39 posts tagged with "announcements"

Alright, here it is, Bluefin Server, this one actually boots. This is the base of the Bluefin Factory, the thing you'll build your homelab on. And in turn, your desktops or whatever you want. Kubernetes for the home.

An FSDK-based, image-based Linux server OS.**

To celebrate this milestone, enjoy the latest video, with some fresh lore!

Bluefin Server targets the same use-case space as Flatcar Container Linux, Kairos, Fedora CoreOS, and Talos, but is built from scratch with BuildStream 2 from freedesktop-sdk (FSDK 26.08) components and uutils coreutils.

It is designed to be installed and then managed entirely through the Kubestellar GUI. I'll be releasing point releases quickly over the next few days. After the install it will give you a web address, then you go to it on your computer. Then that's it, your perfect home server.

Except the dashboards are empty. The more people we have making these the better, including a ZFS one! This variant will have ZFS support so now's the time to jump onboard!

It is DDI first: the OS payload is a compressed XFS DDI filesystem image that is deployed by an offline, systemd-native installer.

Release status: Alpha​

Bluefin Server is currently in Alpha:

• Milestone status: Phase A (reproducible build path, uutils, k0s sysext, graph validation) is complete. Phase B (automated boot verification on lab cluster) is in progress.
• systemd-sysupdate should work, we're about to find out! configurations.
• Readiness roadmap: Track completed criteria and remaining gates toward 1.0 in docs/MVP_1_0_READINESS.md.

How this works​

• A/B root rollback — an MVP 1.0 gate: 50-root.transfer names root-a and root-b; the installer currently creates only root-a.
• DDI-first delivery — the installer embeds the OS payload as a data partition; no network is required at install time. This is basically Linux systemd style.
• Minimal, distroless OS image — no shell in the running rootfs by default IS what we are shooting for. We'll probably fail at this lol.
• systemd-native installer — systemd-sysinstall provides the interactive terminal UI and systemd-repart handles partitioning and block-copy DDI placement. Finally distro installers can all go die!
• Optional k0s as a systemd-sysext so the base image stays distroless. We started with k3s but I want to see how this one goes, stripped down for the home.

SSH ON: SSH is enabled for cluster boot tests and remote debugging. It is scheduled for removal once diagnostics move to serial logs or a guest agent. See docs/skills/factory-integration.md.

Quick start​

Bare metal sorely needed! However this runs on any Linux, feel free to fire up a VM and start designing that dashboard! Once we get home assistant and all the goodies it'll be amazing! Thanks for checking it out!

You need only podman and just. BuildStream runs inside the FSDK bst2 container, so BuildStream is not installed locally.

just validate              # resolve the element graph
just show-me-the-future    # end-to-end QEMU installer smoke test

See AGENTS.md for the full build command matrix, hard rules, and agent skill routing.

Contributing​

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the contributor checklist, Conventional Commit rules, and docs/skills/index.md for task-specific guidance.

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

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

Endpoint Details​

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

Available Tools​

Here's what's exposed:

Related Reading​

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

Participation

Human and automated contributions with current contributors.

Human and automation activity

Show the numbers

Human and automation activity data for August 2026 UTC (2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31)

Label	Human	Automation
Report period	258	283

Current contributor leaderboard

🏆 Hive Leaderboard

Hive Leaderboard: Community Heroes

Celebrating our top community builders across the Project Bluefin factory

#1

@castrojoMonth MVP

109Contributions

9Projects

commonbluefinbluefin-lts+6

Top Hero

#2

@ahmedadan5+ Merged PRs

35Contributions

3Projects

commonbluefindakota

High Velocity

#3

@kubestellar-hive5+ Merged PRs

27Contributions

7Projects

commonbluefindakota+4

High Velocity

RankContributorImpactProjectsMilestone

#04@hanthor24 PRscommonbluefinbluefin-lts+6High Velocity#05@Danathar20 PRsbluefindakotatestsuiteHigh Velocity#06@mrbobbytables13 PRsbluefindakotatestsuiteHigh Velocity#07@bketelsen11 PRsbluefinbluefin-ltstestsuite+1High Velocity#08@Siddhj22065 PRsactionsfinpilotHigh Velocity#09@joshyorko4 PRscommonbluefintestsuite+1Cross-Fleet#10@HuntedRaven73 PRscommonbluefin-ltsutahCross-Fleet#11@rapenne-s2 PRsdakota#12@Giklab1 PRcommon#13@kylerankin1 PRtestsuite#14@onlydole1 PRtestsuite#15@theMimolet1 PRcommon#16@tunix1 PRfinpilot

Release details remain on the canonical /changelogs surface.

