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. :smiling_face_with_horns:
This is landing in Bluefin this week, if you want it now:
brew install Valkyrie00/homebrew-bbrew/bbrew
bbrew
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:
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. 💙
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
This work wouldn't be possible without Timothée Ravier and the bootc team! You have our thanks.
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:
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.
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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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 easy quickfire 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:
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.
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:
This time Jacob Schnurr takes us to the Triassic:
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Note that composefs is now enabled via upstream Fedora!
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:
There are a few major changes from a Bluefin perspective that we’ve been looking forward to, let’s roll!
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.
New Readymade Installation Media - thanks to our friends at Fyra we have a new installer that we’re making available.
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.
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.
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:
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Note: Bluefin GTS users will also get this documentation update.
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.
The PDF is built every time we update the docs and is copied over as part of the build process, so your offiline documentation will always be up to date.
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.
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.
Due to Nvidia’s software support changes we can no longer support the older closed modules for Nvidia cards.
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.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.
ujust rebase-helper and select the latest stream.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.
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:
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:
gts (default) | stable or stable-daily | latest | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fedora Version: | 41 | 42 | 42 |
| GNOME Version: | 47 | 48 | 48 |
| Target User: | Most users | Enthusiasts | Advanced users and testers |
| System Updates: | Weekly | Weekly or Daily | Daily |
| Application Updates: | Twice a Day | Twice a Day | Twice a Day |
| Kernel: | Gated | Gated | Ungated |
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 easy to build our images on any infrastructure (Gitlab, etc.). Bluefin is already set up this way, so go nuts!
Bluefin is an active predator and is constantly hungry. You can help keep Bluefin healthy by becoming a contributor! We are an open source project and accept contributions:
As a cloud native project we are always looking for contributors with skills in Podman, Docker, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, and good ole bash.
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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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:
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:
Data, for me, is the foundation of F1. There’s no human judgment involved. You’ve got to get your foundation right in data.
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. 😄
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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These updates brought to you by Tulip, P5, M2, and bsherman.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Here’s the tracking issue for the merger, which we’re still working on. Then after that we’ll be ready for F42!
We have lots of places to visit, find us here, if you’re attending feel free to reach out:
Hi ya’ll!
I thought it’d be a good time to post a quick “State of the Blue” as we wrap up 2024. We’ve had the excitement around bootc ramp up over the holiday and we’ve crossed over 11,186 members on the Discord. There’s always something to do in the land of the blue!
First up, Happy Birthday to Bazzite! Bazzite continues to find it’s place:
An Asus ROG Ally X running Bazzite has all but replaced the Steam Deck in my life.
Almost exactly a year ago the Bazzite rocket took off when it was featued on Hacker News for New Year’s Eve. The rest is explosive! Let’s look at Fedora’s countme stats:
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As you can see, we’re all living in Bazzite’s world right now! And overall the Fedora Atomic community is growing!
Right now the project is mostly in maintenance mode, accepting PRs in akmods, config, etc. Most of the rest of the main components are complete, there hasn’t been much reason to do a ton of work here.
We’re remaining pretty firm on our scope focus, and continue to concentrate on removing technical debt and sustainability. From a contributor perspective, we’re getting more and more pull requests and new people, so please continue to file issues and send fixes if you have the skills!
There’s a ton of videos on Bazzite already so let’s talk about the others for a minute. Aurora split out into it’s own repo at the end of this year, allowing for it rev on it’s own by people who care and use it the most! This has led to RealVishy joining in as an aurora maintainer.
But before that m2 rewrote the build system so both of those are running really smoothly right now.
@tulilirockz has been ramping up this break, and has been consolidating and modularizing the universal blue components in the packages repo. This is a huge efficiency win since we can now centralize common components instead of copying them from image to image.
Right now the pain point with these two are the future of our Asus and Surface support, which is not in a good state right now. Additionally Broadcom wireless continues to be a plague on humanity. Help in these areas is appreciated!
We have had some interest in making CentOS-based builds since Stream10 was announced.
and @hanthor are working on a Bluefin LTS prototypeSpeaking of uCore, there’s not much to report. Builds keep happening as intended, and it’s mostly pretty boring over there, as intended. 
We’ve also been able to collaborate with HeliumOS, which is also CentOS based - this has led to some knowledge sharing across the board.
bootc’s submission into the CNCF is really making an impact on us as development continues to march forward. Features that we have needed are landing or being scoped to land throughout this next quarter. In many ways we’re getting exactly what we want and we can continue to become more efficient.
There’s not much to say here other than we’ll be working more closely with them as we provide feedback. Antheas has also been submitting pull requests to bootc over the year, so if you want to get involved, this is the time to step up!
Additionally we have been playing with bootc-image-builder: GitHub - osbuild/bootc-image-builder: A container for deploying bootable container images. - so far the results have been very promising. It’s missing a few things we need, like flatpak support, but there are open pull requests in flatpak itself that are being looked at.
This is exciting for us because the ISOs can go on a diet, but more importantly when we make a GitHub action out of this it’ll make it much easier for people making custom images to have ISOs with waaaaaaay less work.
Right now things are humming along. Most of the things we need are a matter of waiting for features to land upstream, such as the ISO builder, zstd:chunked support for more efficient update size, and consuming Fedora 42 and 43 as they come out next year.
A good number of the team will be attending SCaLE this year in March in Pasadena, California: Home | SCALE 22x - hope to see you there, I will be bringing dinosaur stickers!
Members of the team will also be at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in London, UK. I haven’t been to London in years, I’m really looking forward to this one!
And a quick easter egg to round it out, if you’ve enabled bluefin-cli, bazzite-cli, or aurora-cli you’ll have the atuin command enabled. Run atuin wrapped to get your CLI stats for the year! Flex with your friends!
With that, I hope everyone had a safe and happy holidays, and a happy new year!
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