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

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

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

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Repo Consolidation​

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

Config → Packages​

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

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

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

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

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

kernel-cache → akmods → main​

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

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

HWE base images building again​

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

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

Future Work​

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

Events​

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

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

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:

The Steam Deck has finally been surpassed — by a fork of Valve’s own experience​

An Asus ROG Ally X running Bazzite has all but replaced the Steam Deck in my life.

Growth​

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!

Project Status​

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.

• m2 and bsherman are threatening to consolidate our main repos, so stay tuned for that in 2025!

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!

Aurora and Bluefin​

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!

CentOS

We have had some interest in making CentOS-based builds since Stream10 was announced.

• Desktop: @tulilirockz and @hanthor are working on a Bluefin LTS prototype
• Server: @bsherman has kicked off ccos - a CentOS-based CoreOS-style bootc image designed to be a base for uCore.

Speaking 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 and bootc-image-builder

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.

2025​

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.

See you at SCaLE and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon​

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!

That’s a wrap!​

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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