Completed work​

• feat(motd): add uwelcome + update umotd by @​theMimolet in #815
• fix(brew): trust vendored taps so preinstalled casks actually install by @​ahmedadan in #1047
• fix(report): read the boot-time booted-image snapshot when bootc status fails by @​ahmedadan in #1030
• fix(report): read booted tag from bootc, not baked image-info by @​ahmedadan in #1020
• fix(brew): keep preinstall off login critical path by @​ahmedadan in #1006
• fix(brew-preinstall): journal-safe output capture, no /dev/stderr by @​ahmedadan in #998
• fix(brew): correct linuxbrew prefix spelling and preinstall tap ordering by @​ahmedadan in #997
• feat(brew): ship managed ChairLift integration by @​castrojo in #985
• fix(brew): handle cask lifecycle in brew-preinstall by @​HuntedRaven7 in #981
• feat(ujust): honor ACTION in toggle-updates for non-interactive use by @​hanthor in #966
• test: add BATS regression coverage for theming hook by @​kubestellar-hive in #926
• fix(fastfetch): exit cleanly when binary is unavailable by @​castrojo in #931
• test(docs): add check-skill-index regression tests by @​kubestellar-hive in #924
• fix(ujust): preserve report copy when optional files are absent by @​castrojo in #917
• fix(report): preserve external queue preferences by @​joshyorko in #936
• fix(ujust): bootstrap fzf for --choose by @​castrojo in #902
• fix(ci): stop validate failing on stale generated_at date by @​castrojo in #937
• test(docs): add skill validator coverage by @​kubestellar-hive in #911
• feat(brew): preinstall ChairLift with Bluefin maintainer config by @​castrojo in #853
• ci: make the advisory E2E signal mean something by @​castrojo in #914
• ci: stop running E2E on docs-only pushes by @​castrojo in #913
• fix(gnome): enable smoke-tested extensions by @​castrojo in #912
• docs: collapse issue forms to one and delete phantom label taxonomy by @​castrojo in #909
• fix(flatpak): correct Thunderbird Flatpak ID by @​Giklab in #906
• fix(build): checkpoint the rpmdb out of WAL mode at every stage commit by @​Danathar in #1153
• docs(ci): record Firefox failure after testsuite fix by @​Danathar in #1143
• docs(ci): record Testing Images build failing since 2026-08-12 (#995) by @​Danathar in #1136
• test(brew): assert the brew-preinstall payload, not just its trampoline by @​Danathar in #1135
• fix(framework): drop user-setup hook that installs a nonexistent brew formula by @​Danathar in #1132
• fix(lab-check): find the existing check run on busy commits by @​Danathar in #1100
• docs(ci): document :testing promotion blocker set for #989 by @​mrbobbytables in #1091
• docs(ci): document merge-queue GH006 race and stuck-promotion diagnosis by @​mrbobbytables in #1106
• docs(ci): document the :testing stream-tag leak triage path for #989 by @​mrbobbytables in #1096
• docs(ci): document that :testing can freeze for weeks, masking triage (#929) by @​mrbobbytables in #1095
• fix(framework): remove stale hid_sensor_hub karg from AMD Framework laptops by @​mrbobbytables in #1103
• ci: raise BATS coverage threshold from 30% to 45% by @​mrbobbytables in #1104
• docs(ci): explain the nested testsuite workflow refs by @​castrojo in #1077
• ci(lab-check): point the Checks-permission fix at the right screen by @​Danathar in #1079
• test(build): regression-guard missing IMPORTANT_PACKAGES entries (#965) by @​mrbobbytables in #1090
• docs(workflow): note Closes #NNN only fires on the default branch by @​mrbobbytables in #1092
• docs(ci): document stable-promotion blocker set for #929 by @​mrbobbytables in #1089
• ci(bonedigger): drop the remaining no-op triggers and dead permission by @​Danathar in #1085
• ci: gate stable promotion to Tuesday window by @​Danathar in #1076
• fix(ci): preserve builds after Renovate merges by @​joshyorko in #1111
• test(brew): assert the brew-preinstall delivery path ships in the image by @​Danathar in #1081
• docs(security): correct CVE-2026-33186 root cause — podman is a second carrier by @​Danathar in #1082
• test(framework): assert fw-charge-control.conf ships in the built image by @​Danathar in #1080
• ci: guard the testsuite workflow contract by @​Danathar in #1044
• docs(security): document the cosign signature-format requirement by @​hanthor in #1071
• ci: actually remove the mirrored validate status shim by @​castrojo in #1074
• ci: replace mirrored validate status with real check on merge queue by @​castrojo in #1072
• fix(packages): add fzf to base package manifest (#965) by @​hanthor in #1057
• docs(release): clarify e2e gates for stable promotion by @​Danathar in #1049
• ci(bonedigger): drop the no-op schedule trigger by @​hanthor in #1061
• test(framework): lock fw-charge-control.conf battery health fix by @​hanthor in #1060
• test(ci): lock ctx-build stage 1 context to its required inputs by @​hanthor in #1059
• ci(lab-check): surface actionable error when MergeRaptor token mint is denied by @​hanthor in #1058
• [quality] ci(unit-tests): enforce 30% BATS line coverage threshold by @​kubestellar-hive in #1037
• fix(ci): run base-branch guard on main-targeted PRs by @​castrojo in #1041
• [sec-check] fix: pr-validation.yml add permissions block (contents: read) by @​kubestellar-hive in #1038
• docs(security): document CVE-2026-33186 in buildah (no F44 fix available) by @​ahmedadan in #1018
• docs(ci): record MergeRaptor Checks write requirement for lab check by @​castrojo in #1010
• fix(ci): run gitlink check against github.sha by @​castrojo in #1034
• ci: restore managed testsuite v1 ref and stop Renovate re-pinning it by @​castrojo in #1012
• ci(bonedigger): drop the no-op pull_request trigger by @​castrojo in #1011
• docs(skills): record e2e gate triage and tag verification by @​castrojo in #1013
• fix(ci): propagate BATS failures by @​bketelsen in #1015
• fix(factory): extract merge-group status mirror by @​bketelsen in #1021
• fix(build): fully isolate Stage 2 and ISO contexts by @​bketelsen in #1020
• fix(renovate): consolidate repository config by @​bketelsen in #1017
• fix(framework): enable native battery charge control by @​bketelsen in #1019
• ci: document the :testing tag gate on the reusable-build caller by @​castrojo in #992
• docs(skills): note release input trust and worktree merge cleanup by @​castrojo in #998
• feat(ci): add BATS coverage reporting artifacts by @​castrojo in #911
• docs(skills): record CI gating and worktree failure modes by @​castrojo in #994
• docs(skills): adopt the factory skill front-matter contract by @​castrojo in #991
• chore: enforce isolated worktrees for feature work by @​castrojo in #980
• chore(release): remove legacy manifest changelog by @​bketelsen in #973
• fix(build): invalidate package layer for build file changes by @​castrojo in #964
• docs: add agent fast path and every-loop repair contract by @​castrojo in #984
• docs(workflow): replace placeholder bonedigger TODO with real tracking issue by @​castrojo in #982
• docs: sync agentic procedures with projectbluefin/common by @​castrojo in #979
• fix(image): include bootupd for bootc installs by @​castrojo in #962
• ci: verify common extension defaults by @​castrojo in #955
• ci: verify E2E health fixes by @​castrojo in #952
• ci: verify testsuite v1 E2E fixes by @​castrojo in #950
• ci: rerun E2E with testsuite v1 fixes by @​castrojo in #949
• chore: sync issue templates from common by @​castrojo in #946
• ci: retire skill-drift.yml (no-op stub) by @​castrojo in #944
• fix(ci): use managed testsuite v1 by @​castrojo in #941
• fix(ci): force GET method for gh api in nvidia manifest assembly by @​HuntedRaven7 in #530
• fix: install dnf5 so bluefin-lts-countme.service can run by @​hanthor in #502
• chore(release): remove legacy manifest changelog by @​bketelsen in #497
• fix(ci): unblock PR lint and the promotion release gate by @​hanthor in #501
• fix(ci): assemble signed multi-arch manifest for bluefin-lts-nvidia:testing by @​castrojo in #472
• ci(lab): publish PR results through MergeRaptor by @​castrojo in #456
• chore: sync issue templates from common by @​castrojo in #487
• ci: retire skill-drift.yml (no-op stub) by @​castrojo in #486
• test(dx): add unit tests for dx_distrobox_can_be_created (#501) by @​mrbobbytables in #755
• fix(installer): gate the LUKS assertion on the target, not a dead env var by @​Danathar in #754
• feat(dx): gate distrobox create/install/export on a cached image at runtime by @​Danathar in #753
• [sec-check] fix: declare top-level permissions: {} in build-kde-runner.yml build-runner.yml by @​kubestellar-hive in #750
• fix(smoke): preserve Firefox AT-SPI env for Flatpak exports by @​Danathar in #741
• feat(e2e): compose test software as a container layer instead of runtime install by @​hanthor in #744
• [sec-check] fix: pr-validate.yml add permissions block (contents: read) by @​kubestellar-hive in #738
• [sec-check] fix: unit-tests.yml add permissions block (contents: read) by @​kubestellar-hive in #739
• docs(skills): document design gate and verification requirements for #487 by @​hanthor in #747
• test(smoke): scope composefs capability check to Fedora-shipped caps by @​hanthor in #749
• docs(skills): link projectbluefin/lab#621 to distrobox image-cache gap #501 by @​hanthor in #748
• test(common): cover ujust toggle-updates via its non-interactive ACTION contract by @​hanthor in #746
• fix(shared): refuse dbus autolaunch and snapshot session state on readiness failure by @​castrojo in #737
• [quality] add new coverage for untested areas (epic #705) by @​kubestellar-hive in #733
• test(common): make Dakota ujust chooser and report coverage non-vacuous by @​castrojo in #735
• feat(common): add non-interactive devmode coverage via bctl by @​onlydole in #724
• fix(shared): survive GDM restart in GNOME shell readiness gate by @​castrojo in #727
• fix(e2e): enforce the @hardware_blocked tag in CI and at runtime by @​castrojo in #726
• docs: reconcile factory-model governance contradictions and correct the ghost-lab merge gate by @​castrojo in #732
• test(scripts): assert KDE installer behaviour instead of its source text by @​castrojo in #730
• fix(ci): generate suite-map coverage snapshot instead of hand-editing by @​castrojo in #728
• fix(smoke): restore Bluefin release gate reliability by @​castrojo in #731
• feat(installer): add post-boot assertions for UEFI, Flatpak exclusion, and LUKS cmdline by @​kylerankin in #697
• docs(behave): trim SKILL.md under the 500-line cap by @​castrojo in #729
• fix(smoke): restore Bluefin release gate reliability by @​joshyorko in #691
• test(scripts): add unit tests for validate_docs.py by @​kubestellar-hive in #675
• test(software): add CLI-driven Flatpak per-app permission coverage by @​castrojo in #710
• test(common): add Dakota ujust report and chooser regression coverage by @​castrojo in #699
• test: cover orca, input-methods and xwayland smoke step logic by @​castrojo in #709
• docs: onboard testsuite to the common factory model and remove the PR cap by @​castrojo in #694
• test: cover GNOME shell readiness helper by @​kubestellar-hive in #672
• feat(developer): add pending bctl.feature scenarios ahead of CI unmask by @​mrbobbytables in #722
• docs: record OOBE first-boot investigation by @​bketelsen in #715
• fix(software): initialize shared SSH context with coverage by @​bketelsen in #721
• docs(skills): capture SSH context contract and unit-test stub pitfalls by @​castrojo in #723
• build(dashboard): migrate to @tailwindcss/vite, drop @astrojs/tailwind by @​castrojo in #716
• test(scripts): add installer contract coverage for KDE webdriver by @​kubestellar-hive in #676
• test(flatcar): implement Ignition and update-disable lifecycle scenarios by @​castrojo in #711
• docs: add update-cadence research informed by testsuite validation by @​hanthor in #713
• fix(smoke): enable Firefox AT-SPI accessibility and stop the filler false pass by @​castrojo in #692
• test(dx): add distrobox create/install/export scenarios behind @pending by @​castrojo in #720
• fix(software): set SSH context for shared ssh_steps in the suite by @​castrojo in #718
• fix(e2e): enforce non-runnable tag filters by @​bketelsen in #717
• docs(behave): record ujust toggle-updates non-interactive blocker (#499) by @​castrojo in #714
• docs: add issue templates for the agent intake path by @​castrojo in #700
• docs: codify .worktrees/ isolation policy and agent worktree hygiene by @​castrojo in #695
• fix(ci): count job-summary scenarios explicitly instead of by subtraction by @​castrojo in #698
• chore: ignore extracted image roots and local e2e diagnostics by @​castrojo in #708
• fix(ci): count @pending scenarios as stubs in coverage badges by @​castrojo in #701
• test: resolve overdue quarantine debt and reclassify infra-blocked scenarios by @​castrojo in #693
• fix(e2e): preserve smoke health capacity by @​castrojo in #684
• fix(e2e): preserve image extension defaults by @​castrojo in #683
• fix(smoke): preserve monitor layout when scaling by @​castrojo in #682
• ci: retire skill-drift.yml (no-op stub) by @​castrojo in #681
• fix(ci): render e2e heredoc delimiter correctly by @​castrojo in #680
• fix(ci): restore e2e workflow heredoc indentation by @​castrojo in #678
• [scanner] fix: publish PXE boot artifacts by @​kubestellar-hive in #23
• docs: add SECURITY.md vulnerability disclosure policy by @​castrojo in #17
• fix(promote): derive squash branch name from inputs everywhere by @​Siddhj2206 in #423
• fix(sign-and-publish): pin cosign to legacy .sig format for podman/bootc by @​hanthor in #420
• [sec-check] fix: pin renovate version, declare top-level permissions in reusable-sync-branches by @​kubestellar-hive in #417
• [sec-check] fix: actionlint.yml declare least-privilege permissions by @​kubestellar-hive in #415
• [quality] add regression coverage for _section_footer in render_pr_body by @​kubestellar-hive in #412
• fix(check-token-health): support GitHub App installation tokens by @​kubestellar-hive in #418
• fix(ci): use the self-repository prefix in renovate-automerge by @​castrojo in #406
• fix(build): stop leaking the stream tag when publish_stream_tag=false by @​castrojo in #405
• fix(renovate): stop managing first-party projectbluefin/actions refs by @​castrojo in #401
• ci(actions): make mergeraptor auto-merge actually fire on main by @​castrojo in #400
• ci(actions): migrate internal composition to self-repository syntax by @​castrojo in #392
• fix(ci): use secrets.MERGERAPTOR_APP_ID and client-id in factory workflows by @​castrojo in #354
• [quality] add CLI regression tests for consumer-contract script by @​kubestellar-hive in #378
• fix(actions): resolve bundled cosign installer from self repository by @​castrojo in #376
• [quality] add BATS coverage for sign-and-publish SBOM path generation by @​kubestellar-hive in #371
• test(scripts): cover promotion body scripts by @​kubestellar-hive in #369
• [quality] add entrypoint regression coverage by @​kubestellar-hive in #366
• [quality] add regression tests for render_card placeholder fallback by @​kubestellar-hive in #367
• fix(tests): prioritize scripts/ over .github/actions copies in sys.path by @​kubestellar-hive in #370
• [quality] expand sign-and-publish BATS coverage for cache and attach failure paths by @​kubestellar-hive in #372
• fix(report): apply external queue preferences by @​joshyorko in #34
• docs: add Future of Bluefin video post by @​castrojo in #1037
• ci: add just check pre-commit gate by @​castrojo in #1035
• docs: add /dakota variant page by @​castrojo in #1036
• chore: remove stale content and dead dashboard code by @​castrojo in #1034
• refactor: remove dead code and replace hand-rolled helpers with stdlib by @​castrojo in #1033
• docs(blog): add post on Bazzite killing the gamer kernel by @​castrojo in #1032
• docs: add "The Wolves Are Coming" blog post with Bluesky embed by @​castrojo in #1030
• fix(cards): source the Dakota release card from the SBOM cache by @​castrojo in #1029
• fix(factory): attribute Hive to KubeStellar, not an individual by @​castrojo in #1028
• fix(countme): count devices the way ublue-os/countme counts them by @​castrojo in #1027
• fix(factory): correct branding terminology, relabel countme, drop non-owned toolbox images by @​castrojo in #1026
• feat(factory): two-level navigation and first-party chart parity by @​castrojo in #1025
• docs(blog): publish Dakota Alpha 5 by @​castrojo in #1020
• docs(downloads): promote Dakota alpha5 by @​castrojo in #1019
• feat(release-cards): add deterministic release-context renderer and action by @​castrojo in #1018
• fix(containerfile): break dnf.conf hardlink before config-manager setopt by @​tunix in #258
• [scanner] docs: document Renovate alert permission by @​kubestellar-hive in #276
• docs: align signing, branch-model, and promotion docs with current behavior by @​Siddhj2206 in #273
• feat(ci): enable keyless image signing by default by @​Siddhj2206 in #271
• fix(ci): enable native overlay for faster layer commits by @​Siddhj2206 in #266
• fix(ci): grant packages:read to promotion reusable caller by @​Siddhj2206 in #259
• ci: add two-branch main/stable workflow with factory promotion reusable by @​castrojo in #240
• fix: prevent clean-stage.sh glob failure on empty /var/cache by @​castrojo in #243
• fix(ci): harden workflow security — pin renovate, add clean.yml permissions by @​castrojo in #239
• feat(factory): onboard Hive issue workflow by @​castrojo in #218
• fix(ci): simplify rechunking enablement by @​bketelsen in #220
• fix(build): stop copying default just recipes from common OCI by @​hanthor in #227
• Move to agentic workflows and skills by @​hanthor in #226
• fix(packages): install gum for default ujust recipes by @​castrojo in #221
• fix: changed up how the common repo is used by @​HuntedRaven7 in #6
• Add Utah GNOME desktop and live ISO bring-up by @​hanthor in #5
• Build Utah on Hummingbird with the GNOME 51 stack, all four flavors by @​hanthor in #1
• Add GNOME 51 GDM to the package factory by @​hanthor in #12
• Let cosign see the registry login the publish step already made by @​hanthor in #3
• Import the package factory: GNOME 51 for Hummingbird, published as an OCI image by @​hanthor in #1

