today we're happy to announce that Bluefin was one of the 71 projects selected for Github's Secure Open Source Fund. We applied for and were selected earlier this year, with tulilirockz representing the team and working with GitHub -- getting some awesome training and some funding to work on improving our security posture. Also awesome to see CNCF Projects like bootc and fluxcd. We're in excellent company. 😄

This has led to us publishing our SBOMs and in general giving everything a once over. p5 also dove in to ensure we're rocking and rolling to secure our supply chain. Though we still depend on many third party sources for our software, we've severely cut that down, bringing things inhouse when necessary or removing a dependency alltogether. Thanks to p5's automation work the project is constantly rebuilding when there's a new base image, ensuring that you're getting those timely security updates!

This was also a good time for us to work with Alan Pope and the rest of the crew at Anchore. The team deployed Syft across our important repos and got to work.

This work is of course, always ongoing. I am still green in this field myself, if you're looking to learn more start here with the OpenSSF

Discussion

Joining LFX Insights

· 3 min read
Jorge O. Castro
Director of Dinosaurs

A nice milestone for us today! Bluefin, Aurora, Bazzite, and Cayo are now listed in LFX Insights.

This is a Linux Foundation effort to measure something near and dear to our hearts: contributor metrics. I work with many tools at the CNCF. You will find tools we depend on, like bootc and Podman. This lets us measure contributor health not just for ourselves, but to see how we're doing when compared to other projects. No more guessing, now we can look.

Let's see how we're doing ...

Fancy Charts

Whew

Whew! Ok, that's always good. Let's drill right to the red parts because that's the interesting part.

Oh no!

Here's where we need to use our brains. Charts by themselves can be misleading. Our names are missing (caching issue, probably), but it's clear that I am doing a ton of work! Too much!

yikes

What this doesn't show you is that 95% of the work I do on Bluefin is telling a bot it's ok to do something. My takeaway here is "we need to automate more things" because in an ideal world, it's the bots and automation humming away quietly. But ... the chart is also not lying, we are top-heavy for sure, no doubt. We also ensure we measure things outside of code:

hi john

If all you do is file an issue or start a discussion, then I do owe you a thanks; we couldn't do it without you.

Here come the new raptors ...

We've been getting new pull requests in for folks - our way to improve is to continue to work on getting people contributing. LFX Insights is open source and contains some of the largest projects in the world. The fact that we can be involved with this is awesome, and you can submit OSS projects! Stick everything in there, and let's see who is working on improving. 😄

This is just coming live for us, if you're a chart nerd, then feel free to dive into LFX and get started, the team is responsive and moving fast. And if you're like me, you'll find yourself fixing up your dashboard. Make yourself look spectacular! You'll be seeing these charts featured more on the website, etc. Enjoy!

LFX Health Score

Discussion

August Update: Long necks and LTS

· 2 min read
Jorge O. Castro
Director of Dinosaurs

This month Jacob Schnurr takes us back to the Cretaceous. A herd of Dreadnoughtus schrani lumber on their way to their nesting grounds as three Nyctosaurus gracilis lazily fly overhead. You will receive these in your next update over the weekend.

August Day August Night

Other Raptor News

You may have noticed the new changelogs, which publish weekly when the new images are released. We're still working on it so there's some improvements to be made, as well as some DNS work to finish it off, but we're pretty happy with it.

Bluefin LTS and GDX are nearing the home stretch, with the GNOME48 backport completed and the kernel policy set. It will ship with the stock CentOS kernel, 6.12.0, which will receive updates and backports throughout its lifecycle.

  • The hwe stream will be opt in with a ujust rebase-helper, which will bring in a new kernel. This stream is intended for people who need fresh kernels for new hardware. We will not be producing ISOs for these, but will likely do so in the future.
  • The default filesystem across the board will be XFS.
  • Hoping to add ZFS over the weekend.

ask.projectbluefin.io is working well with Dosu, we're still tweaking it but it's at least better than most web searches and almost any reddit post, so we're going to keep that around for people who want to use it. It's always linked from the docs, look for "Ask Bluefin" on the top left of this site.

Bazaar continues to improve, things are mostly settled. We fixed the MIME types for flatpakref files so that should be good to go. We're mostly waiting on this to come to Flathub so we can add it to Bluefin LTS, the team is helping out with that process.

