11 posts tagged with "announcements"

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:

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

• GNOME 48 release notes
• Fedora 42 release notes
• Bluefin changelog - detailed changes

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:

Welcome to Bluefin​

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:

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!

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.

• Linux systray application - these docs will get your tailscale icon going in your tray.

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:

• AI & Machine Learning Tools: run ujust bluefin-ai to install them.
  • Learn more in the AI and Machine Learning documentation.
• Kubernetes Tools: Run ujust bluefin-k8s to install them.
  • For a full list of the tools, check out the Kubernetes documentation.
• Developer Fonts: Run ujust bluefin-fonts to install them.
  • See the full list of fonts in the Fonts documentation.

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.

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.

• Bluefin Documentation
• Universal Blue

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:

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.

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.

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:

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:

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:

• Help Wanted issues
• Contributing Guide

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.

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

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

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!

Discussion Thread​

Only one more day until Bluefin LTS, here's a wonderful gift from Delphic Melody to keep you occupied:

Download it here

Discussion​

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.

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​

You may have noticed this on the docs header lately:

We are using deepwiki to index the documentation and then provide a chat tool for you. For example you can ask it How do I update Bluefin? and so on.

I've been playing with it enough that we've decided to just make it live at ask.projectbluefin.io. Enjoy!

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

• https://bold-brew.com/
• https://docs.projectbluefin.io/command-line#bold-brew

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:

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:

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:

(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:

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.

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:

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!

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. 😃

Alright everyone, it’s been fun testing!

Now Bazaar has enough feature parity with gnome-software so we’ve gone ahead and made the switch in bluefin:latest. Most of you will get this update next weekend - in the meantime feel free to dive in and give feedback! bluefin:stable-daily will start to get this tomorrow.

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• Github: GitHub - kolunmi/bazaar
• Issues: Check these first as we’ve been logging people’s requests here: GitHub · Where software is built - note that the curated page with the dinosaurs and app tiles isn’t Bazaar, that’s our custom config, we’re still working on it. (The horizontal experience needs work still!)
• There’s still some session integration work to happen over the next few days, notably the background service doesn’t start until you launch the app or you hit the super key. This means there’s a loading screen at first. We’re working to make that just be part of login, the end state will be instant launch.

I prefer to use with the Super-space shortcut - this is nice because if you’re in chat or on the web and you see an app you like it’s an quick way to try an app:

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It’s also integrated into the GNOME Search screen, which is probably my 2nd most used way of installing apps:

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And if you’re digging it:

Donate to the Author​

Guardians, today Bluefin switched its base from Fedora 41 to Fedora 42. The gathering of raptors is over, Bluefin GTS remains with F41 while Bluefin stretches her legs with the latest Fedora goodies.

KubeCon EU 2025 Project Report​

As a bootc derived project we tend to align with the cadence of the rest of cloud native. That means we do status reports like this depending on where we are in the world at the time, and to ensure transparency. Previous status update: KubeCon US 2024 Project Report

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First things first, here’s the Bluefin Spring 2025 playlist – like previous playlists, each song was picked for a certain reason, the interpretation is up to you. Rock out while you read this update and refresh yourself up on the docs!

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

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Here’s the major Fedora release information:

• Fedora Magazine: What’s new in Fedora Workstation 42
• GNOME 48 release notes
• Bluefin changelog - and here are all the package updates
• If you’re looking for Fedora 41, check out Bluefin GTS, which released a few weeks ago.

This time Jacob Schnurr takes us to the Triassic:

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Note that composefs is now enabled via upstream Fedora!

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 (aka bluefin:stable) is our leading edge desktop, designed to bring you the newest version of Fedora and GNOME. It follows the CoreOS release schedule and comes ~2-3 weeks after Fedora has done it’s major upgrade. This is a great buffer without being overly tardy. This one came a bit later but it’s ready now!

Here’s a bit of a rundown with Alan Pope! Special thanks to Anchore, makers of Syft and Grype - which we use as our security scanners when making our builds and their advice has been invaluable to our project this cycle!

