15 posts tagged with "community"

A follow up to The Future of Bluefin - Time to be Honest.

Alright everyone we've heard the feedback. You'd like to press X to pay your respects and get to work. Start the Q+A please!

Earlier this month Ahmed Adan and the rest of the Dakota team worked to bring the Open Gaming Collective kernel as an option for Bluefin's new "Gaming Mode". These kernels are explicitly designed to ship greg k-h's kernel and only ship patches that have a path upstream.

Here's some context:

• ghcr.io/projectbluefin/dakota-gaming:testing (and stable)

• ghcr.io/projectbluefin/dakota-nvidia-gaming:testing (and stable)

• Gardiner Bryant's Coverage

• Bazzite Announcement

Jorge Castro 🇵🇷 🦖@castrojo.bsky.social

Three years ago today. Nova they won't let us down, I promise.

Aug 17, 2026, 3:18 AMView on Bluesky

Is AI good or bad for open source? This is 58 minutes of me explaining what I've learned on this.

If you're here for the hot take: Are we really all on the same side? There are two worlds in Linux. What reddit/masto/youtube thinks "Linux" is. And then how Linux actually is.

Our value to our users is that we give you Linux as designed by the professionals. The flex is leveraging the collective knowledge of the community. New users have been led to believe that shipping three-year-old kernels and old software is the right way to consume Linux. Good luck with that. When it comes to my Linux, we listen to Lennart. We do listen to GNOME developers. Linux is about choice. We choose a well-designed system and thank the UNIX gods every day that we don't have to deal with that stuff.

We choose not to let people dictate to us how to use our computers. The science is out. The experts have spoken. I've been fortunate to have access to Greg K-H during his time, and we spent a long time discussing how this affects our communities. And he's right. The damn things are finding bugs. And I'm tired of Linux's bullshit. And I mean that in a loving manner. 90% of this crap is passing a 0 or 1 to some silly argument because Asus hates you.

We've got new territory to explore and we're moving quickly. My lesson from six months of AI is "Seven Days to the Wolves". Where will we be when they come? I've been doing this job a long time and it took me fifty-eight minutes of Puerto Rican mansplaining and a cloud-native symphonic metal musical to explain it. LOL.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Michael Tunnell to discuss Aurora, Bazzite, Bluefin, cloud-native Linux desktops, and the future of the project.

Check out TuxDigital and This Week in Linux.

Discussions​

Flatpak support in Brewfiles is here! You can now manage your Flatpak applications alongside your Homebrew formulae, casks, and other dependencies in a single Brewfile. This is thanks to the amazing work by Ahmed Adan (Donate), who worked with upstream to land this feature.

What's New​

Homebrew Bundle now supports Flatpak packages on Linux. This means you can declare your Flatpak applications in your Brewfile and have them installed automatically with brew bundle.

Note from Jorge: I haven't played with this feature yet but announcing it so we can get feedback right away.

Basic Usage​

Add Flatpak packages to your Brewfile using the flatpak directive:

# Brewfile
brew "neovim"
flatpak "com.spotify.Client"
flatpak "com.visualstudio.code"

Then run:

brew bundle

Remote Support​

Homebrew Bundle supports three ways to interact with Flatpak remotes:

Default Remote (Flathub)​

For packages from Flathub (the default), just specify the app ID. Most of us will use it this way:

flatpak "com.spotify.Client"

URL Remote​

For packages from other repositories, specify the remote URL:

flatpak "org.godotengine.Godot", remote: "https://dl.flathub.org/beta-repo/"

Named Remote with URL​

For shared remotes that you want to reuse across multiple packages:

flatpak "org.godotengine.Godot", remote: "flathub-beta", url: "https://dl.flathub.org/beta-repo/"
flatpak "io.github.dvlv.boxbuddyrs", remote: "flathub-beta"

Commands​

All the standard brew bundle commands work with Flatpak:

• brew bundle - Install Flatpak packages from your Brewfile
• brew bundle dump - Export your installed Flatpak packages to a Brewfile
• brew bundle cleanup - Remove Flatpak packages not in your Brewfile
• brew bundle check - Verify all Flatpak packages are installed
• brew bundle list --flatpak - List Flatpak packages in your Brewfile

Check out the brew bundle documentation for more information.