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• fix(ujust): preserve newlines in confirm/report/verify by @​rapenne-s in #1331
• fix(image): create plugdev and nintendo_switch groups for udev rules by @​ahmedadan in #1424
• fix(ci): sync-next merges small next tweaks instead of restoring files by @​ahmedadan in #1419
• fix(packages): ship fastfetch binary expected by common wrapper by @​ahmedadan in #1417
• [scanner] fix: include dmidecode for bios-info by @​kubestellar-hive in #1391
• fix(fastfetch): show real stream tag via boot-time booted-image sync by @​ahmedadan in #1393
• fix(image): unbreak fresh-ISO post-install (uwelcome, brew, devmode) by @​ahmedadan in #1388
• ci(build): queue runs FIFO with stale-run gate, detach source tracker by @​ahmedadan in #1384
• chore(kernel): align testing on Linux 7.1.8 by @​ahmedadan in #1379
• chore(kernel): move next kernels to stable 7.2 by @​ahmedadan in #1378
• perf(image): compose the host toolchain once by @​ahmedadan in #1377
• fix(chunkah): preserve export mtimes by @​ahmedadan in #1376
• refactor(agent): reduce eager context by @​ahmedadan in #1362
• ci(aarch64): stop queueing x86 builds behind ARM in the CAS group by @​ahmedadan in #1359
• fix(ci): tolerate owned paths absent from next during sync by @​ahmedadan in #1357
• fix(elements): complete the fdsdk 26.08 port across all variants by @​ahmedadan in #1356
• ci(next): build next images on every content push by @​ahmedadan in #1354
• fix(elements): stage sandbox shell explicitly for fdsdk 26.08 by @​ahmedadan in #1353
• ci(next): derive fdsdk pin and patches from tracked gnome-build-meta by @​ahmedadan in #1352
• ci(next): add patches/linux-ogc to the sync overlay by @​ahmedadan in #1346
• ci(next): replace merge sync from main with overlay sync-next workflow by @​ahmedadan in #1345
• fix(gaming): repin LuaJIT after upstream deleted the ROLLING tag by @​ahmedadan in #1344
• ci(release): disable broken GNOME 50 smoke gate on stable promotion by @​ahmedadan in #1342
• fix(brew): bump common for prefix fix, ship make, guard spelling by @​ahmedadan in #1341
• feat(bluefin): add brlaser CUPS driver by @​rapenne-s in #1329
• ci(e2e): correct installer-suite gating docs and add a dispatch recipe by @​Danathar in #1323
• docs(e2e-ci): spec fisherman installer post-boot assertions, correct status by @​mrbobbytables in #1330
• ci(release): schedule Dakota stable promotions Mon/Wed/Fri by @​Danathar in #1322
• test: add avatar-audit to catch #353-class dinosaur-avatar regressions by @​Danathar in #1308
• fix: restore Bluefin dinosaur avatars in GNOME user-account picker by @​mrbobbytables in #1302
• ci: run validate on PRs targeting main by @​castrojo in #1318
• [quality] add Python regression tests for workflow and filemap scripts by @​kubestellar-hive in #1276
• ci(e2e): expose installer suite on workflow_dispatch (fisherman post-boot assertions) by @​hanthor in #1316
• docs(skills): record /dev/stdin regression and why CI cannot catch it by @​castrojo in #1303
• fix(elements): stop using /dev/stdin for inline file writes by @​castrojo in #1298
• fix(audio): unfold pcsp install command; YAML folding emptied artifact by @​ahmedadan in #1297
• fix(audio): disable PC-speaker WirePlumber sink by @​castrojo in #1257
• fix(gaming): pin Steam .deb to versioned pool URL; CDN swaps content by @​ahmedadan in #1279
• fix(gaming): ship 32-bit GL/Vulkan drivers and re-enable Steam UI GPU by @​ahmedadan in #1278
• feat(nvidia): update to 610.57.04 and ship its missing data files by @​ahmedadan in #1277
• fix(bluefin): support ydotool on CMake 4 by @​ahmedadan in #1267
• feat(bluefin): add ydotool input automation by @​castrojo in #1258
• chore: sync issue templates from common by @​castrojo in #1264
• ci: retire skill-drift.yml (no-op stub) by @​castrojo in #1263
• fix(ci): delete .github/workflows/lab-check.yml by @​castrojo in #1260
• fix(zswap): disable zram via integration command, overlap lost by @​ahmedadan in #1262

