So many good things ...

Today we'll be talking about the software we love to ship in Bluefin.

Bazaar​

Bazaar is the application store on Bluefin systems. It is designed to bring the best of Flathub to your fingertips, with a focus on directly supporting application authors. It accomplishes this by focusing on highlighting donations to app authors and ensuring that you get those applications as soon as they are released upstream. No jank.

We're proud to ship this as our app store. Flathub has over 1 billion downloads and 21% Year over Year growth. Nice.

We can't get there from here without a working delivery platform — please donate to Bazaar. Built by @kolunmi and @AlexanderVanhee.

Homebrew Applications​

The ublue-os/tap is the production Homebrew tap for Bluefin - a curated collection of software packaged to work great on all Linuxes. Run ujust bbrew to open the interactive browser and install anything from the tap in a few keystrokes. Here are the highlights of apps added over the last cycle:

Editors and IDEs​

• Visual Studio Code — Microsoft's open-source code editor. You can now install this without needing to use a DX image
• VS Code Insiders — The daily preview build of VS Code with the newest features.
• VSCodium — VS Code binaries built without Microsoft telemetry or branding.
• JetBrains Toolbox — Install, update, and manage every JetBrains IDE from one app. This installs Jetbrains into your home directory as intended by Jetbrains.

System Tools​

• framework-tool — Official CLI for Framework laptop hardware: fan control, battery charge limits, charge LED mode, input module configuration, and firmware update checks.
• heic-to-dynamic-gnome-wallpaper — Convert macOS HEIC dynamic wallpapers into GNOME XML dynamic wallpapers that change with the time of day.
• pmbootstrap — The sophisticated chroot/build/flash tool for postmarketOS development and porting Linux to mobile devices.
• asusctl — CLI and daemon for ASUS hardware: fan curves, battery charge limits, keyboard LEDs, GPU mode switching, and more.
• ROG Control Center — GUI front-end for asusctl, providing a graphical interface for all ASUS ROG hardware controls.

The operating system usage is also interesting. One of the reasons we picked homebrew was to be in the same group as everyone else. It's also nice to know that we're helping represent Linux:

Browse the full tap on GitHub →

Bluespeed​

Bluespeed is our catch all term for agent-centric tooling in Bluefin. It is a play on RHEL Lightspeed, Red Hat's tooling in this area. We continue to collaborate with the team and ship their tooling, such as linux-mcp-server. Bluefin ships a full cloud and AI native development platform ready to go. We default to a "Bring your own LLM" approach, with a focus on pushing towards an all-local opt-in approach for system troubleshooting.

Our flagship tool is Goose from the Agentic AI Foundation, which serves as our "portal" to other tooling. We recommend using the ramalama tool for model management. This features full GPU acceleration for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs to work with local models out of the box. Models and drivers are kept in containers for flexibility. It's an awesome set up, give it a shot!

Full AI setup guide →

Agents and Tools​

Run ujust bbrew to install any of these:

• Goose — The primary AI agent in Bluefin, from the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). Open source, extensible AI agent that goes beyond code suggestions.
• LM Studio — Discover, download, and run local LLMs.
• Antigravity — AI Coding Agent IDE.
• Cursor — Write, edit, and chat about your code with AI.
• Craft Agents — Work with most powerful agents in the world, with the UX they deserve.
• OpenCode Desktop — Open source AI coding agent desktop client.
• Emdash — Agentic development environment for running multiple coding agents in parallel.
• Ramalama — Goal of RamaLama is to make working with AI boring.
• Alpaca — A graphical LLM chat interface available as a Flatpak. Launch it instantly from anywhere with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

Agent CLI Tools​

Choose the ai menu in ujust bbrew to browse the full set of AI CLI tools:

Full AI setup guide →

Ask Bluefin (Alpha)​

Ask Bluefin is a natural-language system assistant that can diagnose, explain, and help troubleshoot your machine using our community's data. You can hit it up on the website, the dedicated discussion forum, the soon-to-come shortcut in the menu, and the soon-to-come Discord app.

Ask is done in partnership with Dosu - here's the gist. Ask Bluefin is trained on all of the documentation and source code for all of the tooling in Bluefin, Bluefin's source code, issues, documentation, and discussions. Podman, bootc, vscode, systemd, etc. Everything on your system. AND THAT'S IT. It is only trained on the code and docs. The results are usually much better than a generic LLM, and light years ahead of Linux subreddits. (That's not a high bar, but let's have some goals). I have it write service units for me, because the era of writing these by hand is now almost over.

Dosu also runs an MCP server if you want to connect your clients to it or work on apps that can index our community's collective knowledge.

Troubleshooting (Alpha)​

Proprietary operating systems are falling over each other trying to implement the worst possible anti-privacy features with AI. Of course they are, it's the nature of the beast. We take a different approach. If someone's going to invent this thing, then we're going to use it for good. Our first stab at this is to use it for a more natural goal - fix broken computers. (Computers are awful)

linux-mcp-server is an MCP server that gives any AI agent live read only access to your system: OS info, processes, services, logs, network, and filesystem. When connected to Goose it gives your LLM access to the following features:

• "Bring Your Own LLM" — use it with a local Ramalama model for fully offline diagnostics, or connect to a hosted API for more capable reasoning — same data, your choice. Current this works best with paid frontier models, but also has been working great with the cheaper "fast models". Our team continues to experiment with the latest local models. Our final goal is for your computer to be able to diagnose itself with 100% local workflows on open weight models. Kyle Rankin in particular is going hard on this and has been making some incredible progress. It's only a matter of time, open always wins.
• Natural language diagnostics — Ask questions like "why is my fan running loud?" or "what process is eating my RAM?" and get real answers grounded in your actual current system state
• Works with any MCP-compatible agent — Goose, OpenCode, and any client that supports the Model Context Protocol can connect to linux-mcp-server and get the same system access
• (Optional, requires setup) Bluefin knowledge base built in — Dosu integration means the assistant already knows the Bluefin documentation, common issues, and community-reported workarounds.

I became a fan when on a trip to the Southern California Linux Expo. My computer was acting weird. I had the tool diagnose the problem, ends up we had made an error in our swap config for Bluefin LTS. It confirmed the issue, and then linked me to the existing issue that someone had reported a few hours before. Clanker + Human confirmation found the issue. We rolled out a fix. I am never going to diagnose a Linux machine by hand ever again.

Full troubleshooting guide →

New Art​

My favorite part of Bluefin, the artwork! I'd like to thank the two new major donors who are funding two new future Bluefin renditions. The future is bright for more art!

Lazy Days

by Jay Balamurugan

Jay joins the prestiguous list of paleoartists to render Bluefin. Jay is a London-based science communicator, paleoartist, and television producer — her credits include Earth, Walking with Dinosaurs, and Evolution.

Bluefin was first modelled in Blender, similar to the technique used in Walking With Dinosaurs, before the finishing work added the feathers. This is so cool! Dinosaurs are typically portrayed as blood thirsty killers murdering constantly. But like real animals there are plenty of times when all you want to do is lay down. This rendition of Bluefin reflects a more chill day, a full belly, and no worries.

You can follow her on Bluesky and Instagram.

Sunrise

by Amy

Sunrise is an older wallpaper from Amy that we failed to ship and announce. Sorry about that Amy!

Sunrise is now available for those of you that prefer your Bluefin smol.

Leaf Collector

by Dr. Natalia Jagielska and Delphic Melody

Did you know birds once had teeth? Crazy I know. This is another banger from Dr J and Delphic. Delphic has painstainkingly vectorized the original artwork so that we can enjoy this artwork on any size monitor.

Duality

by Dr. Natalia Jagielska and Delphic Melody

Duality is a modified Leaf Collector designed for ultra wide monitors. It looks spectacular on 21:9 monitors.

Eyes

by Dr. Natalia Jagielska and Delphic Melody

Our last wallpaper from Dr. J is one of my favorites. It features a microraptor hunting a poor butterfly. Did she catch it? We'll leave that interpretation up to you.

Install the Wallpapers​

The default wallpapers ship automatically with Bluefin. The extra collection (Leaf Collector, Duality, Eyes, Lazy Days) is available via Homebrew:

brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/bluefin-wallpapers-extra

Wallpaper Packs​

Extra wallpaper collections for every variant — install the ones that match your image. You only need the first one if you're not on Bluefin:

brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/bluefin-wallpapers
brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/bluefin-wallpapers-extra
brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/aurora-wallpapers
brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/bazzite-wallpapers
brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/framework-wallpapers

Documentation Improvements​

We've been working pretty hard this cycle on the docs. Specifically around getting more information of what's in Bluefin so that we can be more transparent about what we ship:

Changelogs

Automated weekly changelogs for every image stream

This page will show you all of the versions and releases of every Bluefin. It is automatically generated from Bluefin's Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), so it will always show you what's on the image. This took way more work than we realized, but thanks to awesome tools such as <a href="https://oras.land">oras</a> and <a href="https://github.com/sigstore/cosign">cosign</a> we now have a nice way to show you what's in Bluefin. We also include the updates from the default homebrew and flatpaks shipped in Bluefin for convenience.

Monthly Reports

What's going on?

This page aggregates all of the work from the volunteers that are landing in Bluefin. This report is generated monthly and features all of the contributors who work on Bluefin. My favorite feature is it highlights people's first contribution as a milestone. Welcome aboard, Guardian.