Dump Options​

# Include Flatpak packages when dumping (default on Linux)
brew bundle dump

# Exclude Flatpak packages
brew bundle dump --no-flatpak

# List only Flatpak packages
brew bundle list --flatpak

Why This Matters for Bluefin​

This feature allows Bluefin users to maintain a single Brewfile that manages:

• Command-line and GUI applications in one file
• Lightweight gitops between all of your machines
• Paves the wave for better Homebrew/Flatpak integration

The huge community benefit is the shareability of a list-o-files. You can give your friend the hookup, and in fact many of Bluefin's "features" are just us shipping our own Brewfiles. For you experts out there this likely just simplifies something you probably already have. And for those of you just starting your command line spec tree it's a nice milestone to hit: "I can get a new install up and running in 10 minutes". There's lots of ways to do this, but this is an easy one. 😄

Woo! We feel that this is a nice complement to devcontainers, providing even more flexibility to your workflows!

How does it work in practice?​

You're going to have to tell me, I am on holiday in the German countryside, but this feature is super exciting and I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback!

Refer to the Homebrew Bundle documentation for more!

References​

• Pull Request: Add Flatpak support to brew bundle
• Issue: Feature Request - Add Flatpak support to Brewfile

Also Check Out​

Speaking about "Easiest way to get a clean install in 10 minutes", SaveDesktop is the nice GUI way to do this. You'll always find it in Bluefin's Curated section in the Bazaar app store. (Tell your friends!)

Discussion​

Greetings guardians!

A few minor updates today, you'll receive these updates either today or tomorrow depending on the build you're on. Our first is some updates to our usage of just. Just is a task runner that we use to ship community aliases. Our justfiles are ancient, some going back to the beginning of the project. We are consolidating most parts of what you call "Bluefin" into a common repository. These are all mostly scripts, there's nothing distribution specific about them.

We wanted to centralize this because keeping Bluefin and Bluefin LTS configs in sync is too problematic. In this manner we can make the Bluefin parts easily plop onto any image no matter what the image is.

It also means we cleaned out some broken stuff, and are down to just 34 just recipes, which makes all of this sustainable, especially since we're sharing the maintenance with Aurora. All the recipes now include confirmation dialogs and have been refined. I am glad we got this done because this part of Bluefin was really starting to show its age! Thanks to @tullilirockz for working on this! Thanks to @hanthor for implementing it in Bluefin LTS! Run ujust or ujust --choose to get started!

Bold Brew and Brewfiles​

We now have a nice way for the community to contribute to Bluefin's Brewfiles.

We workshopped some ideas on how to make this nicer for users. We approached bold-brew with the idea of presenting Brewfiles to users in a dedicated view. Vito was very accomodating and implemented the idea, kudos to him! Now let me show you how it works:

ujust bbrew is the entry point, we will generate a little menu for you for every Brewfile in Bluefin. So if we add more they just show up here. Then after you choose one bbrew will open up showing you that Brewfile. You can then select and choose what you want to install, or hit Ctrl-A to grab everything.

Bold Brew is to Homebrew what Bazaar is to Flathub​

This is awesome because we can now curate app bundles of CLI tools to users. We're starting off with AI tools, k8s tools, and monospace fonts. Feel free to send PRs to these Brewfiles, since users can pick and choose we can ship the tools you depend on the most. You'll also notice some color improvements in bbrew, make sure you check out the repo and give them a star!

More Cloud Mumbo Jumbo​

And lastly, we now have ujust cncf, which will show you all of the projects that are part of the CNCF. Many of you work with these tools every day, the hope is to show you all of the cool things you can play with in cloud native!

More Consistent Bluefin​

Ultimately this consolidation of all of our config will lead to better Bluefins and has been a primary source of parity issues between Bluefin and Bluefin LTS. Bluefin continutes to actively shrink over time!

We still have work to do, like the motd, bling, and all that other stuff but we'll keep you up to date!

Discussion​

Guardians, today Bluefin GTS switched its base from Fedora 41 to Fedora 42. The gathering of raptors has begun. In a two weeks Bluefin (aka bluefin:stable) releases on Fedora 43 and we will start the cycle all over again!