Contributors​

Sources​

• github-activity: available (2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31): source
• github-lanes: available (2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31): source
• github-releases: available (2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31): source
• github-releases: available (2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31): source
• github-releases: available (2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31): source
• github-releases: available (2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31): source
• github-releases: available (2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31): source
• countme: available (2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31): source
• homebrew: available (2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31): source
• flathub: unavailable — Flathub statistics could not be read. (2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31): source

Participation

Human and automated contributions with current contributors.

Human and automation activity

Show the numbers

Human and automation activity data for July 2026 UTC (2026-07-01 to 2026-07-31)

Label	Human	Automation
Report period	126	427

Current contributor leaderboard

🏆 Hive Leaderboard

Hive Leaderboard: Community Heroes

Celebrating our top community builders across the Project Bluefin factory

#1

@castrojoMonth MVP

104Contributions

9Projects

commonbluefinbluefin-lts+6

Top Hero

#2

@ahmedadan5+ Merged PRs

12Contributions

2Projects

dakotaactions

High Velocity

#3

@Siddhj2206Community Hero

2Contributions

1Projects

finpilot

RankContributorImpactProjectsMilestone

#04@clubanderson1 PRbluefin-lts#05@daegalus1 PRdakota#06@elephantum1 PRcommon#07@hanthor1 PRdakota#08@KiKaraage1 PRcommon#09@theMimolet1 PRcommon#10@Xarianne1 PRdakota#11@znmeb1 PRdocumentation

Release details remain on the canonical /changelogs surface.

Completed work​

• feat(brew): re-enable ChairLift bootc staging via system-integration split by @​castrojo in #892
• feat: add brewfile for common fonts by @​theMimolet in #891
• fix(framework): remove obsolete hid_sensor_hub karg by @​castrojo in #896
• feat(ujust): streamline report submission by @​castrojo in #895
• docs(skills): fix skill-drift staleness, split lab-testing, build real skill catalog by @​castrojo in #890
• feat(ujust): confirm existing issue reports by @​castrojo in #842
• feat(bazaar): add Freelens to curated developer tools by @​elephantum in #804
• feat(brew): add rancher-cli & rancher-machine to k8s-tools by @​KiKaraage in #809
• fix(gnome): disable blur-my-shell popup blur by default by @​castrojo in #813
• fix(bluefin): set image and video MIME defaults to shipped GNOME apps by @​castrojo in #824
• fix(containerfile): use per-file raw fetches for game-devices-udev by @​castrojo in #825
• fix(ci): make merge queue lane build-only in build.yml by @​castrojo in #826
• chore(deps): update golang:alpine docker digest to 9097beb by @​castrojo in #829
• chore(deps): update actions/cache action to v6.1.0 by @​castrojo in #830
• chore(deps): update homebrew/actions digest to 841d750 by @​castrojo in #831
• ci: add docs-hygiene pre-commit checks by @​castrojo in #838
• fix(ujust): select LTS changelog repository by @​castrojo in #840
• test: cover OEM brew hook by @​castrojo in #841
• docs: document clanker-queue label and human-advisor repo model by @​castrojo in #880
• ci(execute-release): enable release e2e gate for stable promotion by @​castrojo in #837
• fix(hardware): mitigate Framework Core Ultra ucsi_acpi s2idle resume failures by @​castrojo in #910
• fix(sleep): disable psmouse wakeup on HP ZBook Ultra G1a + add missing 20-framework.sh hook by @​castrojo in #912
• refactor(build): rewrite kernel-akmods orchestration in Python by @​castrojo in #914
• fix(ci): mirror validate to merge-group queue head by @​castrojo in #760
• fix(release): use build SBOM artifact for stable notes by @​castrojo in #764
• feat(iso): embed stable Titanoboa contract by @​castrojo in #828
• fix(qa): include Wayland test dependencies by @​castrojo in #830
• docs(qa): clarify ponytail package contract by @​castrojo in #832
• docs: overhaul agent documentation by @​castrojo in #862
• test: cover GNOME extension build stages by @​castrojo in #864
• test: cover changelog generation by @​castrojo in #866
• test: cover image validation gate by @​castrojo in #868
• ci(lab): publish PR results through MergeRaptor by @​castrojo in #902
• fix(kernel): default LTS to HWE/CoreOS stable by @​castrojo in #405
• fix(ci): publish multi-architecture testing manifests by @​castrojo in #433
• [quality] add BATS unit tests for 20-packages.sh and 40-services.sh by @​clubanderson in #441
• fix(ci): assemble and sign multi-arch manifest list for testing stream by @​castrojo in #452
• fix(ci): unindent heredoc delimiters in e2e.yml by @​castrojo in #669
• feat(smoke): add comprehensive sudo-rs e2e test suite by @​castrojo in #632
• fix(common): repair immutable SSH Python quoting by @​castrojo in #617
• docs: document uupd suppression contract blocker by @​castrojo in #665
• fix(kde): make AT-SPI WebDriver transport reachable (D2) by @​castrojo in #651
• feat(smoke): add fractional scaling coverage by @​castrojo in #609
• docs(skills): record sparse-checkout and PR-trigger blind-spot traps by @​castrojo in #663
• docs(skills): make the merge-gate guidance evergreen by @​castrojo in #664
• fix(smoke): accept Showtime as OOTB video player in MIME allowlist by @​castrojo in #598
• feat(smoke): add GNOME Online Accounts panel scenarios by @​castrojo in #600
• feat(smoke): add XWayland on-demand coverage by @​castrojo in #599
• feat(common): add screenshot portal scenarios by @​castrojo in #601
• fix(common): repair 5 false-negative scenarios blocking the release gate by @​castrojo in #602
• feat(smoke): add input method and keyboard layout coverage by @​castrojo in #603
• feat(smoke): add Orca screen reader coverage by @​castrojo in #605
• fix(smoke): rework GNOME 50 overview and lock scenarios for headless by @​castrojo in #606
• feat(smoke): add printing stack coverage by @​castrojo in #607
• feat(common): add ScreenCast portal plumbing scenarios by @​castrojo in #608
• feat(ci): publish per-suite coverage badges to gh-pages by @​castrojo in #611
• docs: harden agent doc tree and fix stale internal references by @​castrojo in #613
• ci: add reusable ISO validation workflow by @​castrojo in #619
• fix(common): quote SSH embedded Python commands by @​castrojo in #633
• docs: remove artificial open PR cap by @​castrojo in #634
• docs: update projectbluefin lab references by @​castrojo in #635
• docs(skills): enforce read-only access to all KDE namespaces by @​castrojo in #639
• feat(kde): implement KDE session preconditions by @​castrojo in #641
• ci(kde): add KDE host-side runner image and skill by @​castrojo in #640
• feat(kde): add KDE D-Bus control plane helpers and tests by @​castrojo in #642
• feat(kde): add W3C WebDriver wrapper and retry policy for AT-SPI by @​castrojo in #643
• feat(kde): add kde_faillog failure artifact bundle by @​castrojo in #644
• ci(kde): wire KDE suites into reusable e2e workflow by @​castrojo in #645
• test(kde): add kde-smoke informational suite (13 scenarios) by @​castrojo in #647
• docs: document KDE Plasma coverage in README and CONTRIBUTING by @​castrojo in #648
• fix(kde): add ssh and git to the KDE runner image by @​castrojo in #652
• fix(kde): repair kde-smoke helper API and remove silent skip by @​castrojo in #653
• fix(kde): support Plasma Login Manager and correct precondition lifecycle by @​castrojo in #654
• docs(ci): mark the ghost-lab merge gate as unavailable and document the real gate by @​castrojo in #656
• refactor(kde): use the shared is_kde_image predicate in kde-smoke by @​castrojo in #657
• fix(dashboard): pin astro to v5 so publish-to-pages npm ci resolves by @​castrojo in #658
• docs(ci): re-point the ghost-lab gate note at lab#479 after #474 merged broken by @​castrojo in #660
• docs: correct post-merge counts and stale KDE/CI claims by @​castrojo in #661
• docs: finalize documentation overhaul and add doc-quality gates by @​castrojo in #10
• docs: full documentation audit for Bluefin Server by @​castrojo in #9
• fix(runner): accept naive overlay diff on Ubuntu kernels by @​ahmedadan in #360
• fix(runner): allow Podman updates with native overlay by @​ahmedadan in #351
• fix(runner): prevent stale nested overlay mounts by @​ahmedadan in #350
• fix(automerge): mint app token so queue checks dispatch by @​ahmedadan in #348
• fix(create-release): avoid runtime playwright install for release cards by @​castrojo in #315
• fix(release): call create-release via @v1 in reusable-release by @​castrojo in #316
• fix(release): fallback when SBOM artifact is missing by @​castrojo in #317
• feat(release): add testsuite e2e gate before stable promotion by @​castrojo in #319
• fix(test): drop stale tests for removed render_notes inventory helpers by @​castrojo in #320
• docs: authorize clanker-queue merges by @​castrojo in #342
• docs(ci): enforce existing discussion token contract by @​castrojo in #1015
• fix(ci): authenticate cross-repo discussion creation by @​castrojo in #1014
• fix(ci): authenticate discussion backfill workflow by @​castrojo in #1013
• fix: create Giscus discussions for published blog posts by @​castrojo in #1012
• docs: add Bluefin sausage factory draft by @​castrojo in #1011
• Update downloads-testing.mdx by @​znmeb in #1010
• docs: publish agentic development post by @​castrojo in #1008
• docs: add agentic development blog draft by @​castrojo in #1007
• docs: publish Five Years of Bluefin article by @​castrojo in #1004
• fix(countme): deploy worker with zone route by @​castrojo in #1001
• docs(blog): publish Bluefin LTS/GDX migration post by @​castrojo in #998
• test(iso): add artifact-backed stable installer E2E by @​castrojo in #68
• fix(brew): rsync @ublue-os/brew files and clarify Homebrew setup docs (#131) by @​Siddhj2206 in #138
• feat(build): add NVIDIA example and clarify script activation by @​Siddhj2206 in #164

