Jorge O. Castro

Bluefin was fortunate to get nominated for a "Ship and Tell" session at GitHub Universe.

A little while ago we had a thread in our discussions about the nightmare that is printing on Linux. What started as a joke turned into an actual thing that we built. It was such a cool story that Martin Woodward mentioned us in his closing keynote at Universe!

I've gotten feedback in the Discord from multiple people who have these working. We could really use more data/feedback/reports from those of you who have printers that need these drivers.

It was also a great event to spend time with Kyle Gospodnetich (co-creator of Bazzite). This gave us an opportunity to catch up on a bunch of things. Bazzite's build system just got reworked into a Python for a super clean design. It was exciting to hear Kyle talk about the new people that are coming on board. Just a week prior I had spent time with Cameron Knauff, the maintainer of StillOS. Same enery, the cloud native experts are starting to show up in larger numbers and everyone is accelerating.

We had a great 30+ minute discussion with Godot developers. Kyle spent a good deal of time explaining the Flatpak process to them, you love to see it.

We had some great sushi too:

Overall we had a great show, and it was awesome. I was inspired by the Home Assistant and AutoGPT developers as well, we have lots of experts to learn from! This was a bucket list event for me, we had to get nominated before even being submitted, it's very hard to get a talk here so it was great to be able to present your work in front of these developers!

A huge shoutout to GitHub for their direct support to Bluefin, it's not the first time!

I was recently on the Fedora Podcast to talk Bluefin, Utahraptor, the Factory, and AI. There's a little bit of everything in this one, enjoy!

Jono Bacon posted this video about how we did things in Ubuntu during the good old days. I thought it would be relevant to post here. Marco Ceppi and Adam Israel are the Maintainers Emeritus who helped make the first prototypes of Bluefin. It's basically this formula but applied to bootc images:

Endless Forms most Beautiful​

I wanted to capture the recent swarm of activity in the project lately, so I turned to a trusted tool: gource. This is a visualization tool that makes git activity look cool. We needed something that showed how Bluefin used to be, to how Bluefin is now. Here's the past few months:

Some high points:

• 02:59 — Starting up the Bluefin Factory with Hive - Prepping for the clankers to start their work. Here you find me frantically realizing that it's only a few months to GitHub Universe so you see me doing a bunch of fixes in the docs and YAML files in order to prepare for the automation
• 04:00 — Where Hive is introduced and mostly turned on

I'll likely refresh this in a few weeks since we're really grooving now and getting in lots of fixes. We'll see how it plays out over the next month or so! I think this graphical representation is quite cool. It's a good graphical representation that shows how we went from manual mode to agentic mode. It's also nice that everything is MORE SPREAD OUT across MORE people instead of just a few. The next few months will be the real test to see how we do! Check clankers.projectbluefin.io for contribution instructions if you want to check it out!

For me the reviewer role has changed significantly. We have testing branches and test suites now so we can do better reviews instead of "this is mostly fine if it breaks users will tell us.". There's still a lot of that of course, we can never know who is using every knob in an operating system. Mostly now I review things in my omp harness and watch things scroll by slowly. Sometimes I need to steer/adjust but these days it's more acking each other's reviews. This is particular handy with James being in India, we can leave each other homework to review since every change still needs a +2 from maintainers.

Here's two more, both on manual mode:

Bazzite​

Aurora​

Dakota Alpha 6 is out. This one is brought to you by Ahmed Adan/ Built against GNOME 51 and freedesktop-sdk 26.08.1, running Linux 7.2.6, NVIDIA 615.71.09. Kernel OGC 7.2.6-ogc1 for your gaming needs.

This one certainly feels good! Please remember that we still do NOT support secure boot, so temper your expectations! Here's the changelog, I'll make a video on this one since we have a lot to discuss!

Version matrix​

Alpha 5 baseline values are from tag stable-20260731 (as reflected in the Alpha 5 release announcement):

Note on kernel and bootc: Dakota pins its kernel at 7.2.6 via elements/core/linux-fdsdk.bst (ahead of freedesktop-sdk 26.08.1's default of 7.2.2) and pins bootc at 1.16.13 via elements/gnomeos-deps/bootc.bst (ahead of gnome-build-meta's default of 1.16.6).