Looking for Fedora 43? That's here too in bluefin:latest, and will roll out to bluefin:stable users in 2 weeks. It's tough to write two of these, so we'll likely just move to spring/autumn announcements and whenever major things land. When bluefin:stable upgrades I will post it as an addenum in the discussion thread for this post.

Introduction​

As it ends up F43 will be coming to bluefin:stable while we're in Atlanta, GA, for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, come say hello! As a bootc reference architecture we tend to align with the release cadence of other projects. This usually means that I'm on the road when there's a Bluefin release happening, so we do status reports like this depending on where we are in the world at the time, and to ensure transparency. It's also our chance to gather with attendees and get feedback on how we can make Bluefin better and gather feedback.

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

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

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

What is Bluefin?​​

Bluefin is an operating system for your computer. It is designed to be installed on a device upgrade for the life of the hardware – we accomplish this by sharing the maintenance and care of our systems together as a community. It is designed to be as “zero touch” as possible by providing a curated GNOME experience.

Bluefin GTS (aka bluefin:gts) is our standard release, designed to be one cycle behind the most current Fedora release. This one's been in the oven for about six months and is ready to go. In a few weeks the bluefin:stable branch will move on to Fedora 43. If you're brand new you can use the website to pick the right image or select from the grid below:

Welcome to Bluefin​

This unidentified Dromeasaur is by Dr. Natalia Jagielska, a world renowned expert paleontologist and paleoartist! We reached out to work with her on bringing her artwork and style to Bluefin, and she said yes! This rendition will be revealed in November, or you can just manually pick it in the wallpaper chooser.

I am so stoked about this, an actual scientist! We're retconning that this is just Bluefin enjoying a nice day at the lake. We have two more wallpapers from her coming soon. I have come to really appreciate the world of flying reptiles. They are terrifying.

Natalia's artwork was vectorized and remastered by Delphic Melody, please consider donating so that the collaboration can continue!

Major Changes​​

There are a few major changes from a Bluefin perspective that we've been looking forward to:

Installation Experience​​

• The Anaconda web-ui installer is now the default installer, dramatically improving the experience. We say goodbye to the old GTK Anaconda installer.
• We'll be automatically refreshing all the Bluefin ISOs once a month to ensure the installation media is fresh.

Introducing Bazaar​

Bazaar makes its debut in Bluefin GTS! All Bluefins are now just using the Bazaar flatpak. You're in for a treat:

It's been super awesome seeing Bazaar move from a random project we found on r/gnome to what is effectively now the premier app store experience for FlatHub and Linux. You can help out tremendously by sponsoring the author.

This is also a major milestone for Bluefin since we've effectively done our part for the GNOME and FlatHub ecosystems and can now consider application installation a solved problem, we can introduce new things into Bluefin as a flatpak to begin with and move us away from distribution specific formats.

I am finding more applications now than I ever have. It's also a milestone for all Linuxes since flatpak's upcoming release gives us the flexibility to do this in a proper way with full lifecycle management. We can now be more flexible with the applications we can ship mid-cycle by plopping a file in /etc/preinstall.d. Those of you making custom images will really take advantage of this!

Shoutout to Sebastian Wick for this work in Flatpak and working on the next release of this cool tech!

Homebrew​

Speaking of packages, we've been doing more work engaging with Homebrew developers, check out this interview I did with Workbrew talking about our hopes and dreams:

Let us know if you're interested in working on Homebrew for Linux, we have opened a homebrew tap so that we can interate on bringing cool new things to you. A huge shoutout goes to Yulian Kuncheff and Ahmed Adan for spearheading this effort, please consider donating!

Fonts​

The fonts have been a disaster for a long time, we're finally ripping the bandaid off and removing a bunch of fonts from the image. For you command line nerds you can install any of the fonts listed in Homebrew or use a tool like Embellish to install more fonts.

If you're in developer mode you can bring the monospace fonts back with ujust bluefin-fonts.

Tailscale​

We've dropped the GNOME Quick Settings extension for tailscale in favor of the upstream system tray implementation. For more information, check the docs, this requires manual set up.