Dakota (GNOME OS Prototype)​

• fix: restore Bluefin dinosaur avatars in GNOME user-account picker by @​castrojo in #1241
• docs(skills): document verification path for testsuite-owned E2E failures by @​castrojo in #1240
• fix(nvidia): preserve Mesa GBM on hybrid GPUs by @​ahmedadan in #1239
• fix(changelog): guard glow dependency and fix release-tag regex by @​Xarianne in #1231
• fix(ci): enqueue with app token so merge groups dispatch checks by @​ahmedadan in #1233
• fix(publish): pass push digests downstream instead of re-reading GHCR tags by @​ahmedadan in #1232
• chore(ci): delete .github/workflows/actionadon.yml by @​castrojo in #1229
• feat(zswap): transition from zram to optimized zswap configuration by @​castrojo in #1131
• fix(ci): align scorecard push trigger with default branch by @​castrojo in #1138
• fix(ci): align standard builds with upstream caches by @​ahmedadan in #1160
• fix(ci): wait for GHCR image visibility by @​castrojo in #1180
• fix(ci): publish dakota:aarch64 + add aarch64 boot gate (Asahi M0) by @​hanthor in #1190
• fix(bluefin): make optional common profile removal idempotent by @​castrojo in #1197
• fix(build): set GOROOT for remote Go builds by @​castrojo in #1198
• docs(skills): add merge-queue sequential queuing lesson by @​castrojo in #1203
• fix(bluefin): disable binary stripping on sudo-rs to preserve setuid bit by @​castrojo in #1209
• ci: publish lab results through MergeRaptor checks by @​castrojo in #1210
• feat(gaming): add gaming variant and adopt the OGC kernel for all variants by @​ahmedadan in #1212
• ci: make CAS warm-up pull non-fatal and fit a seeded cache by @​ahmedadan in #1215
• ci: fit the artifact push timeout to full image uploads by @​ahmedadan in #1216
• fix(kernel): enable ATH12K across variants by @​daegalus in #1226
• ci(build): route x86 variants through BuildBox remote execution by @​ahmedadan in #1227

Contributors​

Sources​

• github-activity: available (2026-07-01 to 2026-07-31): source
• github-lanes: available (2026-07-01 to 2026-07-31): source
• github-releases: available (2026-07-01 to 2026-07-31): source
• github-releases: available (2026-07-01 to 2026-07-31): source
• github-releases: available (2026-07-01 to 2026-07-31): source
• github-releases: available (2026-07-01 to 2026-07-31): source
• github-releases: available (2026-07-01 to 2026-07-31): source
• countme: available (2026-07-01 to 2026-07-31): source
• homebrew: available (2026-07-01 to 2026-07-31): source
• flathub: unavailable — Flathub statistics could not be read. (2026-07-01 to 2026-07-31): source

First let's celebrate. It's five years of Bluefin and Universal Blue! Thanks for riding with us. Starting later this year you can join Bluefin, Rafael, and the rest of cloud native as Bluefin comes to your hands.

We're proud to announce Seven Days to the Wolves, a comic and musical series set in an alternate future where Maintainer-Guardians fight alongside users for survival. We hope to expand this into the world's first cloud-native musical to be performed live at KubeCon (We have goals!).

In the meantime, enjoy this multi-hour metal maelstrom of death and destruction. #stopjohnbazzite

BLUEFIN: SEVEN DAYS TO THE WOLVES​

Will you be ready when they come?

Parts of the story will be dropping over the next few years and will star some of your favorite OSS heroes!

The Great Migration​

We're in the process to moving to the factory to build Bluefin. This process is opt in and will be a transparent to most of you. The TLDR is you'll see your image name change from gchr.io/ublue-os/bluefin to projectbluefin/bluefin.

It's midsummer so not a bunch of changes on the images. We'll work on this in 2H2026 so for now there's no need to worry, just chill and enjoy your Linux!

Bluefin​

Let's start with Bluefin.

The new Bluefin is a tad smaller. We're dropping the dedicated DX images, everything we support is in brew now and is operating system agnostic. We aim to ship the most popular developer environments in cloud native and hope you give us feedback on things. ujust devmode is the CLI and remains unchanged.

Don't expect many changes here other than moving to sealed images at some point. projectbluefin/bluefin:next is in place if anyone wants to start working on that.

Anyone who is interested in driving forward with the Fedora base images is encouraged to work here. This is also the first time this Bluefin has an aarch64 version!

• Bluefin Repo

Bluefin LTS​

Bluefin LTS has also moved over to the factory. Bluefin GDX users have been moved here already. Nothing to report, though we turned off the ISO downloads to the old versions so people don't get confused. Once everything is set here we'll relaunch new ISOs.

Not much to say here, I'm mostly here for the fuzzy brown guy. Bluefin GDX has been retired as an image, the proper Nvidia tools are on the nvidia images themselves, and most of what was "GDX" is now in userspace with brew and containers, enjoy!

• Bluefin LTS repo

Dakota​

Dakota is our latest and most sophisticated raptor, featuring the cutting edge of Linux desktop development. It's built from GNOME OS using BuildStream.

Most of the work I've been involved with this cycle has been working on this. (And failing lol). Ahmed and Jordan just got the builds online and we'll probably do another alpha later this month. Things are really great here and I spent some time with the GNOME OS and systemd folks in Berlin this summer to ensure we're on the right track.

James and I worked on the ISOs this cycle, and we finally have one unified ISO that covers Nvidia/AMD/Intel on one ISO. Needless to say this is my raptor of choice and I'm hoping to play with more builds this weekend. Once the builders are up I'll start work on Bluefin's "game mode", offering the very best of OpenGamingCollective's tech.

• Dakota repo

Bluefin and The Forbidden Factory​

The "factory" is a culmination of everything we've been building. I guess it'd be the equivalent of "Universal Blue 4.0". It's simultaneously the most important change in Bluefin's history, and the most invisible! Also spoiler alert it's the second comic!

It's a combination of the server OS, FSDK containers, Kubernetes, Argo, BuildStream with Buildbarn, and everything you need to build Bluefin "on the spot". Basically, instead of "the OS" consider the entire toolchain "the product". Unlike the old methods, this new factory is all about leveraging clankers and putting them to work effectively via hive.

The Factory is a result over about a year of convergence with many groups. We've assembled GNOME 50 desktop tests and have started work on KDE. We test everything in this thing. Each test runs through a full suite. Checks everything, network, apps, and other functionality. We can finally automatically test everything and then post a screenshot at the end of the test.

And not just Bluefin. We're throwing everything at this thing. Aurora, Bazzite, Fedora Silverblue, Zirconium, GNOME OS. Every time there's a published image we run a battery of tests on it. We are not yet doing visual recognition - this is to catch visual regressions. Right now we're just hoping someone on a testing build is paying attention. It's encouraging to see members from bootc and the UAPI Group working in this space. The idea is to have a completely manageable, reproducible, and sovereign system to run everything, not just a few desktop images.