GNOME 51 "A Coruña" was officially released on September 16, 2026 — see the official release notes.

Migrating Major GNOME Versions​

This is the first time we utilized dakota:next tracking a dev release, and Ahmed smoothly transitioned the testing branches through these:

Kernel and hardware​

Here's a bunch of enablement crap:

Desktop​

And some of the upcoming desktop improvements that we've been going over in the Discussions:

Game Mode​

Bluefin's "Game Mode" is fleshed out now, offering access to a "Bazzite Light" gaming setup, perfect for slaying out. Destiny on Linux please Sony!

Image and boot plumbing​

The chunka work is great, you'll notice way smaller updates than the old images. Top of the line hunter!

Behavior changes​

• Ghostty ships resize-overlay = never; theme tracks the GNOME Dark/Light preference.
• snd_pcsp sink disabled in WirePlumber — audio no longer falls back to the PC speaker after resume.
• zram is disabled; swap is zswap backed by /var/swap/swapfile.
• Bluetooth-Battery-Meter is replaced by BudsLink-Companion plus the io.github.maniacx.BudsLink Flatpak.
• aarch64 images are not published this cycle. (We'll turn these on soon)

Images​

You can't rebase to Dakota from another image. If you're not on Dakota already, reinstall from the ISO.

ISO downloads​

• Dakota Alpha 6 ISO
• Dakota Alpha 6 Checksum
• Dakota daily snapshot

Testing instructions and bug reporting: ISO Testing. File ISO bugs in projectbluefin/dakota-iso.

Lore​

Remember that the wolves are coming, level up your skills at training.projectbluefin.io. It's a tough world out there, here's a sneak peek at the artwork from the artists at makemeacomic.com! These are just a sample of entries from a mysterious journal uncovered on Europa by a [REDACTED] merchant. Inside are the secrets to unlocking the potential of Contributor-Guardians and their mounts. But the forces of the Toilmaster are already ahead of them. Instructions from a doomed CNCF Expedition are sparse:

Click to expand

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Bluefin

Long-Range Raptor Mount

BluefinQuetzalcoatlusTriceroBrachio-Trax

Bluefin — Long-Range Raptor Mount

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Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol for LLMs and agents to talk to each other. We're now serving the Project Bluefin organization knowledge base and live factory state at https://mcp.projectbluefin.io/mcp.

Right now hive.projectbluefin.io exposes an API that has things that are useful for agents. We use it to dole out work to volunteers and to get review tasks. This is what's letting us scale out in ways we haven't been able to before. Hive has a nice Knowledge Base that it exposes, so this initial cut is to search that knowledge. This is mostly useful to connect whatever agent you use to our stuff and get context for your agent. So if you want to do Bluefin things you just add this. I've updated the Agentic Contributor Guide, note that our hive API endpoints are published, so if you're building a deep integration it probably makes sense to work with the Hive API directly. Feedback and usage notes welcome!

Endpoint Details​

• URL: https://mcp.projectbluefin.io/mcp
• Transport: Streamable HTTP / Server-Sent Events (SSE)
• Authentication: None (public, read-only)
• Health Check: https://mcp.projectbluefin.io/health

Available Tools​

Here's what's exposed:

Related Reading​

• Why Bluefin is all in on agentic development
• Bluefin's Sausage Factory
• The Future of Bluefin - Time to be Honest
• Bluefin: Welcome to the Jungle
• Agentic Contributor Guide

wolves.projectbluefin.io​

A follow up to The Future of Bluefin - Time to be Honest.

Alright everyone we've heard the feedback. You'd like to press X to pay your respects and get to work. Start the Q+A please!

Earlier this month Ahmed Adan and the rest of the Dakota team worked to bring the Open Gaming Collective kernel as an option for Bluefin's new "Gaming Mode". These kernels are explicitly designed to ship greg k-h's kernel and only ship patches that have a path upstream.

Here's some context:

• ghcr.io/projectbluefin/dakota-gaming:testing (and stable)

• ghcr.io/projectbluefin/dakota-nvidia-gaming:testing (and stable)

• Gardiner Bryant's Coverage

• Bazzite Announcement

Jorge Castro 🇵🇷 🦖@castrojo.bsky.social

Three years ago today. Nova they won't let us down, I promise.

Aug 17, 2026, 3:18 AMView on Bluesky