Images

Full matrix of available image variants

This page is a reference of all of the images we publish, and features rebase instructions if you need them. This includes the testing branches of every image (if they exist), as well as the Nvidia images.

Driver Versions

GPU driver version tracker across streams

Ever update and get a regression? When was the last kernel update? When was the last time Uncle Jensen left us an unexpected gift? This page shows a matrix of major component version bumps so you can quickly see what updated when so you can at least make a better guess as to what past image you should rebase to. This page is clutch for troubleshooting.

Music

Metal, Mayhem, and Melancholy

Every release ships with a curated soundtrack highlighting Bluefin's cloud native journey. The music page archives every playlist we have released, with notes on the artists and the vibe we were going for.

Artwork

Browse and download all wallpapers and artwork assets

Bluefin is not just tech, the artwork of her world is just as important to us as the software.<br/><br/>All of Aurora and Bazzite's wallpapers are also available here, in dark and light variants.<br/><br/>All of Bluefin's artists are compensated for their work. Bluefin will never ship AI generated art.

Downloads

Refreshed Downloads Page

The downloads page provides direct ISO links with checksums and torrents for every Bluefin variant — Bluefin, Bluefin LTS, and Dakotaraptor — with GPU-specific entries so you always grab the right download when you need it!

Metrics​

Charts! My favorite. Usage remains steady at about 3.5k weekly devices. This feels about right for our target audience, but Bazzite is still 10x larger. And Ubuntu even more so. I've personally really never cared too much about this - you always need to make the contributor and team structure healthy before these numbers can ever go up.

This is the year that Aurora and Bluefin will start to focus on this number.

Contributor Community​

Unfortunately due to limitations in LFX, we can only track one Bluefin repository - so the charts below reflect the reduction of contributions to the one monorepository. This is a bummer because we intentionally split the project up into more granular repositories. The work in all other Bluefin repositories is NOT tracked here. When we can aggregate all of the contributions across all repositories we will have better data. It's all in git so we will be able to come back and correct past charts. Here are the numbers anyway:

Full report: insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/ublue-os-bluefin

Full analytics →

Discussion Thread​

Two hats and a dromeosaur

^^^ this post best enjoyed with heavy metal.

I found this app called Speed of Sound, a speech to text app that makes writing long winded release announcements a breeze - so this is a series of blog posts over the next three days.

I am not going to lie I haven't been this excited about Bluefin since the start of the project. This spring is particularly relevant for us, with GNOME 50 being a particularly nice roll up of tech. First more of a project update. As I've alluded to in the past, we're learning to come out of the shadows more for people looking for a great desktop for every day use. We've purposely avoided this audience for a few reasons - mostly because normal people don't install operating systems.

But now that we've got five years of production under our belt it's probably time to be louder. First we're partnering with Michael Tunnell on a set of video content that should be more appealing to the general computing audience. Then you can expect more visible changes in our approach as we (as they say in the biz) "Go To Market". Expect that some time this summer!

Lazy Days​

This is Lazy Days by Jay Balamurugan. Jay is a London-based science communicator, paleoartist, and television producer — her credits include Walking with Dinosaurs and Earth. This is Bluefin as you rarely see her: full belly, no worries, just a chill day in the sun.

Lazy Days

by Jay Balamurugan

Bluefin was first modelled in Blender, similar to the technique used in Walking With Dinosaurs, before the finishing work added the feathers. Dinosaurs are typically portrayed as blood thirsty killers murdering constantly. But like real animals there are plenty of times when all you want to do is lay down. You can follow Jay on Bluesky and Instagram.

Some backstory ...​

Some of you know that Bluefin wasn't really an accident - it's a distillation of decades of OSS experience from a bunch of experienced people. I am particularly priviledged to be exposed to this audience of open source gurus. Part of our appeal is we get you one step closer to knowing how Open Source actually works from the people doing it at the professional level. We're taking this team-work based approach to the maintenance of our desktops. That's basically it. Here are the collective lessons we have learned:

• Digital Sovereignty: There is an actual demand for a Linux client that can be built, from the ground up and verified to the very end. We're not talking about what you would typically consider "an Ubuntu remix". It's gotta be at the top level of supply chain security and be deployable at scale. Only modern Linux can compete here.
• Bazzite proves that delivering to the 95% is a thing people want
  • Ends up that there's significantly more to gain by throwing away the old things holding Linux back than serving edge cases.
• Open Gaming Collective has proven that different distributions can work together in a way that is conducive to get all of this stuff out of the little fiefdoms and into the upstream Linux kernel. And they're just getting started.
• The Team:
  • Seven(!) people have gotten jobs through Universal Blue.
    • Chainguard, Red Hat, and Microsoft have all recognized the talent from the enthusiast community. Users like you have proven to the industry that enthusiasts matter.
  • It's not about what we're building these days, it's about what we're choosing to NOT build.
  • Ends up that the development techniques from Open Source infrastructure apply very well to people who love to work together as a team. You don't succeed in this business as an individual, you bring your individual talent to a team, and you succeed together.
• Efficient downloads are coming: It never made sense to push too hard with this limitation. Now it's not going to be an issue. I'll explain more in the third blog post.

I find digital sovereignty in particular to be interesting. The discussions around Linux are predictable. Once again people are fighting over who is going to ship the least-worst Debian. The discussion should be focused on infrastructure and how you build it. You know who are really passionate about infrastructure? The European Cloud Native communities. The Kubernetes nerds expect and demand a modern Linux, and in order to deliver that you need world class infrastructure. The communities are mixing, and with modern tooling like bootc and buildstream the bare minimum standard for what constitutes a Linux desktop is about to go up substantially. So yeah, it's probably time to be louder.

But enough preaching, let's go into how we plan to get you there!

GNOME 50 "Tokyo" comes to Bluefin​

GNOME 50, codenamed Tokyo, is the foundation of this release. If you're updating today you'll be on GNOME 50. It is opt-in in Bluefin LTS:

• Full GNOME 50 release notes →

ASUS Support​

Asus support has always been a pain in the ass on Linux. In the past we had specialized images but the maintenance burden was too great. Thanks to improvements in Linux 6.19 and greater, as well as awesome work from the asus-linux community we can now better support Asus hardware. The Asus Linux community is a participant in the Open Gaming Collective, which gives us the confidence that this will be well maintained over time. Thanks so much for your efforts!

The ublue-os/tap ships asusctl and ROG Control Center — the standard ASUS Linux control stack. These packages will work on any Linux with at least a 6.19 kernel.

• Fan curve control — per-profile fan curves for Performance, Balanced, and Quiet modes; customizable RPM targets per temperature point
• Keyboard RGB and Aura lighting — full per-key RGB control, multi-zone effects, static, breathe, rainbow, strobing, and more — all manageable from the GUI or CLI
• Power profile switching — toggle between Performance, Balanced, and Power Saver without a reboot
• Battery charge limit — set a charge ceiling (e.g. 80%) to preserve long-term battery health; the limit persists across reboots
• GPU mode switching — switch between Integrated, Hybrid, NVIDIA-only, and Compute modes from the system tray
• This is in Bazzite's testing branch as ujust asus and we'll pick it up at some point. Sorry that you have to do this by hand:

Install (order matters — system daemon first, then the GUI):

# Step 1: system daemon — handles hardware access and power management
brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/asusctl-linux
sudo systemctl enable --now asusd.service asus-shutdown.service
sudo udevadm control --reload && sudo udevadm trigger

# Step 2: GUI and user daemon
brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/rog-control-center-linux
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now asusd-user.service

ROG Control Center lands in your system tray and gives you a full GUI for everything above — no terminal required after the initial setup. Someday we will automate this so you don't have to do any of this CLI mumbojumbo, but in the meantime kick the tyres and report back. Remember that these packages work on any Linux!

This support has turned my 2022 G14 AMD Advantage Edition in a pretty great Linux laptop. It wasn't always like that!

Bluefin​

Now on to Bluefin itself. First up is bluefin:stable. Here's the release card:

And here are the release notes and announcements:

• Fedora 44 Release Notes
• What's New for Fedora Atomic Desktops in Fedora 44

And that's it. The usual stuff. I want to focus on what's coming next because Bluefin is going to change for the better.

The Future of Bluefin and Fedora​

Timothée Ravier's post is particularly relevant for us. The biggest news of all is the announcement of new sealed base images. These will end up being the most fundamental change to Bluefin in its 5-ish year history. The new sealed bootable container images will bring us:

• systemd-boot replaces GRUB as the bootloader — GRUB is now an extinct species in our world. Goodbye old friend.
• Unified Kernel Images (UKI) — kernel, initrd, and command line bundled into a single signed EFI binary.
• composefs with fs-verity — every file in the OS image is cryptographically verified at read time and managed by bootc. We also say goodbye to ostree. With both projects now in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation we have a vendor neutral stack to base Bluefin on. Nice.
• Full verified boot chain from firmware → bootloader → kernel → OS image — see the FOSDEM 2025 deep-dive for how it all fits together
• TPM-backed passwordless disk unlocking via systemd-cryptenroll — LUKS unlocking is bound to the verified boot state so no password prompt on a clean boot
• UEFI on x86_64 and aarch64 - Legacy BIOS support goes away too, but we don't support that anyway.