The Factory dashboard is one of the best ways to see whether an image is actually ready to ship. This is meant to expose more broken things before they reach you. Check out the Hummingbird public meeting this Thursday, where I hope to present on the components in more detail!

I'll also be doing a complete factory tour and explaining our experiences with agentic development. I look forward to moving faster here! I spent a good deal of time on the charts:

The dashboard is live, so those numbers will move after this post ships. The Factory dashboard and its underlying data are the sources for this snapshot. We'll continue to add information here over time!

Freedesktop SDK Containers (Alpha)​

Every factory needs purpose-built containers. Since the goal is a fully offline, self-contained build system, we built our own — carved from freedesktop-sdk components using the distroless playbook. 90% of "distroless" is deleting all the docs and not providing shells. We're able to do this quite easily with BuildStream

The current images range from a ~40 MB distroless base (glibc, coreutils, CA certs, tzdata) up through distroless Python, Buildah, and Skopeo variants. I also made an omnibus lab-runner with kubectl and a few other tools in one convenient package and a shell for ops work. Two prototypes are worth calling out:

Homebrew nspawn container — a Homebrew developer environment packaged as a systemd-nspawn machine image rather than an OCI image. The systemd folks think this approach is worth investigating, and this is the result of some beer drinking in Berlin. I haven't tried it yet but if you're one of those distrobox-adjacent folks it might be interesting for you.

All images are keyless-signed with Sigstore Cosign and include BuildStream-native SBOMs. Tags track the FSDK point release. The actions are easy to copy — fork and go, no key wrangling required. I am finding the base images to be quite good, and in general I find the fsdk containers to be a nice alternative to Chainguard and other distroless images. For us the benefits are simple, these are the same libraries as the operating system so it doesn't cost us much to make these.

• fsdk-containers repository
• Release v25.08.13
• Discussion thread

Bluefin Server (Alpha)​

Bluefin Server v25.08.13 targets the same space as Flatcar Container Linux, Fedora CoreOS, and Talos — but is built from scratch with BuildStream 2 from freedesktop-sdk components. This one was kind of an accident. I needed a server OS for the new homelab and there wasn't an easy way to get a newer kernel in Flatcar. Since we have BuildStream, making this was pretty straightforward. This is basically the Dakota setup without the desktop.

The OS payload is a compressed XFS DDI filesystem deployed by an offline, systemd-native installer. This is using systemd's new interactive installer. Burn it to disk and run through it and then you're done.

Key properties:

• DDI image-based updates with atomic rollbacks via systemd-sysupdate
• Minimal, distroless rootfs — going to shoot for no shell by default with a GUI but we'll see how far we get on that
• k3s for kubernetes available as a systemd-sysext
• GPG-verified SHA256SUMS, BuildStream-native SBOMs, keyless signing throughout, all that crap
• Currently on the GNOME Desktop kernel but I am shopping around, since we're using UKIs swapping out kernels is easy

Alpha 1 is live. Beta comes after the 26.08 FSDK bump next month. KubeStellar dashboard integration is in progress but not ready yet.

• Bluefin Server page
• Server repository
• Alpha 1 release
• Discussion thread

Testsuite: Full Desktop and Image Coverage​

Bluefin's automated test suite is the quality gate between an image build and promotion. It runs headless Wayland desktop sessions in QEMU on standard GitHub Actions runners and can be supplemented with any hardware.

What it covers​

Here's what we've got working on so far. Shoutout to Christian Schaller at Red Hat for guidance:

• smoke — core GNOME, Settings, MIME handlers, accessibility, desktop identity, Orca, input methods, keyboard layouts, XWayland, ScreenCast, screenshot portals, Online Accounts, and printing
• common — portable SSH health checks for Flatpak, portals, polkit, shell behavior, immutability, and system health
• vanilla-gnome — upstream GNOME OS baseline
• developer — Homebrew and Ptyxis on developer variants
• dx — VS Code, distrobox, JupyterLab, and mise
• software — Bazaar app-store behavior and Flatpak CLI health
• lifecycle — bootc upgrade, rollback, and migration
• security — Cosign signature verification
• hardware — udev rules and emulated peripherals
• bazzite — Bazzite-specific extensions
• flatcar — Flatcar OS boot and lifecycle

The smoke and common suites are designed to run against any GNOME bootc image so feel free to take it for a spin.

How it works​

• Behave runs the Gherkin scenarios and step bindings
• qecore-headless bootstraps the Wayland and D-Bus session
• Dogtail drives the accessibility tree through AT-SPI
• gnome-ponytail-daemon provides coordinate injection for Wayland
• GNOME Shell Eval handles the GNOME 50+ top-bar fallback
• Shared SSH steps assert system state from outside the VM
• Dynamic suite sharding distributes large smoke and common runs
• Coverage counts and screenshots publish to the Live Build Health Dashboard

We'll continue to expand it as some tests are better than others.

Reusable integration​

Image projects can call the reusable e2e.yml workflow or the gnome-e2e@v1 composite action with an OCI image, selected suites, a test ref, optional native-app skipping, Flatpak screenshot IDs, zstd:chunked coverage, VM memory, CPU count, and disk cleanup. The suite also provides reusable ISO validation for downstream projects. None of this has been tested outside of myself so if you're diving in get ready to get dirty!

Local development uses Python 3.14 with behave, qecore, and dogtail; full GUI runs require a live Wayland and AT-SPI session. The repository includes Argo and KubeVirt plumbing, a coverage dashboard, Codecov reporting, Flatpak caching, and the container images used by the test jobs. (The whole enchilada!)

Successful run · 4 / 0 / 4Failed run · 3 / 1 / 4

Does this mean I'll get less bugs?​

Yes and no. Most of these aren't blocking yet. A few of them catch issues you've reported in old-bluefin. Some of them give us capabilities we've never had, like mass upgrade testing.

If we had perfect Linux tests no one would ship because the entire desktop stack is a tyre fire lol. However with better, more automated testing we can get to where we need to be!

Suncatcher​

Bonus wallpaper from Natalia and Delphic!

The Lab, Actions, and Finpilot​

projectbluefin/lab is the "everyday" part of the lab. It contains everything I am running in the homelab to test Bluefin, etc. It runs image and ISO tests in KubeVirt, handles graphical checks on the lab hardware, and collects screenshots and results that can be attached to a build. That lets us validate the thing people actually install, not just the container build that produced it. These tests are additive and listed on the website.

We're adding these as gates, which means when a contributor merges something it will land in a testing branch. Then as part of the release processes all of these tests run. The lab repo is for people who want to add their homelabs to help with Bluefin. It's messy in there, but if you know K8s, help is always wanted!

The intent is for these to be driven by GitOps, which means no access control or people connecting to remote servers, your agent either opportunistically finds work or is assigned work from hive. Lab repo

projectbluefin/actions is the shared build layer behind the factory. Repositories can use the same workflows for bootc image builds, multi-architecture publishing, signing, SBOMs, and release metadata instead of each project inventing its own supply-chain plumbing. This is the sort of infrastructure that is invisible when it works, but it is what makes the rest of the factory repeatable. These actions are all new and heavily centralized, so if you want your custom image to use the latest tech, check out this repo.

finpilot is still there and now has a new maintainer! This hasn't been integrated into the factory but it's working pretty great. finpilot repository

Merch​

The Bluefin store has a couple of especially good ways to rep Bluefin. All of the proceeds go towards artwork, and the kid's shirt is priced the lowest we could make it.

Dakotaraptor Forever

Celebrate the stable release of GNOME OS in the official Dakotaraptor shirt.

Shop the shirt - from $23

Bluefin Official Shirt

First among equals, the leader of the pack, in a soft everyday tee.

Shop the shirt - from $25.50

Bluefin Women's Rawr

Stabby stabby stabby - a relaxed-fit everyday tee with a little more raptor energy.

Shop the shirt - $16

What's next​

The 26.08 FSDK release is next month and Dakota's looking to move to beta so there's plenty to do. In the meantime enjoy your day and rock out to some Wolves metal! Then we cycle into Fall.

As always thanks for joining us and keep on rocking! Feel free to ask questions, we covered a ton!

Hello guardians,

We're starting the transition away from ublue-os/bluefin and bluefin-lts to projectbluefin. This is part of the move to factory.projectbluefin.io. I'll have more details over the next few days. It's our fifth birthday on July 21st so in a way we're kinda relaunching Bluefin. I hope to post updates between now and then so that we can party after.

tldr: GNOME 50, newer kernel support, cleaner OCI layers, NVIDIA as a proper separate image, no more -dx/-gdx images, all userspace baby! You don't do anything but hang out.

LTS and GDX users, this one's for you, the rest of you will come later. GDX's builds have been struggling so you're going first. Thanks to those who tested; we found real issues that have helped the project.