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

The tailscale experience is still not where it needs to be, but now that Tailscale has started work on an official system tray implementation we expect this to solidify over the next few upstream releases.

ujust commands returning​

After a hiatus we've finally refactored the Homebrew management in Bluefin. We're adding back some convenience commands:

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

Removal Notices​​

Extinction is a natural part of life. After a deprecation cycle the following images are now removed:

• Nvidia Closed Images: Due to Nvidia's software support changes we can no longer support the older closed modules for Nvidia cards. Not many people are using these, either migrate to the nvidia-open images or move to a stock image to use the built in kernel drivers.
• Bluefin HWE Images: Not many people were using these, they have also been removed.

Repository Changes​

As usual most of the changes we do in GitHub to deliver Bluefin and not so much in the image itself. Major parts of the Bluefin repository have been cleaned up to align with the improvements and lessons learned from building Bluefin LTS earlier in the year. This has been the bulk of the work in the past few weeks.

Bluefin has significantly been simplified, now would be a great time to contribute as we've brought the repository up to the state of more modern bootc projects like Bluefin LTS.

• bluefin:gts and bluefin:stable will be publishing on Tuesdays from now on instead of Saturdays. Publishing on Saturday nights is an artifact of pre-automation "reserved time" for testing before a weekly release. This matches the same release schedule as Bluefin LTS.

More Information​​

Bluefin is a deinonychus, and may snap at you occasionally. Four year olds can get feisty of so there might be issues that you discover that we haven't seen before. Filing issues is always appreciated.

• Bluefin Documentation
• Universal Blue

We also accept donations to sponsor the infrastructure and artwork.

Helping FlatHub​

Sometimes starting in open source can be a real barrier if you don't know where to start. Don't have the skills to do cloud native things yet? Here's a good way to help out FlatHub. Flatpaks rely on what we call "runtimes" to ensure that the application has the dependencies it needs to run. Do a flatpak list to check them out:

Flatpak Tracker is a site we made that will check all of the applications we ship in Bluefin and see which runtimes need to be updated. We label them by image, here's the the list of applications that need to be updated.

This is important work because we want applications to be updated to the latest runtimes for security reasons. As it turns out, many of these applications have OPEN PULL REQUESTS already with people updating the runtime, you just need to find the app, run the updated version by following the instructions, and then report back to the Flatpak maintainer that the new app is working great (or broken!). Since GNOME 49 just released, there's plenty to do, so feel free to dive in and get started! Also remember, this work helps all of FlatHub, we're explictly sending new volunteers to help upstream.

Find your favorite app and see if there's a test build available for a new runtime. And if you have the skills to port applications to new runtimes, now is the time to flex. 😄

store.projectbluefin.io​

Check out store.projectbluefin.io and pick up some dino merch. Thanks to John Johnson for ensuring our coffee mug game is up to snuff:

Is that it?​​

Nothing makes ops people happier than uneventful things.

Today is really like any other, we just updated a few tags, you always have the option to go to any version we support at any time. Wether you like the chill vibe of bluefin:gts or the refined aggresiveness of bluefin:stable , the raptor abides.

Here's the current lay of the land:

NOTE: The stable and stable-daily branches will move to F43 in two weeks.

Desktop DevOps folks wanted!​​

Bluefin is an active predator and is constantly hungry. You can help keep Bluefin healthy by becoming a contributor! We are an open source project and accept contributions:

• Help Wanted issues
• Contributing Guide

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

Bring on the Charts!​

Let's take a look at our contributor health, and celebrate the amazing folks who have come together to bring you Bluefin! We use LFX Insights to measure our project health. First note that my results here are skewed, since I am either usually just merging or telling a bot it's ok to do something. This also does not include the rest of Universal Blue. Yes, Aurora people basically maintain both, haha.

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

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

Feel free to browse around and learn cool things about Bluefin's creators.

What's Next?​​

After KubeCon we head into the holidays, where things will slow down significantly. We've been in the lab with mad doctor Timothée Ravier and have been cooking up something. We expect that this will change the course of Bluefin for the better, forever. We can't wait to show you, until then, enjoy!

Discussion Thread​

I was thrilled at the opportunity to team up with Pragyan Poudal from Red Hat to showcase Bootc along with Bluefin's vision for desktop Linux to a packed house at IndiaFOSS 2025 in Bangalore this past weekend. I managed to make only a handful of Linux users mad. It was a great chance to spread the word about image-based bliss.