Want all of these things? It will take some work to move Bluefin and Aurora to these new base images, and we're looking for people to help. If you've been worried about the lack of progress in bootc in Fedora then this one set of images brings us back to the forefront of Linux desktop tech. Our man from France was not going to let Dakotaraptor run away with it, so if you want to help make this dream a reality, now is the time to step up and volunteer!

Fedora Accelerates​

The biggest improvement this cycle has been mostly invisible to you. Fedora's bootc efforts seem to have been finally resolved. It may come as a surprise to some of you that Fedora does not actually release an official bootc image. All of our work continues to be based on Timothée's unofficial images. For the first time it feels like Fedora have figured out what to do with bootc, and this removes a bunch of uncertainty for us. It has never made sense that Fedora would start off in the lead and end up behind the rest of the community with bootc adoption. This also means that if you're enjoying Aurora, Bazzite, Bluefin, Secureblue, or rocking your own custom image ... quality is going to go up.

Honestly I just work on Fedora to toss RPMs right at Jorge's smug cloud native face.

-- John Bazzite

It took lots of work to get Fedora back on track with bootc, after all, Bluefin was intended to be a weekend project inbetween Fedora 39 and 40 to prove how easy it was. See? Look how easy that was! Jef you're doing great, I'm sorry for riding you so hard over the past few months. Fedora has two awesome avenues and a brand new sandbox to play in -- good to see some "Fedora First" flexing over there! Thanks Laura Santamaria and LH!

They have a ton of work to do, so if this is your jam, now is the time to get involved. Good timing too, looks like Red Hat is hiring.

An awesome special thanks to the Fedora CoreOS team for ensuring the Copy Fail 2 and DirtyFrag issues were resolved in the kernel we use. I also have some awesome Fedora news for you ... tomorrow.

Bluefin LTS​

Now over to CentOS -- Achillobator giganticus remains our Long Term Support option, here's the release card:

Bluefin LTS launched with GNOME 48 and has been updated to GNOME 49. This release delivers two full GNOME upgrade cycles in one — GNOME 49 and GNOME 50 are both available — thanks to @hanthor's work backporting the full GNOME stack to the EL10 base. See the March testing announcement for all the details.

There's really not much to say here, the move to GNOME 49 wasn't as smooth as we'd like but as a result GNOME 50 is much smoother. We will keep GNOME 50 in it's own set of branches and likely move LTS to GNOME 50 sometime this Fall.

Bluefin LTS is maintained by @hanthor. If you rely on the LTS channel, consider supporting his work:

Merch​

Unfortunately selling outside the US is still a struggle, we'll continue looking at options. Our store is designed to highlight Bluefin's incredible artists! Proceeds from the store fund future artist work. We adjust the prices on all the other items in the store in order to make the kids shirt as cheap as possible. Rawr.

Bluefin Official Shirt$25.50

Buy →

Reign of Achillobator Shirt$22.50

Buy →

Wash Your Claws!$10.00

Buy →

Bluefin Pride$16.50

Buy →

Bluefin Murder Chicken$20.50

Buy →

Bluefin Kids$16.50

Buy →

Check out the rest on store.projectbluefin.io →

Download​

Thanks to our awesome ISO factory we can now deliver fresh ISOs and both Anaconda and Tuna installer suck way less than before. You can find the weekly ISO builds on the Downloads Testing page - these are automatically refreshed weekly. We've also set the timer to auto publish stable releases of the ISOs each month, so you're never too out of date. We're also now publishing torrents of the most popular images. See you tomorrow for part 2 of our series!

Bluefin, Bluefin LTS, and Bluefin GDX​

Bluefin

Recommended

The default experience for users. 📖 Read the documentation to learn about features and differences.

bluefin-stable-x86_64.iso

AMDIntel

📥 Download ISO🧲 Torrent🔐 Verify

bluefin-nvidia-open-stable-x86_64.iso

Nvidia

📥 Download ISO🧲 Torrent🔐 Verify

Bluefin LTS

The long-term support experience. 📖 Read the documentation to learn about features and differences. HWE images include updated kernels — recommended for newer devices such as Framework Computers. ujust rebase-helper lets you switch between variants at any time.

bluefin-lts-x86_64.iso

AMDIntel

📥 Download ISO🧲 Torrent🔐 Verify

bluefin-lts-aarch64.iso

ARM (aarch64)

📥 Download ISO🧲 Torrent🔐 Verify

bluefin-lts-hwe-x86_64.iso

AMDIntel (HWE)

📥 Download ISO🧲 Torrent🔐 Verify

bluefin-lts-hwe-aarch64.iso

ARM (HWE)

📥 Download ISO🧲 Torrent🔐 Verify

bluefin-gdx-lts-x86_64.iso

GDX — Nvidia

📥 Download ISO🧲 Torrent🔐 Verify

bluefin-gdx-lts-aarch64.iso

GDX — ARM

📥 Download ISO🧲 Torrent🔐 Verify

Discussion Thread​

Desktop​

GNOME desktop environment, Aurora variant (KDE), and terminal enhancements

Planned Work​

• revert: switch back to LogoMenu from Custom Command Menu by @​dylanmtaylor in #294
• feat: enable GNOME Calculator search provider by default by @​dylanmtaylor in #263
• fix(gschema): xdg-terminal-exec for terminal keyboard shortcuts by @​hanthor in #265
• feat(ublue-bling): clean up fish script by @​AlexNPavel in #291
• feat: use dynamic hostname in menu label by @​dylanmtaylor in #272
• feat: replace LogoMenu with Custom Command Menu extension by @​dylanmtaylor in #264

Opportunistic Work​

• fix: exclude gnome-software on all Fedora versions by @​dylanmtaylor in #4504
• chore: bump gsconnect from v67 to v71 by @​dylanmtaylor in #4414
• chore: bump gsconnect from v67 to v71 by @​dylanmtaylor in #4413
• fix: Change GNOME 50 COPR repository to jreilly1821/c10s-gnome-50 by @​hanthor in #1287
• fix(gnome49): exclude gdk-pixbuf2 from COPR and rebuild cache by @​ahmedadan in #1285
• feat: install lgda from GNOME 49/50 COPRs by @​hanthor in #1276
• feat(lazy-days): add lazy.jxl to bluefin-wallpapers-extra by @​castrojo in #86
• Add lazy days wallpaper by @​delphicmelody in #84
• feat: add Aurora Skywrecker wallpaper by @​inffy in #83
• feat(bluefin-extra): add leaf-collector, duality, and eyes wallpapers… by @​castrojo in #82
• Add duality super-ultrawide files by @​delphicmelody in #80
• Refine and correct Eyes wallpaper by @​delphicmelody in #79
• Rename Eyes wallpaper for consistency by @​delphicmelody in #78
• Add Eyes wallpaper by @​delphicmelody in #77
• fix: convert wallpapers to jxl to fix issues in wallpaper settings by @​NiHaiden in #76
• fix(wallpapers): add os stanza so brew bundle installs casks on linux by @​ahmedadan in #371
• fix(bluefin-wallpapers): fix disappearing wallpapers by @​castrojo in #351
• feat(bluefin-wallpapers-extra): update to 2026-04-13 by @​castrojo in #347
• feat(artwork): sync new Bluefin extra wallpapers + fix update-artwork… by @​castrojo in #753
• fix(artwork): add Delphic Melody co-author credit to Dr. Natalia wallpapers by @​castrojo in #734

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• feat: add Bazaar Companion extension by @​coxde in #348
• Add nautilus python by @​jumpyvi in #336
• fix(keybindings): use xdg-terminal-exec instead of ptyxis by @​castrojo in #280
• fix(bashrc): add login_shell guard to profile.d sourcing by @​castrojo in #278
• fix(os-release): add VERSION_ID to fix ldconfig stamp mechanism by @​castrojo in #269
• fix: custom-command-menu shows Hello World on fresh install by @​castrojo in #268
• fix: remove gnome-system-monitor from image by @​dylanmtaylor in #222
• fix: remove yelp from image by @​dylanmtaylor in #223
• fix(common): map Bluefin icons to GNOME OS expected names by @​dylanmtaylor in #219
• fix(custom-command-menu): install gschema to system dir for override support by @​dylanmtaylor in #220
• chore: Update custom command menu references by @​dylanmtaylor in #218
• feat(packages): add xdg-terminal-exec by @​castrojo in #213
• feat(extensions): replace LogoMenu with Custom Command Menu by @​castrojo in #210
• feat(gnome): rebase gnome-build-meta junction to gnome-50 by @​castrojo in #199
• fix(ci): disable broken GNOME lorry-mirrors by @​dylanmtaylor in #190
• feat(ghostty): upgrade Ghostty to 1.3.1 and Zig to 0.15.2 by @​ahmedadan in #169

Development​

Development tools and IDE integrations

Planned Work​

Status: ChillOps

Opportunistic Work​

• Fix dockerd deps by @​jumpyvi in #305
• feat(lts-card): enrich DX/GDX packages from SBOM allPackages by @​castrojo in #760

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• Update to the latest bst2 docker image by @​alatiera in #350

Homebrew​

New Applications​

The following applications were added to our Homebrew taps this month:

Application	Description	Status
asusctl-linux	ASUS laptop control CLI and immutable-friendly system daemon payload
fw-fanctrl-linux	Framework laptop fan controller daemon and CLI
rocm-smi-lib	AMD ROCm System Management Interface library (provides librocm_smi64.so)
rog-control-center-linux	ASUS ROG Control Center GUI and user daemon with XDG-first installation
visual-studio-code-linux@insiders	Open-source code editor (Insiders build)
zed-linux	High-performance, multiplayer code editor
zed-linux@preview	High-performance, multiplayer code editor (preview build)

Use ujust bbrew to browse and install these packages. Follow the tap instructions if you want to do it by hand.