Upgrade Instructions​

• There are none, this will happen automatically.
• If your Linux Lizard Brain starts to want to jump out of your skull please follow the manual directions to upgrade

ublue-os/bluefin-lts → projectbluefin/bluefin-lts​

The biggest change is image consolidation, DX/GDX images have been merged:

• "Bluefin DX" will be moving off of images and into userspace with ujust devmode, if you're missing anything please file an issue.
• "Bluefin GDX" will also be moving to userspace with "ujust aimode", but this doesn't exist yet.
• aarch/amd64 all across the board, even ARM/Nvidia hell yeah! (It's Ampere time!)

We're also adding hooks for the IDEs/tools in Bazaar to highlight some of these. So instead of images these will just be modes you can add on. One of the reasons we were struggling with GDX is the GitHub runners didn't have enough space/resources for something so large.

CUDA can now just be consumed via containers - the ujust aimode will look just like the developer mode but we'll have options for pytorch, etc. If you're on an AMD machine you might have seen the preview in bctl

Wow that's ugly! Now you see why we hid it, but you get the idea, start thinking of bundles. bctl is short for bluefin control but probably won't expose it, centralized just is just too good.

OCI Things​

These images use chunka to create smaller layers, and LTS was already svelte. This brings us in full upstream alignment with bootc.

• Signing: We moved from keys to Keyless OIDC (Fulcio/Rekor), ensuring that my shame will live on in the past. This is nice for custom image builders too, no more pub key in your root and pasting in github secrets to get going. Savage. Not fully implemented yet, but still working on it.
• SBOM: Each image has full SBOMs etc, I'm still working on these, but both of these steps are modelled after proper usage according to upstream. The docs, website, and ujust changelog will source from these if they aren't already.

The end state is any version of anything that you see on the website should be what's on the latest image and not manually updated.

Kernels​

No one was using vanilla Bluefin LTS (who wants to use 6.12 lol) so we've consolidated everything onto Fedora's kernels

Other​

• GNOME is now 50 across the board
• :testing branches will land all code, if you're a nerd hop onto these
• These images are a huge improvement, especially with our testing suite (more info later), however you will for sure find cosmetic issues since we tend to ignore those until the end lol.
• Please use ujust report, even for minor issues!

Migration Schedule​

Feel free to ask questions!

Source Discussion​

GitHub Discussion #4802

Check out this announcement about Azure Container Linux GA. I won't be talking about Azure Linux 4.0. That's the "distro".

Let's talk about Flatcar Linux instead. This is an OS that's stripped down, designed for you to drop what you want on it. It is in the CNCF and a perfect fit for us. Every raptor needs a nest. Afterall, linux is linux. Our homelabs should be badass.

The Problem with Installing Flatcar (and CoreOS)​

Both Flatcar Container Linux and Fedora CoreOS use Ignition for first-boot provisioning — a powerful declarative system that requires you to write a complete JSON (or Butane YAML) config file before you can install. There is no interactive configuration during install it's pretty nerdy. Basically for all intents and purposes, uninstallable for enthusiasts. For experienced Kubernetes operators this always-in-pain life is fine, but for homelab users and folks new to container-native Linux, it's annoying. And our mission is to help OSS developers which means, we cover all aspects. And from reading the room, I think a lot more people are going to want to self host. And so are organizations. This is why it has to be cloud native, you gotta have the server ↔ client goodness to compete.

It would be madness to create our own installer, so Knuckle just translates that stuff into something the Flatcar installer understands and then that's it. It's the real image. And we added some nice conveniences like choosing systexts. That's it. A pure vanilla brick wth a fancy ignition translator. What are you going to build with yours? Here's what we've been working on:

Enter Knuckle​

Knuckle is a TUI "installer" for Flatcar Container Linux. It gives you an Ubuntu-server-style guided wizard that generates a valid Ignition config and passes it to flatcar-install — no hand-crafted JSON required. Knuckle is "basically Azure Container Linux (Home Edition)." but it's the upstream unbranded one with not many strong opinions.

We even wired in the sysexts and whatnot.

Note: Knuckle is pre-alpha software. It will wipe the target disk. UEFI-only; BIOS/legacy boot is not supported.

Why Flatcar?​

Flatcar is an awesome OS, here's a list. I like it because it offers different stability channels, making it easy to canary test on clusters, etc. But it's also a great building block to build your server on:

• Read-only system partition — dm-verity protected; eliminates a whole class of vulnerabilities
• Automatic atomic updates — using the same mechanism as Google ChromeOS; atomic rollbacks supported, this is actually built with Gentoo upstream!
• System Extensions (sysexts) — Extend your server with the Flatcar Bakery
• Ignition provisioning — declarative first-boot config, shared format with Fedora CoreOS
• No package manager — user workloads run as containers (Docker, Kubernetes) or sysexts; the OS itself never drifts
• CNCF governance — vendor-neutral, community-maintained, built to outlast any single company's interest
• Production-proven at scale: Adobe (18,000+ nodes), STACKIT (20,000+ nodes, their customers' most popular OS choice), and many more

People sometimes ask why we don't make a Server Edition. It's because we don't care about distributions it's all Kubernetes. :) And even if it fails at that we can prove people want it. But the nice thing about flatcar is it comes empty and is great for lots of projects. For me it's the last OS you install on your new server build. Problem solved, I have jellyfin to set up let's go!

Knuckle is feature complete, we won't be adding whizbang features, it's vanilla only and will only ever support vanilla. However ...

Bluefin Server?​

Since this is all well designed cloud-native stuff: "upstream + opinion = product".

• k8s configured for single node operation, easy to expand (you just set up another one)
• Single webui to schedule whatever you want, say jellyfin, all the self-hosted stuff of your dreams
• All that dashboard stuff you want to show off to your friends with
• kubevirt out of the box, import your old VMs and redeploy on your new system.
• Out of the box gitops so you can operate the entire cluster from version control
• No CLI, No ssh, or kubectl access at all - entire cluster is API or MCP driven, magical tailscale integration
• Standard industry gear, Kubernetes, Argo Workflows, k8s-mcp-server, bring your own workload

Now THAT is an opinion! I have a version of this running in my lab now, and we'll keep iterating, so start with ideas. It's still early days but I'm sure many of you will start prototyping with Flatcar, sky's the limit!

Get Knuckle​

Download the installer ISOs from the GitHub Releases page:

SHA256 checksums and cosign signatures are published alongside each release.

• SSH in as the core user with the key you configured
• The OS updates itself automatically on the schedule you chose during install
• Add software via sysexts (/etc/extensions/), containers (Docker/Kubernetes), or distrobox
• Reprovision by re-running knuckle — no in-place mutation

Discussions​

• GitHub: projectbluefin/knuckle
• Releases and changelog
• Headless config reference
• Security posture
• Flatcar on Discord

Screenshots are bug reports, social posts and memes. The faster you can capture the thing, draw an arrow at the thing and send it, the better.

Bluefin is rolling out an upgraded screenshot experience with Gradia and Gradia Capture. The Gradia Flatpak is built in and ready out of the box for new users (Existing users might need to install it in the Bazaar App Store, we'll figure out how to automate it, send issues!) and Gradia Capture hooks into GNOME's screenshot flow so the path from capture to annotation feels native.

Capture, mark up, send it​

Gradia gives you the finishing tools that screenshots usually need before they are useful: text, arrows, censoring, padding and quick upload. Gradia Capture brings that into the screenshot moment with annotations and OCR text recognition, optionally you can hand it off to Gradia for further editing.

Gradia and Gradia Capture are built by Alexander Vanhee. If this saves you time, please send some support upstream. Supporting builders like Alexander helps keep that momentum going and helps modern Linux desktop like Bluefin keep shipping great apps out of the box.

Discussion Thread​

The Final Shape is here...

Ok look we made another Bluefin. I know what you're thinking (especially you McPhail!). We got rid of Bluefin GTS and now the team decided to make another one. How many of these things are there, it's like a string of Jurassic Park sequels. First let's level set. The product is Bluefin. That's the default Fedora one.

Your favorite murder chicken is safe. We don't expect normal people to know what Dakota is anymore than we expect them to know what a Koenigsegg is. I can't even pronounce that name! We remain a project designed for cloud native practicioners, so we offer the very best tech the desktop has to offer. And there's good tech in BuildStream and GNOME OS, there's a compelling set of options here. This one just goes all in. I would not call yesterday's Fedora Hummingbird announcement a coincidence.

And now for the mysterious new raptor who keeps making waves:

Dakota is our newest "distroless" raptor. It's built from source and directly published as a bootc image, no traditional package manager involved at all.

Wait, this is just Gentoo.

Chris Aniszczyk, CTO Linux Foundation and former Gentoo contributor

Dakota features a more aggressive push away from legacy technologies, pure image mode only. Just the best desktop we can ship, direct from GNOME and Freedesktop SDK right to you. We remove the concept of "the Linux distribution" being a platform and the top primitive, the Freedesktop SDK libraries and Flathub are our platform. No compromises. Dakotaraptor is daily driveable and has quickly exceeded all expectations.