Universal Blue revolutionizes the Linux desktop experience

We fiercely invest in automation and distributed work, which is one of the many reasons why Linux and Open Source have devoured the industry. We strive to bring these cloud native features to the desktop.

If you’re brand new you can use the website to pick the right image or use one of the direct DL links:

• AMD/Intel: https://download.projectbluefin.io/bluefin-stable-x86_64.iso
• Nvidia: https://download.projectbluefin.io/bluefin-nvidia-open-stable-x86_64.iso

Major Changes​

There are a few major changes from a Bluefin perspective that we’ve been looking forward to, let’s roll!

Installation Experience​

Let’s get this out of the way … our installation experience continues to be the bane of our existence. Most of this project is automated, but the installation experience takes a disproportionate amount of time, most of the last two months have been us scrambling to make ISOs work. As of today there are no bootc installers that are production ready for end users, this has been a problem for years so we’re exploring multiple options. I’m kinda done with snakes.

This cycle we will be producing two sets of ISOs for installation. One is the the older Anaconda installer, and one is Fyra Labs’ new readymade installer. Both sets are listed on this download page. Production of both ISOs is automated so we can kick the tyres on both and take a closer look in October for the next set of releases. The website will default to the Anaconda installers.

• Refreshed Anaconda ISOs - Thanks to a herculean effort by Jason Naggin and Noel Miller we have refreshed ISOs on the website, based on the Fedora Anaconda installer.

  • These are offline ISOs so they include all the flatpaks and everything you need to get up and running in one download.
  • Don’t overthink it these are basically fine.

• New Readymade Installation Media - thanks to our friends at Fyra we have a new installer that we’re making available.

  • The major new feature is being able to try Bluefin via a “Live CD”, which was never possible before. This is especially useful for testing wireless drivers, Nvidia support, etc.
  • This is also an offline installer and includes all the flatpaks, the major difference is that these offer a LiveCD experience.
  • Note that this installer is still very young, but we’re hoping to keep revving fast on it. The more feedback and fixes you submit, the faster it goes.

And for some color (if it’s not obvious), there’s no future for legacy installers in the new world. We plan to aggressively pursue aligning our installation methods with the rest of the cloud native ecosystem so we don’t have to deal with this. I’d like to take a moment to shout out the intergration work @tulilirockz has been doing to deliver this. Without her there would be no ISOs, or Bluefin. Much love.

We are not out of the woods yet, but we’re making significant progress so this might take a few weeks still.

Other Major Changes​

• ComposeFS information for F42 upgrades - this is the biggest heads up, if you move to stable there’s no going back to GTS. James has added guards and warnings to ujust rebase-helper to remind you. This is a one time migration, it sucks that it’s a one way trip. On the plus side someday in the future your base OS, containers, and flatpaks will all be consuming composefs for some great efficiency wins. More to follow on this as we learn more from upstream.

• As usual most of the changes are the work we do in GitHub to deliver Bluefin and not so much in the image itself. This took up the bulk of the work this cycle. Here’s a huge changelog of the package updates. You can also check out the release notes or use ujust changelogs to keep track of what’s going on.

• We really, really made some efficiency gains across Universal Blue this cycle, we were able to grow the team while getting faster.

  • We’ve centralized a ton of things from the individual images to the packages repo - the team slayed here, with Tulip and Zeglius leading the work. This has led to more sharing and reviewing across the board. This is also a great place to get started contributing!
  • This centralization led to use removing tons of old founder code that hasn’t been touched, though it did cause tiny but annoying issues. But it’s going to lead to less bugs over time.
  • Bluefin now shares more code with Aurora and Bazzite, so the repo has been shedding weight, we’re always trying to delete as much of Bluefin as we can. 😄

• Some packages have moved to flatpaks: Upcoming changes to Bluefin packages for the F42 release

• This cycle has also been all about being more up front about our project metrics:

  • Just how many of us are making this thing?
  • Just how many of us are there?