Package Updates​

103 automated updates this month via GitHub Actions. Homebrew tap version bumps ensure Bluefin users always have access to the latest stable releases.

Quick Summary​

Ecosystem​

Homebrew packages, AI/ML tools (Bluespeed), and Flatpak applications

Planned Work​

• feat(bazaar): add SpeedOfSound to AI and Machine Learning section by @​repires in #286

Opportunistic Work​

• feat: move rog-gui to production by @​inffy in #378
• chore: move asusctl cask to production tap by @​inffy in #369
• set_permissions to make zpass.sh executable by @​hulet in #342
• feat: add visual-studio-code-linux@insiders cask by @​nklowns in #337
• Fix 1password browser integration https://github.com/ublue-os/homebrew-tap/issues/94 by @​RichardMartija in #296
• chore: move rog-gui to production by @​inffy in #348
• Add incompatibility with moby by @​jumpyvi in #319
• feat(zed): add zed-linux and zed-linux@preview casks by @​castrojo in #296
• Add rocm-smi-lib formula by @​hanthor in #326
• chore: remove asusctl cask by @​inffy in #333
• feat: add fw-fanctrl-linux cask by @​ahmedadan in #314
• fix: unblock craft-agents-linux upgrade process by @​KiKaraage in #259

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• feat(distrobox): switch to next branch Go rewrite by @​castrojo in #234

System Services & Policies​

Systemd services and system-level policies

Planned Work​

• fix(custom-command-menu): add menu icon settings to dconf distro database by @​dylanmtaylor in #274
• feat(nvidia): add service to sync Flatpak driver version by @​ledif in #257

Opportunistic Work​

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• Increace keepalive timeout by @​alatiera in #356
• fix(tailscale): provide defaults for tailscaled service by @​goozkan in #327
• fix(bluefin/network): disable binary stripping for text-only element by @​castrojo in #329
• fix(network): remove %{install-extra} from text-only element by @​castrojo in #328
• fix: ship resolv.conf symlink and /etc/hosts via network element by @​hanthor in #296
• feat(bluefin): add uupd auto-updater element by @​castrojo in #209
• tailscale: bump to 1.96.4 by @​hanthor in #175

Hardware​

Hardware support, drivers, NVIDIA GPU, and ARM64 architecture

Planned Work​

• Remove carriage returns in ublue-nvidia-flatpak-runtime-sync script that cause it to fail by @​akeeton in #279

Opportunistic Work​

• fix(cards): restore foil prevVersion and LTS HWE kernel carry-forward by @​castrojo in #761
• fix(ci): always re-fetch driver versions data on every build by @​castrojo in #701
• fix(driver-versions): make shimmer visible in light mode by @​castrojo in #700

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• feat(nvidia): add bluefin-nvidia OCI variant by @​ahmedadan in #363
• fix(deps): restore fwupd dropped by Saturn merge by @​castrojo in #324
• fix(deps): add fwupd by @​castrojo in #279
• patches: remove OnePlus 6 panel backports by @​castrojo in #260
• feat(deps): add efibootmgr 18 by @​dylanmtaylor in #163

Infrastructure​

ISO images, upstream integration, build systems, and testing frameworks

Planned Work​

• chore: put the nvidia files to the image by @​inffy in #259

Opportunistic Work​

• fix(ci): make caching actually work by @​renner0e in #4440
• ci: replace extractions/setup-just with brew install by @​dylanmtaylor in #4418
• feat: replace cosign-attest SBOM with ORAS attach + actions/attest by @​castrojo in #1258
• cursor-linux: update sha256 for re-uploaded 3.2.11 build by @​ahmedadan in #336
• ci: add fw-fanctrl build workflow by @​ahmedadan in #311
• ci: rebuild site daily instead of weekly by @​castrojo in #770
• fix(ci): align SBOM cache save/restore paths by @​castrojo in #758
• fix(ci): restore artwork.json from checkout after data cache restore by @​castrojo in #751
• feat(sbom): add stable-daily GHCR stream to SBOM pipeline and changelogs by @​castrojo in #744
• fix(images): force per-product refresh on every build by @​castrojo in #726
• fix(reports): contributor pipeline correctness and workflow idempotency by @​castrojo in #722
• Upstream pr/batch remaining fixes by @​castrojo in #714
• fix(components,scripts,ci): p2 component and script fixes by @​castrojo in #713
• fix(ci,images,changelogs): least-privilege tokens, correct stream att… by @​castrojo in #710
• fix(firehose): always fetch fresh app data in CI by @​castrojo in #703
• ci(prerelease): publish release even when arm64 builds fail by @​castrojo in #47

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• fix(deps): use codeberg closer-mop repo by @​AlexNPavel in #357
• workflows/track-bst-sources: Also update bst2 image by @​alatiera in #351
• Revert "chore(deps): update freedesktop-sdk junction" by @​alatiera in #349
• fix(custom-menu): set icon display mode and repin to post-v14 cleanup commit by @​castrojo in #345
• fix(ci): unblock bst2 CI and add pin consistency gate by @​castrojo in #337
• fix(ci): replace broken setup-just with taiki-e/install-action by @​castrojo in #335
• fix(storage): hide composefs loop from UDisks by @​goozkan in #330
• Update command-order to be 1-99 by @​StorageB in #332
• linux: enable IPV6_MULTIPLE_TABLES for tailscaled IPv6 routing by @​hanthor in #315
• fix(renovate): include sha256: prefix in chunkah currentDigest capture by @​castrojo in #323
• chore(renovate): add customManager for chunkah container image by @​castrojo in #322
• chore(coreutils): revert mv, cp, rm to gnu coreutils by @​ahmedadan in #316
• fix(ci): suppress phantom PRs when bst source track only normalizes r… by @​castrojo in #317
• fix(chunkify): remove --tag flag not supported by pinned chunkah by @​castrojo in #309
• fix(fakecap-restore): treat EPERM/ENOTSUP as skips, not errors by @​castrojo in #308
• fix(chunkify): add --tag so podman load outputs tagged ref by @​castrojo in #307
• feat(chunkify): rechunk OCI image into plain-zstd layers with automat… by @​castrojo in #305
• chore: bump uutils-coreutils to 0.8.0 and sudo-rs to v0.2.13 by @​castrojo in #282
• fix(ci): disable arm build until webkit is cached by @​castrojo in #297
• feat(saturn): add Saturn launcher with ECL, CL deps, ripgrep by @​castrojo in #295
• feat(ci): track package updates individually by @​castrojo in #283
• fix: inject IMAGE_VERSION into os-release at export time by @​castrojo in #273
• fix(os-release): inject VERSION_ID at export time, remove invalid BST… by @​castrojo in #271
• fix(os-release): add IMAGE_REF and image metadata to /usr/lib/os-release by @​castrojo in #266
• fix: remove ibus-libpinyin from build (broken at runtime, SIGILL in CI) by @​castrojo in #265
• oci: normalize /var layout with relative symlinks by @​castrojo in #263
• ci: increase build step timeouts from 300 to 420 minutes by @​castrojo in #262
• ci: disable remote-execution for aarch64 build by @​castrojo in #258
• feat: add aarch64 native build by @​hanthor in #248
• revert: "chunkify: enable in export and reduce max-layers to 120" by @​castrojo in #252
• chunkify: enable in export and reduce max-layers to 120 by @​hanthor in #246
• fix(bootc): revert composefs-rs cargo2 query.rev to abbreviated hash by @​castrojo in #236
• feat(deps): add bootc v1.15.1 local override with CI tracking by @​castrojo in #235
• chunkah: rechunk with user.component xattrs via extended fakecap by @​hanthor in #232
• ci: add nightly schedule at 13:00 UTC; drop redundant push trigger by @​castrojo in #227
• chore: bump common refs by @​dylanmtaylor in #221
• revert: "fix(chunkify): enable chunkify with updated settings" by @​castrojo in #217
• fix(chunkify): enable chunkify with updated settings by @​castrojo in #212
• Remove 1Password by @​dylanmtaylor in #206
• bluefin: Consolidate per-arch elements by @​alatiera in #101
• Revert "chore(deps): track core and junction sources" by @​alatiera in #147