• GNOME 50, Linux 6.19.x, Mesa 26.x, and Freedesktop SDK 25.08.11 libraries
• systemd-boot, UKIs, UEFI only, compiled for the x86-64-v3 architecture level
• Oxidized coreutils - same sudo-rs and uutils setup as Ubuntu - thanks to Canonical for funding this important work
• Mostly feature complete, it's a full Bluefin
• Custom Command Menu — Dakota features a newly refined menu. We hope to bring this menu to other Bluefins over time.
• Ghostty as the default terminal

Since Dakota is brand new there's no users to transition when we switch something. We are switching to Ghostty as the default terminal. This has always been a fan favorite so we're starting with it fresh here.

Last I talked to Christian Hergert we discussed having ptyxis just use a libghostty backend. This is not only totally possible but would be the ideal situation! Someone please make this.

Changes since Alpha 1​

Thanks everyone who helped test, you've done a great job!

• LUKS encryption works on install
• Full Nvidia Image
  • nvidia-container-toolkit
• Efficient layering - this image uses the upstream chunkah tool for more efficient downloads. We expect efficient delta downloads to land sometime this summer, but the infrastructure is in place now
• Linux 7.x kernel will land once some of the bootc issues with 7.x are resolved
• Beta target: Probably a month or so; GA target: Fall 2026
• Want to help? GNOME OS upstream is always looking for help: os.gnome.org

Gotchas​

• Open issues
• ISO-specific issues

And the big one. We cannot guarantee that this installation will be the final layout. GNOME OS is transitioning to systemd-homed eventually. That will mean either a manual transition or reinstallation. As such we likely will not go GA until this transition completes. We expect a lazy summer beta.

What now? It has been an absolute pleasure working with BuildStream over the past few weeks. The team has committed to the hardware necessary to make builds faster and the local development experience has been the best we've ever had. It has become clear and obvious to me that the combination of BuildStream and bootc brings a level of automation and developer experience that will be tough to beat.

Here's the hot take: If you look at all three raptors, all else being equal, the best development experience and best infrastructure always wins in this space. We have over a decade of cloud native industry experience to prove it, Kubernetes runs the world for a reason. This workflow is now in the Linux desktop space. I firmly believe that buildstream/bootc combined with our gitops approach will deliver a fantastic product.

Thanks to Brian Ketelsen and James Reilly for the Tuna installer. Yes they called it the Tuna installer. lol.

Thanks to Jordan Petridis, Valentin David, Adrian Vovk, Felicitas Pojtinger, and the GNOME OS team for their expertise and advisory roles - we couldn't do this without you!

Bluefin's Download Diet: Introducing Chunkah​

Yes, they called the upstream rechunker "Chunkah". A rechunker is a thing we use to take an image and reslice it into more chunks. ghcr.io/projectbluefin/dakota is sliced into 120 layers instead of one big unresumable download for updates. It also takes content of the image into account. The idea being if you have components that update often, they would be group together in layers, and things that don't get updated often are group together.

That means if your computer doesn't need that layer for that update, it doesn't get downloaded. Additionally partial zstd:chunked pulls will complement the layering. This will mean that your computer will also only download the parts of the layers it needs. When combined this finally brings efficient downloads to the bootc ecosystem. Initial findings are looking good.

These alpha images are rechunked by Chunkah, but unified storage does not work on the composefs backend to bootc yet so it's not done.

Why tho? A Call to Action​

After all that praise of an alpha product of all things, some may misconstrue this as abandonment of the other Bluefins or a lack of focus. Now let's talk about how we got here.

The Shoulders of Giants​

Bluefin's mission is sustainaiblity, that means people. Bluefin LTS is there so we have a reason to bring people like Carl George and Shaun McCance into our ecosystem. Without Bluefin LTS Red Hat would not have as much of a financial incentive to help us out. We drive bootc forward, they invest in the software and sell it as part of their product. It's the Circle of Life, but with Linux. Red Hat did afterall, give us millions of dollars of engineering for free.

Same thing with Fedora, it's our line to that center of gravity. And we have a new approach with Fedora Hummingbird, attracting more people. It's not about the software, it's about the ecosystems we make along the way. Sounds like the kind of tripe the Linux Foundation loves to peddle! Dakotaraptor has one foot in the bootc world and one in the UAPI world.

The CNCF Community via bootc, composefs, podman, and oras. The UAPI community bringing in the Linux userspace. Sounds great, let's go. Someone from Amutable please save me a shirt!

The Race to Sustainability​

Colin Walters describes communities like this as "Centers of Gravity" - and we're all in one gigantic galaxy, everyone pulling and pushing around different ecosystems. All made possible by open source tools, amazing.

The state of Dakota Alpha 2 is impressive considering how few people it took to make it. For us our job is to make Bluefin as thin of a config layer as we can, our opinions are mostly in userspace anyway. It should be noted that this way is always cheapest. It is always cheaper to fix things upstream closer to the source. It's called "shifting left", yes there's a term for it lol. Welcome to cloud native.

It's here​

There are those that will say that GNOME OS and KDE Linux make no sense, that's what distributions are supposed to do. I push back against that. 4% marketshare in 30 years is not a success story. And the ones that are growing are designed to be used as reliable clients and not package manglers.

Timothée Ravier once said, people don't want distributions they want experiences. And these operating systems will prove it. No one will ever give you a better KDE experience than KDE. That wasn't true in the past because distributing software over the internet was hard. Now not only is it much easier, these organizations can start greenfield with the state of the art rather than trying to adapt old techniques to the new world.

Best infrastructure wins. Fastest and cheapest development wins.

If you're into GNOME work on GNOME OS, if you're on KDE work on KDE Linux. If you like Fedora work on that. Make a friend, donate to an app developer.

This is of course, all from our point of view.

GNOME OS would prefer we ship a DDI image. And some would prefer we don't exist at all and just sit as a systemd-sysext in GNOME OS. Sure, someone make one, we have buildstream, would you like fries with that? And with so many RPM-based people in the bootc world I am sure there are people who prefer that Bluefin just focus on being a Fedora with batteries included and nothing else.

But we are a forcing function - the dinosaurs are there to remind us that only the best survive the harshest ecosystems. This is especially true in the resourced starved Linux desktop ecosystem. We will continue to push. Some software is not going to make it. See you in the trenches, thanks!

Merch​

Celebrate the release of a new top predator with our stylish "Dakotaraptor Forever" shirt.

Dakotaraptor Forever$23.00

Buy →

Bluefin Women's Rawr$16.00

Buy →

Universal Blue Polo Shirt$60.50

Buy →

Check out the rest on store.projectbluefin.io →

Download​

Dakotaraptor Alpha 2

Alpha testing ISO — not for production use. 📖 Read the documentation.

dakota-live-alpha2.iso

AMDIntel

📥 Download ISO🧲 Torrent🔐 Verify

dakota-nvidia-live-alpha2.iso

Nvidia

📥 Download ISO🧲 Torrent🔐 Verify

The Resonant Assembly​

One last group of people to thank. These community members participated in GitHub Discussions over the last six months. Asking questions, sharing tips, helping newcomers, and keeping the conversation going is just as valuable as code. Thank you for your help, it's important!

Filing Issues​

• Bluefin issues
• Dakota issues
• Dakota ISO issues

Discussion Thread​

Hey, you know who is good at making "distroless images"? Distros.

• Scott McCarty, Challenger of The Final Shape

It seems Fedora Hummingbird has been revealed. Of course Red Hat built this, modern infra demands modern images. All they had to do was put a kernel in there. So they did. It's awesome that this will be done in Fedora!

• Red Hat's announcement

I had heard the rumors. But it wasn't until I put two and two together and realized that Red Hat had quietly hired two Universal Blue core maintainers. They will be on the team building this. In the open, along with everybody else. This will take them some time to cook, there is a ton of work ahead. But it's closer than you think. I was able to cobble together a prototype in a day. Most of what you're about to see was grabbing the Fedora RPMs and and smelting it together. But it worked. It booted just fine.

This is also the reason why we're not doing the stable->testing->next plan. We'll likely do more one off testing branches, but work on the sealed images and Hummingbird will attract the right kind of nerds to make this interesting. I think it's cool that they're putting this in Fedora. You have the evolution of the tried and true way + a continuous integrated option that can be the prototype for a greenfield Silverblue and Kinoite.

This does not exist (yet)​

Well, I got what I wanted, a CoreOS style base image to have a true "CoreOS Desktop". So is Fedora rolling or stable? Yes.

I hope some of you step up and accept's Scott's challenge, we have an opportunity to do something brand new, chances like this don't come along often! A place for a cloud native in Fedora, I can't wait to see what Legends rise.

Discussion Thread​