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Documentation Improvements​

We really spent a ton of time on the docs this cycle. I consider them mostly feature complete now. docs.project.bluefin is always linked from your terminal motd too. 😄

Thanks to the magic of princexml we’re able to generate a pretty amazing offline PDF of the Bluefin docs:

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Note that we will replace the Yelp help application with a link to this doc, which will open in the Papers PDF reader automatically. Yelp’s had some problems, so it’s time to say goodbye.

We will also replace the Documentation shortcut in the logo menu with this instead so that documentation will always be browsable when offline. The blue u shortcut to the online docs will remain in the menu unchanged. We hope to finish this up soon.

ARM Image​

We are currently not producing an ARM build of Bluefin or Bluefin GTS. However we do have an ARM image of Bluefin LTS, which is in Beta, you can select it from the this list.

It’s very good and on track to GA sometime this summer, so help there is appreciated. We’re still working on ARM builds for Bluefin and Bluefin GTS.

Deprecation Notices​

Extinction is a natural part of life. These will take effect when we migrate to Fedora 43 this fall so we’re giving you a full release cycle heads up.

Nvidia Closed Images​

Due to Nvidia’s software support changes we can no longer support the older closed modules for Nvidia cards.

• We will continue to make the Nvidia closed driver images for the remainder of this cycle. If your Nvidia card is OLDER than Turing+ / GTX 16XX+ this is the last release of Bluefin that will run on your card with these drivers.
  • In some cases these older cards may run better with NVK on a vanilla image.
  • Due to these changes being out of our control we cannot guarantee that older cards will work on the subsequent GTS release either. Sorry. 😦
• We will not be generating ISOs for the closed driver images.
• We will migrate you to the new nvidia-open images automatically during an upgrade if your hardware supports it. So any GTX 16XX+ and RTX Series cards will be migrated over with no action needed from you.
• Pour one out for that GTX 1080Ti, the thing rocked for an absurdly long time, rest in peace friend.

Bluefin HWE Images​

If you are using one of the old hwe images for Surface/Asus, this is the last cycle that we will be generating them. We haven’t linked to their ISOs in a long time but there’s a handful of you still rocking these. If you’re using one of these images you’ll see hwe in your bootc status or fastfetch output.

• Use ujust rebase-helper and select the latest stream.
• If you own one of these devices we recommend trying this sooner rather than later to see where your device stands today.
• If anyone is interested in maintaining images for Asus and Surface devices let us know and we’d be happy to link to your images.

More Information​

Bluefin is a deinonychus, and may snap at you occasionally. Three 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.

• Bluefin Documentation
• Universal Blue

We also accept donations to sponsor the infrastructure and artwork. If there’s a piece of software in Bluefin that makes you happy, consider donating to the upstream organization and/or authors. Thanks to the present (and past!) supporters for helping out.

Check the docs for all the available version options:

• Upgrades and throttle settings

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, the refined aggresiveness of bluefin:stable, the raptor abides.

Here’s the current lay of the land:

Other Universal Blue News​

M2 has moved ublue-os/main to use one justfile for builds. This means that you can just now git clone and build images on the spot. This also makes it straightforward to build our images on any infrastructure (Gitlab, etc.). Bluefin is already set up this way, so go nuts!

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:

• Help Wanted issues
• Contributing Guide

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

What’s Next?​

• Bluefin LTS and Bluefin GDX are looking solid, mostly it’s just waiting for secureboot support.

Community Health Metrics​

And lastly let’s take a look at how we’re doing. This year started off nice and boring but soon our community experienced some amazing growth. Let’s start off with our conversations on Discord, Discourse, GitHub, and Reddit. This is a measure of just how active our community is in helping each other out.

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Lots of growth here, we’re proud to announce that we just crossed 16,000 folks on the Discord. Contributions have experienced the same level of growth.

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And here are where people are submitting pull requests in GitHub. 123 individual people have contributed a pull request to Universal Blue in the last six months. As you can see we have a nice even spread of contributions across the board, this is a good thing!

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Usage​

Keep those great numbers in mind because we have a correction to make to one of our most important metrics. Timothee Ravier at Fedora was preparing his talk for Flock and noticed a problem with the countme metrics. Fedora and Universal Blue have been counting devices twice, doh! Here is the corrected chart.