Documentation​

Documentation improvements and additions

Planned Work​

Status: ChillOps

Opportunistic Work​

• docs: remove GTS badges from README by @​repires in #4474
• fix(readme): use picture element for dark/light mode card embed by @​castrojo in #4466
• chore: delete docs directory by @​hanthor in #1250
• blog: add video embed to Dakota Alpha 1 post by @​castrojo in #766
• Update 2026-04-19-dakota-alpha-1.md by @​castrojo in #764
• fix: use object-fit cover on playlist thumbnails to eliminate letterboxing by @​castrojo in #763
• feat(music): add Syrens of Metal playlist as first in Legendary Adventures by @​castrojo in #762
• fix(lts): parse new lts.YYYYMMDD release format by @​castrojo in #759
• fix(sbom): fix GHCR tag pagination regex — \b fails after closing quote by @​castrojo in #757
• fix(sbom): parse SPDX JSON format for LTS changelog card version chips by @​castrojo in #756
• fix(artwork): remove duplicate Duality (Ultrawide) entry by @​castrojo in #754
• feat(changelogs): rolling 12-month window for updates stream by @​castrojo in #750
• feat(changelogs): show all apps by default; click header to expand card by @​castrojo in #749
• feat(changelogs): collapse app cards by default in updates stream by @​castrojo in #748
• fix(embed): use picture element for dark/light mode card snippet by @​castrojo in #747
• fix(lint): remove unused chipName destructuring in loadStableDailyEve… by @​castrojo in #746
• fix(changelogs): SBOM null-fallback, GHCR tag enumeration, cache key … by @​castrojo in #743
• fix(sbom): SBOM-primary chips + resolve amd64 digest for oras discover by @​castrojo in #742
• feat(changelogs): add embeddable PNG cards with dark/light themes and… by @​castrojo in #741
• fix(images): make downloads optional to prevent crash when field abse… by @​castrojo in #740
• feat(changelogs,ui): SBOM-driven chips, Dakota placeholder, pipewire/… by @​castrojo in #739
• feat(changelogs,ui): SBOM-driven chips, Dakota placeholder, pipewire/… by @​castrojo in #738
• feat(changelogs): SBOM-driven OS card chips — Dakota placeholder + pi… by @​castrojo in #737
• feat(changelogs): unified OS releases stream with stable-daily, LTS, … by @​castrojo in #736
• bugfix(docs): preserve homepage hero aspect ratio by @​castrojo in #735
• fix(docs): replace hero PNGs with WebP, add trailingSlash, add perf t… by @​castrojo in #733
• Feature/artwork gallery page by @​castrojo in #732
• Feature/artwork gallery page by @​castrojo in #731
• feat(docs): add Artwork gallery page with wallpapers, lightbox, and a… by @​castrojo in #728
• fix(images): remove Metadata cache chip from images page by @​castrojo in #724
• feat: add link to upstream docs about MOK enrollment by @​sebjag in #720
• fix(reports): replace history query with GHA cache for new contributo… by @​castrojo in #723
• feat: quick update by @​castrojo in #719
• fix(eslint): remove unused FlatTimelineEvent import by @​castrojo in #717
• feat(changelogs): OS release card design polish by @​castrojo in #716
• feat(changelogs): add prominent OS release cards interleaved in timeline by @​castrojo in #715
• fix(sbom): enforce sbom-only version sources across docs site by @​castrojo in #712
• fix(sbom): enforce sbom-only version sources across docs surfaces by @​castrojo in #711
• fix(firehose): seed firehose-apps.json with empty data; atomic write … by @​castrojo in #709
• fix(audit): quick-win fixes from site-wide audit by @​castrojo in #708
• feat(changelogs): add Firehose page with per-release package diffs by @​castrojo in #707
• fix(changelogs): flatten firehose feed into per-release event stream … by @​castrojo in #706
• feat(changelogs): add hero section with dinosaur and Firehose title by @​castrojo in #704
• feat(changelogs): port Bluefin Firehose to /changelogs page by @​castrojo in #702
• fix: remove a bunch of dead code by @​castrojo in #699

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• docs: add ISO archive table and automation workflow by @​castrojo in #253

Tech Debt​

Maintenance work and feature parity between variants

Status: ChillOps

Automation​

CI/CD pipelines, GitHub Actions, and automated dependency updates

Planned Work​

• chore(ci): enable renovate for git-submodules by @​renner0e in #295

Opportunistic Work​

• fix: disable automerge for projectbluefin/common container updates by @​castrojo in #4481
• ci: replace wretry.action with nick-fields/retry (Node 24) by @​dylanmtaylor in #4408
• feat(ci): make betas run daily by @​castrojo in #4388
• Feature/fix generate release trigger by @​castrojo in #1301

Localization​

Translation and internationalization work

Status: ChillOps

Bot Activity​

Automation Percentage: 62.3% (308 bot PRs out of 494 total PRs)

Build Health​

Raptor Race​

Keep Bluefin healthy with green builds. Wranglers apply within!

Image	Success Rate	Successes	Failures	Monthly Change
bluefin:stable	91.3%	211	20
bluefin:latest	89.8%	203	23
bluefin:lts	93.1%	188	14
bluefin:lts-hwe	94.1%	190	12
bluefin-dx:lts	93.1%	188	14
bluefin-gdx:lts	90%	181	20
bluefin-dx:lts-hwe	93.5%	188	13

This Month's Highlights​

Contributors​

New Lights​

We welcome our newest Guardians to the project.

"I do not know what the future holds. But I know this: with you at our side, there is nothing we cannot face."

—Commander Zavala

Wayfinders​

"Define yourself by your actions."

—Lord Saladin

Want to see the latest OS releases? Check out the Changelogs. For announcements and deep dives, read our Blog.

This report was automatically generated from todo.projectbluefin.io.

Generated on 2026-05-01
View Project Board | Report an Issue

Today we celebrate a nice milestone for the project. Thanks to some awesome work by the team we have a mostly daily-driveable Alpha 1. GNOME 50 too!

What is this?​

"Dakotaraptor" is the codename for Bluefin based on GNOME OS. It is designed to deliver software from upstream sources and eschews the traditional Linux distribution model entirely. It's built with Apache Buildstream and published as a bootc image.

• GNOME 50, Linux 6.19.11, Mesa 26.0.4, and the Freedesktop 25.08.9 libraries. systemd-boot, UKIs, Rust uutils and sudo-rs included out of the box. (Hi Jon!)

GNOME OS itself has moved on to GNOME 51 builds, so we are on a stable branch. I'm pretty sure we're the first ones to consume this thing so keep an eye out for issues. We're still recommending VMs but it's also running fine on bare metal given the gotchas below.

Those of you with keen eyes might notice the new snazzy menu Dylan Taylor landed. It's Custom Command Menu and the upstream author was kind enough to accept our patch to put your hostname right there in your menu for a little bit of bling. We're working on bringing this to other Bluefins so sit tight. Lots of great customization options with this menu, I am enjoying it. You may have also noticed that we're using Ghostty here as the terminal.

Goals​

• Goal is beta late spring, hopefully GA by fall
• If you want to help out with infrastructure we're always looking for help.
• If you're looking to help on the desktop side, help GNOME OS.
  • This will likely be the "thinnest" Bluefin ever, with our primary purpose being to help upstream as much as possible.

Gotchas​

• LUKS is busted so skip the encryption step on install. James has a fix for this and it should be landing soon.
• Updates are one big layer. We're working on this actively and it's looking good but it will land later.
  • Updates will first come split up into 120 layers but will still be large.
  • At some point this late spring/early summer zstd:chunked support should land in bootc and then you'll start receiving delta updates. We'll announce when this is live.
• Many of the issues are cosmetic and "fit and finish" - you should not be having crashers or anything crazy like that.
• Some parts of the build are old, we have not automated bumping version numbers of components so that's being done manually right now. So if you find an old version of something we'll get to them eventually.
• No Nvidia support.
• A sort of working ARM build, more to come.
• Pretty sure docker doesn't work.

Thanks!​

• Jordan Petridis, Valentin David, Adrian Vovk, and the rest of the GNOME OS team.
  • Thanks for your patience and guidance!
• Brian Ketelsen and James Reilly for porting the Vanilla OS installer to use bootc: Tuna installer. Yes, James' personal image is called Tuna OS lol. On the plus side at least it's not called Titanoboa.
  • This thing is quite cool and shaping up to be a decent generic bootc installer. Nice.
• Thanks to all of you on the Discord who have been testing and reporting issues, it helps tremendously! Shout out to JumpyVi!

Download​

• dakota-live-latest.iso

Filing Issues​

All issues appreciated! The end goal is for Dakota to "feel" like a regular Bluefin.

• Dakota Issues
• ISO Specific Issues

Discussions​

I thought I'd take some time to talk a bit about the world around us. I've come back from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Amsterdam super energized and have been taking this week off to recharge and relax.

I'll be talking about Bluefin and friends a bit later - we're gearing up for release and everything is humming along nicely. Let's talk about where we are.

Our target audience​

Let's talk about numbers that matter to us. Here's the rollup:

• Cloud Native Developer Growth is up to ~20 million developers - This one snuck up on me, since we last reported 15.6 million in November of last year. That's a 28% increase in six months! And 7.3 million AI developers are now working in the cloud native space. Our audience continues to grow.
• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU hit 13,500+ attendees, not only was it the largest KubeCon ever, but it was the largest open source conference in the world.
• Flahub had 21.6% Year over Year growth last year.

What this means​

First off it means a lot of tired developers. The bootc booths and talks were well attended, and everyone was talking about platform engineering and the challenges of infrastructure at scale. These are the lessons we want to bring into Bluefin and friends, we are a tiny little chicken in a world of giants. We must be crafty and efficient!

I received tons of feedback and "tell your friends hello!", but here's the lessons as I see them:

• Our choice of developer tooling and investment in DX is a huge strength - people want standardized tooling across the board.
• We will do the same for AI tooling by shipping things like Goose and linux-mcp-server to serve those developers. Everyone is using these tools, and everyone wants these tools in VMs and containers to keep a barrier between these agents and their host. I expect this year will lead to more tooling in this space as developers figure it out.
• We will continue to support a distribution-agnostic application store that focuses on meeting the needs of application developers first and foremost.