Discuss this post

Incoming Cool Tool - Bold Brew

· One min read
Jorge O. Castro
Director of Dinosaurs

Alright, this tool just added linux support like three weeks ago, so when I saw it I had to call dibs. the / search is awesome, and you can do full package management. You have just leveled up your TUI game. 😈

This is landing in Bluefin this week, if you want it now:

brew install Valkyrie00/homebrew-bbrew/bbrew
bbrew

Bold Brew

Four Years of Universal Blue

· 3 min read
Jorge O. Castro
Director of Dinosaurs

A little over four years ago some of my fellow ex-Ubuntu friends helped me complete the first prototype for Bluefin. It was our pocket vision of a "what if we could start over and make exactly what we want?". For you archaeologists, here's the first version.

Technically a day early but we intend to make this a weekend long celebration. Eighteen months later we would form a community ... Universal Blue, with the goal to provide modern Linux operating systems for the next generation of open source users and contributors.

Now we have Bazzite, Aurora, and Cayo. Finally, the tools to make our own fate. 😈 I don't have anything especially insightful to say other than thanks! Let's take a quick look at where we stand:

chart

We're sitting at about ~25,000 weekly checkins of Universal Blue systems, and now that we have sort of functional installers, who knows how fast we can grow!

As Kyle mentioned in the Bazzite update our communities continute to grow as well! We're now well over 30 million pulls of our images (we kind of stopped counting that). Here's the contributor stats:

chart2

Here's our rolling totals:

  • Core contributions: 61 individuals
  • Contributors: 1098 individuals
  • Participants: 3069 individuals
  • Visitors: 13469

And as we can see, the amount of contributions since Bazzite started to gain traction has really improved. I'm particularly proud of our contributor distribution here - it proves that non-code contributions around support can help keep our project healthy:

chart3

(This chart is measuring the partial month of July, ignore that drop off we're not collapsing. 😃 )

You have my thanks, you've made my operating system invisible, it has been a pleasure destroying the Linux desktop with you. 💙

Bluefin

Today is also Bluefin's fourth birthday. I suppose as the first product she was the one who would push the hardest, and will always strive for the pure bootc experience. The dinosaurs remind us that we need to force change in order to achieve the best possible desktop we can. Here's a peek at something special:

chart4

I was unfortunately unable to find out the lifespan of a Deinonychus, so we'll have to just roll with it.

Things are pretty calm right now, Bazaar is in and once that gets put into Flathub we can chill more. There's plenty of folks on what we call "chillops": they rotate out and relax while the automation hums along for a while.

But also now is the time when the new folks start to step up, so it's encouraging to see people come in and drive for a while. Bluefin LTS is looking pretty good, probably on track for fall GA but we're not in a rush. Next major effort will be adding F43 as beta channels and cycling back into release mode. The game has not started. The clue is: Winnower

Thanks

This work wouldn't be possible without Timothée Ravier and the bootc team! You have our thanks.

Fresh Bluefin ISOs and Bazaar

· 2 min read
Jorge O. Castro
Director of Dinosaurs

A Midsummer Night's Nightmare

This month we return to our pleasant July savannah, our first ever dinosaur wallpaper! There will be a brand new one for August, so enjoy the serene pastures while you can. Today is all about ISOs:

Screenshot From 2025-07-06 11-08-49

Fresh ISOs

We've refreshed all of the ISOs, Anaconda and Readymade, you can always find them on the website and the download page:

https://docs.projectbluefin.io/downloads/

The build went pretty smooth, we'll likely turn these on to automatically refresh every month or so.

Bazaar

This is also the first time that Bazaar is shipping on our installation media, we hope that exposing application donation pages and download metrics will help encourage folks to donate to the apps they love!

Support the work here: https://ko-fi.com/kolunmi

We have a working Flatpak and hope to submit to Flathub soon so everyone can enjoy! This thing is so fast I am never giving this app up, it's become a necessary part of my kit!

image (1)

This is the latest weekly snapshot, hope you enjoy! Note to you Bluefin GTS users that you're still stuck with the old installer and old software store, but at least you'll get it all when it's mostly finished. 😃