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The chart is the same, all the numbers are cut in half though. If we look at the number of machines checking in with Fedora every week:

• Bazitte has crossed 30,000 15,000 devices
• Bluefin is flirting with 4,000 2,000 devices, depending on the week
• Aurora is at about 2,200 1,100 devices
• Bluefin LTS and Aurora LTS make up 400 200 total - they are still beta and hard to find so no surprises here.

It’s fine, I mean sure, it sucks to know your userbase is half of what you thought it was, but let’s look at what the team principal at Williams F1 has to say:

So error corrected, and the big takeaway from this is to remember, the contribution metrics are the key to our success. The Atomic universe is half the size we thought it was, but at least we’re consistent with each other and understanding that measuring this stuff is the key to long term success, despite the occasional bummer. We’ve always been about the slow burn, and you probably know how much we thrive under the radar anyway.

We are of course, inevitable.

Let’s look at image pulls. Note that image pulls aren’t indicative of users, instead we use it as a gauge of how many successful upgrades we’ve had. Here are all the images with more than 1 million pulls:

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And lastly, let’s take a look at the last 90 days of homebrew analytics

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All of our images are represented well here considering how small we are. 😄

Stay Safe​

• Always read the documentation before venturing out into the wild.

If you haven’t read the docs in a while, check them out, we put a ton of effort in them this cycle.​

We’ll see everyone this summer to talk about Bluefin LTS — meanwhile enjoy the release!

Feel free to ask questions!

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Hey ya’ll, we’re about to head into conference season so I thought I’d do a quick rollup for you before the team starts on F42 work.

Most of these things are infrastructure and project related and won’t have a visible impact on your desktop or OS. Don’t worry we have other exciting things for that coming down the pipeline! For you Aurora fans we’re just going to leave a teaser for you:

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And have a look at Bluefin’s new March wallpaper, coming next week!

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Repo Consolidation​

These updates brought to you by Tulip, P5, M2, and bsherman.

Config → Packages​

We’ve been doing a poor job historically of reviewing across so many repositories, so we did some consolidation. The ublue-os/config repo has been consolidated here:

• GitHub - ublue-os/packages: Spec files for packages published in ublue COPR repos

This repo contains a few things. First off, many parts of Aurora and Bluefin have been centralized into common services, and have been included here. Bazzite is in progress. This means service units, udev rules, desktop settings, motd, spec files, and their corresponding packages will all live here. This also means that we have more eyeballs on everything instead of it being spread out across repos.

The package building is automated via the Universal Blue COPR. This is useful for those of you making custom images, you can grab any of those RPMs and and more selectively pick and choose the parts of Universal Blue that you want. This also makes it much easier to remove something, dnf5 remove ublue-brew in your Containerfile would remove brew cleanly, etc.

We’ve pruned some issues and merged a few that came over from config. If you have a udev rule you’d like to see included, this is the place to do it. Also for those of you looking for a place to start, check out the help wanted issues.

kernel-cache → akmods → main​

The ublue-os/kernel-cache repo has been merged into ublue-os/akmods, This is to more tighly couple the kernel versions with the akmods.

Note that akmods will be merging into ublue-os/main. For those of you who have been following along for a long time, yes, we’re moving back to a monorepo. The circle of life continues.

HWE base images building again​

A reminder that the ublue-os/hwe repository is being retired, check the readme for the existing deprecation notice. The main repo will be publishiung the nvidia images moving forward. These were broken for a bit but are now green thanks to M2.

Note that none of our products use this repo so this mostly affects people making images off of these. We will make an announcement when main is building the nvidia images. Ideally we’ll publish to the same URLs so hopefully we can make that a clean transition.

Future Work​

Here’s the tracking issue for the merger, which we’re still working on. Then after that we’ll be ready for F42!

Events​

We have lots of places to visit, find us here, if you’re attending feel free to reach out:

• Meet the team at SCaLE 22x - 30 million pulls and counting!
• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon
• Linux App Summit