Not into any of those things?​

Kick back and enjoy your computer!

Discussions​

Desktop​

GNOME desktop environment, Aurora variant (KDE), and terminal enhancements

Planned Work​

• fix(ublue-fastfetch): use exec to preserve parent shell detection by @​kriszentner in #233
• fix: alias definition for cat command by @​castrojo in #220

Opportunistic Work​

• fix: upgrade selinux-policy to 43.x for GNOME 49 to resolve GDM failure by @​hanthor in #1242
• feat: add Bazaar Companion extension by @​castrojo in #1243
• fix(build): resolve dracut EXDEV and libjxl conflict in gnome-50 builds by @​hanthor in #1240
• fix: install jxl-pixbuf-loader for JPEG-XL desktop backgrounds by @​hanthor in #1230
• feat: add GNOME 50 full build pipeline with GNOME_VERSION build arg by @​hanthor in #1218
• feat: add GNOME 50 testing builds (lts-testing-50, lts-hwe-testing-50) by @​hanthor in #1209
• feat: switch from GNOME 48 to GNOME 49 by @​hanthor in #1207
• Revert "feat(GNOME) : gnome 49 backport" by @​hanthor in #1192
• feat(GNOME) : gnome 49 backport by @​hanthor in #1187
• feat(driver-versions): add foil effects, Mesa/GNOME cards, CodeBlock refactor by @​castrojo in #694

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• Update gnome-build-meta ref by @​alatiera in #76

Development​

Development tools and IDE integrations

Planned Work​

Status: ChillOps

Opportunistic Work​

• feat: Add OpenSSF Scorecard Action by @​KyleGospo in #4273
• chore(renovate): fix automerge rules and reschedule lts cron by @​castrojo in #1171
• Update dockerd-linux SHA by @​jumpyvi in #208
• Update docker to 29.2.1 by @​jumpyvi in #195

Homebrew​

Package Updates​

78 automated updates this month via GitHub Actions. Homebrew tap version bumps ensure Bluefin users always have access to the latest stable releases.

Quick Summary​

Ecosystem​

Homebrew packages, AI/ML tools (Bluespeed), and Flatpak applications

Planned Work​

• Remove 'mods' from ai-tools.Brewfile by @​mmartinortiz in #231
• feat(brew): podman-tui to Homebrew CLI Brewfile by @​castrojo in #228
• feat: add llmfit to ai-tools.Brewfile by @​KiKaraage in #226

Opportunistic Work​

• feat: add Bazaar Companion extension by @​coxde in #4089
• fix: turn off bazaar.service by @​renner0e in #4264
• fix(antigravity): URL scheme handling, user guidance, and added path by @​hanthor in #290
• chore: bump craft-agents-linux 0.6.0 by @​KiKaraage in #196
• fix(emacs-app-linux): avoid on_arch_conditional errors and improve WM_CLASS handling by @​dtg01100 in #189
• fix: use experimental tap path throughout bottle workflow by @​hanthor in #201
• fix: fully-qualify bluefin-cli tap in bottle workflow by @​hanthor in #199
• fix: use supported macOS x86 runner for bluefin-cli bottles by @​hanthor in #198
• chore: switch bluefin-cli to Homebrew Go formula + bottles by @​hanthor in #197
• Update Homebrew installation command for bluefin-cli by @​hanthor in #672
• feat(reports): add 'New Applications' section for Homebrew additions by @​castrojo in #653
• chore(deps): pin homebrew/actions action to 8f52032 by @​mergeraptor in #42

System Services & Policies​

Systemd services and system-level policies

Planned Work​

Status: ChillOps

Opportunistic Work​

• fix: turn off bazaar.service for now by @​renner0e in #1172
• fix: fetch raw instead of blob for zram config by @​jumpyvi in #1170

Hardware​

Hardware support, drivers, NVIDIA GPU, and ARM64 architecture

Planned Work​

Status: ChillOps

Opportunistic Work​

• fix(ci): replace cosign attest with oras attach and use RPM-bundled nvidia-install.sh by @​buggerman in #4274
• fix:DRACUT_TMPDIR export for kernel swap by @​hanthor in #1251
• fix(gdx): guard nvidia-modeset.conf copy for arm64 by @​hanthor in #1232
• fix(gdx): remove stale kernel-pin, follow coreos-stable akmods by @​hanthor in #1231
• feat(driver-versions): rebuild page as timeline with per-release reba… by @​castrojo in #684
• Feat/driver versions redesign by @​castrojo in #665

Infrastructure​

ISO images, upstream integration, build systems, and testing frameworks

Planned Work​

Status: ChillOps

Opportunistic Work​

• feat(ci): add DNF package cache to reusable build workflow by @​castrojo in #4359
• feat(beta): turn on Bluefin beta by @​castrojo in #4355
• chore(beta): point beta builds at beta branch by @​hanthor in #4362
• feat: deprecate GTS image tag and migrate to stable by @​ahmedadan in #4251
• feat: layer GNOME 50 on top of GNOME 49 base image by @​hanthor in #1212
• fix(ci): use tree-hash anchor for accurate promotion commit list by @​castrojo in #1197
• ci(promote): replace push-based promotion with PR gate by @​castrojo in #1195
• fix(ci): prevent production LTS tag pollution from main branch merges by @​castrojo in #1154
• fix: remove redundant macOS tap copy in bottle build by @​hanthor in #202
• fix: avoid tap ambiguity in macOS bottle build by @​hanthor in #200
• fix: add .npmrc legacy-peer-deps to unblock TypeScript 6 build by @​castrojo in #678
• feat(sbom): add SBOM attestation cache pipeline by @​castrojo in #693
• feat: SBOM pipeline for data by @​castrojo in #691
• perf(ci): add node_modules cache, broaden data cache key, add concurr… by @​castrojo in #688
• Upstream pr/fix signing SBOM commands by @​castrojo in #687
• fix: correct stale repo refs, announcement bar, and CI cache key by @​castrojo in #660
• docs(agents): update documentation for build-iso-lts-hwe-testing.yml … by @​castrojo in #46
• ci(prerelease): attach iso-CHECKSUM files to GitHub prereleases by @​castrojo in #45
• ci(iso): harden testing/production isolation across build and promote… by @​castrojo in #44
• ci(iso): add weekly lts-hwe-testing iso build by @​castrojo in #43
• fix(ci): correct build-iso-all cron schedule to run monthly by @​castrojo in #37

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• feat(ci): turn on automerge by @​castrojo in #145
• ci: Track with arch aarch64 for the arm elements by @​alatiera in #114
• ci: Use buildstream to track elements by @​alatiera in #111
• Fix the build_image_name again by @​alatiera in #97
• ci: Fix yaml indentation by @​alatiera in #95
• ci: Only setup the CAS config if the secrets exist by @​alatiera in #94
• Run builds on commits and PRs by @​alatiera in #92
• chore: rename build-egg.yml to build.yml by @​castrojo in #89

Documentation​

Documentation improvements and additions

Planned Work​

Status: ChillOps

Opportunistic Work​

• chore(renovate): group eslint and @typescript-eslint in one PR by @​castrojo in #698
• chore(deps): update step-security/harden-runner action to v2.16.1 by @​mergeraptor in #689
• docs(downloads): add weekly lts-hwe testing download table by @​castrojo in #695
• fix(images): address issue #20 reviewer feedback — cert identity, par… by @​castrojo in #690
• fix(images): wire fetch-github-images into fetch-data chain by @​castrojo in #686
• docs(downloads,driver-versions): fix links and remove backup ISO section by @​castrojo in #685
• feat(images): add images catalog page by @​castrojo in #683
• feat(changelogs): prototype changelog card UI with supply chain and c… by @​castrojo in #682
• docs: Docs/lts hwe testing download links by @​castrojo in #681
• doc: include podman settings in devcontainers doc resolves #661 by @​NahsiN in #673
• fix(reports): correct workflow ID and add PR pagination by @​castrojo in #679
• Remove 'mods' from AI tools documentation by @​mmartinortiz in #659
• fix(docs): correct Goose and OpenCode MCP config for dosu by @​castrojo in #669
• blog: add hanthor profile card to bluefin-cli announcement by @​castrojo in #667
• blog: announce bluefin-cli for Mac and Windows (WSL) by @​castrojo in #666
• feat(changelogs): redesign changelog page with combined feed and commit view by @​castrojo in #664
• docs: remove retired GTS references from active documentation by @​castrojo in #663
• Update installation instructions for Lenovo ThinkPad users by @​jfmongrain in #656
• Document early alpha bluefin-cli for cross-platform use by @​hanthor in #662
• feat: goobye Bluefin GTS by @​castrojo in #654
• docs(agents): rewrite AGENTS.md and remove stale planning artifacts by @​castrojo in #38

Tech Debt​

Maintenance work and feature parity between variants

Planned Work​

• chore(rollback-helper): Remove gts by @​AtomHare in #229

Opportunistic Work​

• fix(packages): add autofs and restrict ROCm to non-nvidia dx by @​castrojo in #4370

Automation​

CI/CD pipelines, GitHub Actions, and automated dependency updates

Planned Work​

• fix(renovate): use customManagers with currentValue group by @​ahmedadan in #242

Opportunistic Work​

• fix(ci): grant contents:write to generate-release jobs by @​castrojo in #4371
• chore(ci): add Sigstore build attestations by @​castrojo in #4369
• fix(ci): remove pull_request trigger from GNOME 50 workflow by @​castrojo in #1238
• fix: upload-artifact names for hwe/non-hwe gnome50 builds by @​hanthor in #1220
• feat: add bluefin-dx GNOME 50 build variants by @​hanthor in #1221
• fix(ci): use regular merge for promotion PRs instead of squash by @​castrojo in #1201
• fix(ci): replace PR promotion with squash push in promote-to-lts by @​castrojo in #1177
• fix(ci): sync workflow files and AGENTS.md from main by @​castrojo in #1161
• fix(ci): fix LTS promotion workflow failures by @​castrojo in #1157
• fix(ci): prevent branch pollution by replacing pull app with manual workflow by @​castrojo in #1152
• fix(ci): prevent accidental LTS tag publishing from pull bot PRs by @​castrojo in #1147
• feat: switch lts builds to cron-only schedule by @​castrojo in #1138
• fix(ci): restrict SBOM generation to lts branch only by @​castrojo in #1142
• revert: restore SBOM generation on main branch by @​castrojo in #1141
• fix(ci): restrict SBOM generation to lts branch only by @​castrojo in #1140
• chore(deps): update github actions (major) by @​mergeraptor in #40
• chore(deps): update github actions by @​mergeraptor in #39

Localization​

Translation and internationalization work

Planned Work​

• feat(bazaar, po): add Indonesian curation translation by @​KiKaraage in #207

Opportunistic Work​

Status: ChillOps

Other​

• fix(packages): remove sssd cluster packages by @​castrojo in #4356
• fix: upgrade script was being wiped by /tmp tmpfs mount by @​hanthor in #1213
• chore: remove .opencode/ and plans directory by @​castrojo in #119
• Revert image squash by @​alatiera in #96
• Disable chunkify again by @​alatiera in #88
• Add bluefin CAS server by @​alatiera in #41
• Update refs by @​alatiera in #78

Bot Activity​

Automation Percentage: 68.6% (258 bot PRs out of 376 total PRs)

Build Health​

Raptor Race​

Keep Bluefin healthy with green builds. Wranglers apply within!

Image	Success Rate	Successes	Failures	Monthly Change
bluefin:stable	82.1%	184	40
bluefin:latest	83.5%	182	36
bluefin:lts	78.6%	272	74
bluefin:lts-hwe	76.5%	260	80
bluefin-dx:lts	75.7%	256	82
bluefin-gdx:lts	38%	128	209
bluefin-dx:lts-hwe	77.8%	263	75

This Month's Highlights​

Contributors​

New Lights​

We welcome our newest Guardians to the project.

"I do not know what the future holds. But I know this: with you at our side, there is nothing we cannot face."

—Commander Zavala

Wayfinders​

"Define yourself by your actions."

—Lord Saladin

Want to see the latest OS releases? Check out the Changelogs. For announcements and deep dives, read our Blog.

This report was automatically generated from todo.projectbluefin.io.

Generated on 2026-04-02
View Project Board | Report an Issue

The time has come. Thanks to @hanthor not only do we get GNOME 49, we get GNOME 50 too! Achillobator can be fast!

Call for Testing​

We've got fancy new testing branches so feel free to help out. I know it's tempting to go right to 50 but if you could give 49 a shakedown on your way there it would really help. We're also wondering when the best time to land 50 would be. Do we wait until Fall to kinda get the -1 feel GTS had or do we pick a happy spot in the summer? Leave your feedback below.

Help fix the matrix of madness​

Find your image with a sudo bootc status and you basically adding a -testing to your image name. So instead of bluefin:lts it's bluefin:lts-testing, and so on.

We need one more legend.​

Huge thanks to @hanthor on this one, and if you're as annoyed as I am with those manual branch names you can help just add a toggle to the rebase helper so that we can just have this be a nice testing switch! Once we get that going and add a testing branch to bluefin:stable we'll have a nice easy way for people to opt in and out of testing. Good luck, have fun!

Discussion​

We like to say "The command line is our passion. Therefore we invest in the command line experience, knowing that most people will never see it." Sounds grandiose! Bluefin CLI is a a terminal experience designed around shipping a new "default terminal experience" with modern tools. But it also has things like the just task runner, making the community shared aliases and shortcuts easy. That just lets the good stuff float to the top. Actually we should probably just call it "Bluefin for Mac and Windows", once we have the wallpaper stuff figured out, which is where we need your help!

Bluefin CLI is one of my favorite Bluefin features. I get to host meetings with CNCF Ambassadors and they have the coolest prompt setups, etc. I love checking out a fellow nerd's loadout. You start to find cool little tools that just freshen up the Linux command line experience. And of course they're all written in rust, duh. We've been building bluefin-cli — the opt-in terminal experience that ships with Bluefin — into something that runs anywhere. Today it's available as an early alpha on macOS, any Linux distribution, and Windows via WSL or PowerShell.

This work is brought to you by James, who has been working on this single handedly. In Universal Blue tradition, this feature started off as a meme. Send him a donation if you wanna support his efforts!

What is bluefin-cli?​

On Bluefin, ujust bluefin-cli turns on a curated set of modern command line tools: eza, bat, zoxide, atuin, starship, ripgrep, fd, ugrep, tealdeer, and more. The philosophy is simple — a greenfield terminal experience using the best tools available today, with the ability to toggle it off and return to your known-good kit at any time. That toggle is important because this is an opinionated setup you should be able to turn it off. It's also designed to not be too crazy, we want subtle bling here. And anyway it's a template for you to build off if you want to go customize everything. And we use this system to pull in Flatpaks like Podman Desktop, which is an awesome GUI way to manage your containers. This could all be adapted to bring the same developer experience to other operating systems. "Bluefin the Application" I guess.

Some of Bluefin's best parts are common aliases. I want ujust update and ujust bios in Ubuntu and Windows. PRs to make it nice and slick would be appreciated.

And our community curated ujust bbrew app lists are great, I love it when someone finds a new CLI tool in an exciting space, especially in AI. I learned about llmfit, a nice tool that figures out the optimal local model for your hardware. Knowing that we're all curating awesomeness is a really fun part of this!

Why?​

I've always argued that the Linux development experience competes best when you do container development. This is the technology that forced Microsoft and Apple to adopt cloud native in the first place. MacOS even has it's own container tool, an analogue to podman. Each OS ships something, and Docker and podman run on all of them. We have a diverse set of implementations, but one common standard. I betcha distrobox would work on that Mac thing if it doesn't already.

There's just something about doing it on Linux, on the platform it was designed for, that leads to that extra bit of user experience. And the one thing I wish more Linux nerds would understand, we live in a cross platform world. Changing platforms is tough enough, let's at least give the developers a comfortable place to land! An operating system agnostic development environment is a competitive advantage when we have home court advantage.

Expectations​

This is an alpha. What we want is for you to be able to have the Bluefin experience on the Mac and Windows, wallpapers and everything. James is almost there, we just need people to give the thing a once over, see what needs to happen. Ideally we want one click happyness for both systems eventually.

Installation​

You need Homebrew installed on the system:

brew install ublue-os/experimental-tap/bluefin-cli

On Windows with PowerShell, enable shell integration after installing:

bluefin-cli shell powershell on

On bash, zsh, or fish:

bluefin-cli shell bash on
# or
bluefin-cli shell zsh on
# or
bluefin-cli shell fish on

What you get​

Once enabled, bluefin-cli brings the bling:

• eza — modern replacement for ls
• bat — cat with syntax highlighting and git integration
• zoxide — smarter cd that learns your habits
• atuin — shell history sync across machines
• starship — fast, cross-shell prompt
• uutils-coreutils — Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils - that's right, before Ubuntu did it lol!
• ripgrep, fd, ugrep — faster search tools
• tealdeer — fast tldr for quick command references

You can also grab Bluefin artwork and wallpaper collections, browse and install curated Brewfiles via the ujust bbrew command, and run bluefin-cli motd show to get the same Message of the Day that greets Bluefin users at every new terminal.

This is an early alpha​

The cross-platform release is early. Things will be rough in places. Open issues with feedback — that's how this gets better.

The full source is at hanthor/bluefin-cli. Contributions welcome, we'd love feature parity!

If you're already running Bluefin, nothing changes — ujust bluefin-cli still works the same way. This is for everyone else who wants in.

Discussion​

Desktop​

GNOME desktop environment, Aurora variant (KDE), and terminal enhancements

Planned Work​

Status: ChillOps

Opportunistic Work​

• fix: move starship init bash to /etc/profile.d by @​salim-b in #4147
• feat: Add Adwaita Fonts from EPEL by @​rrenomeron in #1089
• fix: use upstream xdg-terminal-exec instead of hack by @​tulilirockz in #1060
• fix: GNOME downgrade commands by @​hanthor in #1109
• build: Remove GNOME 48 backport COPR by @​hanthor in #976
• fix: no logos on centos bluefin-lts by @​renner0e in #32
• fix: fedora logos in iso by @​renner0e in #30

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• Update gnomeos juction ref by @​alatiera in #39
• fix: add dconf profile and database compilation, clean up elements by @​ahmedadan in #30

Development​

Development tools and IDE integrations

Planned Work​

Status: ChillOps

Opportunistic Work​

• fix: re-enable arm64 builds by @​ahmedadan in #1098

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• feat: improve boot-vm ssh forwarding for native and containerized QEMU by @​hanthor in #38
• feat: add docker-qemu by @​hanthor in #36

Homebrew​

New Applications​

The following applications were added to our Homebrew taps this month:

Application	Description	Status
craft-agents-linux	Work with most powerful agents in the world, with the UX they deserve
emdash-linux	Agentic development environment for running multiple coding agents in parallel

Use ujust bbrew to browse and install these packages. Follow the tap instructions if you want to do it by hand.

Package Updates​

58 automated updates this month via GitHub Actions. Homebrew tap version bumps ensure Bluefin users always have access to the latest stable releases.

Quick Summary​

Ecosystem​

Homebrew packages, AI/ML tools (Bluespeed), and Flatpak applications

Planned Work​

• feat: add antigravity-linux to Brewfile by @​castrojo in #215
• feat: add Sitra & Embellish font apps to Bazaar flatpak curations by @​KiKaraage in #198
• chore: update tap brewfile by @​inffy in #196

Opportunistic Work​

• fix(pmbootstrap): rebuild bottle for 3.9.0 by @​ahmedadan in #278
• feat: add antigravity URL handler desktop entry and update artifacts by @​hanthor in #262
• fix: add git pull --rebase to bottle workflow to handle concurrent pushes by @​ahmedadan in #247
• feat: add agy target alias for the antigravity binary by @​hanthor in #234
• feat(cask): add emdash-linux by @​ahmedadan in #191
• feat: add craft-agents-linux by @​KiKaraage in #186
• Fix emacs-app-linux GUI startup by placing pdmp next to binary by @​dtg01100 in #188
• feat(reports): add homebrew tap promotions section to monthly reports by @​castrojo in #614

System Services & Policies​

Systemd services and system-level policies

Planned Work​

• fix: move ublue signing keys to /usr/lib/pki/containers by @​renner0e in #202
• fix: move StartLimitIntervalSec to [Unit] by @​renner0e in #203
• fix: move quay.io/toolbx key to /usr by @​renner0e in #201

Opportunistic Work​

Status: ChillOps

Hardware​

Hardware support, drivers, NVIDIA GPU, and ARM64 architecture

Planned Work​

Status: ChillOps

Opportunistic Work​

• fix: remove kernel pin by @​castrojo in #4237
• chore: remove firmware files that are part of mt7xxx-firmware by @​castrojo in #4198
• fix: pin kernel to 6.17.12 for ZFS compatibility by @​castrojo in #4187
• fix(gdx): disable arm64 builds and fix nvidia failure by @​ahmedadan in #1078

Infrastructure​

ISO images, upstream integration, build systems, and testing frameworks

Planned Work​

• fix: clarify what ujust update does by @​renner0e in #219

Opportunistic Work​

• feat: publish -testing images when changes merge to main by @​castrojo in #1101
• feat: add torrent generation for ISO builds by @​castrojo in #35
• feat(ci): implement prerelease/promotion workflow by @​castrojo in #36
• ci(promote): update production bucket name to bluefin by @​castrojo in #34
• ci(promote): update R2 secret names to production by @​castrojo in #33
• chore: remove space saving actions by @​renner0e in #31
• fix(ci): resolve anaconda-webui package conflict after bluefin PR #4072 by @​castrojo in #27

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• feat: add justfile bcvk test commands by @​ahmedadan in #61
• revert: "chore(deps): update dependency buildstream-plugins to v2.5.0" by @​castrojo in #62
• Revert "feat(ci): add multi-runner workflow for free GitHub runners" by @​hanthor in #35
• feat(ci): add multi-runner workflow for free GitHub runners by @​hanthor in #34
• feat: use pre-built chunkah image by @​hanthor in #33
• Refactor build process to use Just and integrate Chunkah by @​hanthor in #32
• feat: integrate chunkah for oci image re-layering by @​hanthor in #24
• ci: switch to daily cron build at 08:00 UTC by @​castrojo in #29
• Build bootc locally to fix bad caching by @​jumpyvi in #17
• Update justfile by @​jumpyvi in #18

Documentation​

Documentation improvements and additions

Planned Work​

Status: ChillOps

Opportunistic Work​

• docs(linux-mcp-server): add link to upstream survey by @​castrojo in #240
• docs: add torrent column to ISO download tables by @​castrojo in #651
• Edit streams table to reflect stable being default by @​louhitar in #632
• docs(troubleshooting): update MCP config for Gemini and migrate images by @​castrojo in #630
• docs: simplify MCP configuration with shared Dosu UUID by @​castrojo in #629
• Update Removal of Starship docs by @​AtiusAmy in #627
• feat(components): add holographic hover effects to foil cards by @​castrojo in #626
• docs: add tieguy to advisors and mentors by @​castrojo in #622
• docs: remove planning archive and clean up documentation by @​castrojo in #617
• chore: upgrade Node.js requirement from 18 to 20 by @​castrojo in #613

Tech Debt​

Maintenance work and feature parity between variants

Planned Work​

Status: ChillOps

Opportunistic Work​

• feat: add ibus-chewing for parity and better i18n by @​tingweiwan in #1076

Automation​

CI/CD pipelines, GitHub Actions, and automated dependency updates

Planned Work​

Status: ChillOps

Opportunistic Work​

• feat: migrate changelog generation to external action by @​hanthor in #1125
• feat: fix changelog generation and add HWE kernel comparison table by @​castrojo in #1116
• chore(renovate): enable automerge for additional container digests by @​castrojo in #1106

Localization​

Translation and internationalization work

Planned Work​

• feat: add Czech translation to the desktop files by @​ExistingPerson08 in #197
• feat: added french translations for bazaar's curated page by @​theMimolet in #184

Opportunistic Work​

Status: ChillOps

Other​

• fix: remove xone and openrazer by @​castrojo in #4203
• feat(renovate): enable platformAutomerge for digest updates by @​castrojo in #1114
• feat: add aarch64 elements for pre-built binary packages by @​ahmedadan in #60
• Misc fixes by @​alatiera in #63
• Remove duplicate bootc element by @​alatiera in #42
• Add 1Password desktop & CLI packages by @​ahmedadan in #28
• feat: add Caffeine extension, glow, gum, and fzf by @​castrojo in #25

Bot Activity​

Automation Percentage: 70.2% (167 bot PRs out of 238 total PRs)

Build Health​

Raptor Race​

Keep Bluefin healthy with green builds. Wranglers apply within!

Image	Success Rate	Successes	Failures	Monthly Change
bluefin:stable	54.7%	87	72
bluefin:gts	53.8%	56	48
bluefin:latest	64.1%	98	55
bluefin:lts	68.2%	107	50
bluefin:lts-hwe	72.3%	115	44
bluefin-dx:lts	59.9%	94	63
bluefin-gdx:lts	51.3%	81	77
bluefin-dx:lts-hwe	0%	0	0

This Month's Highlights​

Contributors​

New Lights​

We welcome our newest Guardians to the project.

"I do not know what the future holds. But I know this: with you at our side, there is nothing we cannot face."

—Commander Zavala

Wayfinders​

"Define yourself by your actions."

—Lord Saladin

Want to see the latest OS releases? Check out the Changelogs. For announcements and deep dives, read our Blog.

This report was automatically generated from todo.projectbluefin.io.

Generated on 2026-03-01
View Project Board | Report an Issue

Hi everyone,

It can be difficult to keep track of things if you're not paying attention regularly, and even if you are there's always stuff all over the place. I've been working on ways to collate all of the things happening from across the community into a regular monthly report. Here's Jurassic January.

Changelogs are actually pretty weird in bootc land. We usually extract the package version info from the last rechunking step to generate the changelogs - however that doesn't really cover the entire project, just the things in that repository. There's also a new upstream rechunker coming down the pipeline so that means that we'll need to rework how we generate the changelogs (thanks to @renner0e for investigating this!). The existing changelogs also really only tell you about the things in the image, and not the "whole" of Bluefin. These will always continue to be published on changelogs.projectbluefin.io

These reports aren't a replacement for the changelogs, just as this blog will continue to handle most of the "Why?" we do things -- for us it's a good way to blog about the meta and not the minutiae.

We've divided Bluefin into the categories that match the labels throughout the project, so that we can organize things a little bit better. Each section looks like this:

Ecosystem​

Homebrew packages, AI/ML tools (Bluespeed), and Flatpak applications

Additionally each section is divided into two categories. "Planned Work" are things we're purposely working on. These usually need planning and organization and are tracked in todo.projectbluefin.io.

"Opportunistic Work" are things that people just work on day-to-day and may or may not have a plan attached to them. This is usually the bulk of the work. We also needed a way to track what's going into the production homebrew tap, and in general tell people when something is getting promoted. Here's the first attempt:

Homebrew Package Updates​

75 automated updates this month via GitHub Actions. Homebrew tap version bumps ensure Bluefin users always have access to the latest stable releases.

Quick Summary​

We also took the opportunity to add stats on the builders so you can check out Bluefin's health "at a glance". And lastly we wanted to highlight the contributors. New contributors ("New Lights"), will have a gold foil usercard to celebrate their first Bluefin contribution:

Each month will list every person that contributed to Bluefin for that month, so if you're keen, apply within! This section is incomplete, it does not include discussions and issues, so if you're working in those areas you're not getting a shout out yet, but we'll keep making improvements.

If there's an area of Bluefin that you're finding hard to keep track of leave feedback in this thread!

Discussion​