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.
Achillobator giganticus
After nine months of development Bluefin LTS and Bluefin GDX are now Generally Available(GA). The reign of Achillobator has begun. Find the download links on the website, or snag them below.
Bluefin LTS is a workstation designed for people who prefer Long Term Support but desire a modern desktop. This species of raptor is for users who prefer a slower release cadence, about a three-to-five year lifespan on a single release. Like other Bluefins it features first-class support for Flathub via Bazaar, Homebrew, ZFS, and all the other goodies.
Bluefin LTS is composed of:
Bluefin LTS also offers a hardware enablement branch (bluefin:lts-hwe) with:
ujust rebase-helper.Bluefin LTS ships with Linux 6.12.0, which is the kernel for the lifetime of release. An optional hwe branch with new kernels is available, offering the same modern kernel you'll find in Bluefin and Bluefin GTS. Both vanilla and HWE ISOs are available, and you can always choose to switch back and forth after installation.
I have been dogfooding Bluefin LTS for most of this year. This is the most "work focused" image and is suitable for "set it and forget it" style desktops. We are proud of this one!
Here's how I pitched the idea earlier this year:
Bluefin LTS provides a backported GNOME desktop so that you are not left behind. This is an important thing for us. James has been diligenlty working on GNOME backports with the upstream CentOS community, and we feel bringing modern GNOME desktops to an LTS makes sense. I may be old but I'm not dead!
A very special thanks to Jordan Petridis from GNOME for technical advice and review.
Installation is via a live session with the new Anaconda webui. This installer is miles better than the ones we used to ship, thanks to the Anaconda team.
Secure boot and all those goodies are available:
Updates will come as often as we need them for now and will settle into weekly releases on Tuesdays. Follow updates on changelogs.projectbluefin.io.
There are a few lingering issues that will take more time:
Bluefin GDX is designed to be an AI Workstation by providng Nvidia drivers and CUDA in one image. It combines Bluefin LTS with the Bluefin Developer Experience. There's no cool expansion of GDX: GPU Developer Experience I guess. Maybe someday we'll call it Bluefin CUDA Edition. (Jensen call me!)
The reason we brand it differently is that it is designed for AI and Machine Learning professionals. Instead of a multitude of Nvidia images like Bluefin we will concentrate on this one image to focus on one thing: this is our platform for open source AI. Improvements made in GDX will make it's way into Bluefin's developer mode. GDX gives us a place to rev fast with some new friends:
We are happy to announce that we've formed a community partnership with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Command Line Assistant team. We are collaborating on upstream and open source AI and ML tools to provide system-wide inference and an enhanced experience for Bluefin LTS and GDX users.
This will be the lab that will keep Bluefin on the leading edge of open source AI. Here's Mo Duffy on Destination Linux to give you an idea of what we're thinking about.
You can find Bluefin GDX on the conference circuit!
Bluefin LTS will end up being way more sustainable than Bluefin and Bluefin GTS from a developer perspective. It's more of an initial setup and then we don't touch it as often. We have had periods in beta development where we didn't need to touch it for weeks. If you look changelogs.projectbluefin.io you'll soon notice the pattern, mostly minor version bumps. Nice.
It's also much more advantageous for us to derive off of a base image that ends up being a commercial product -- there is no doubt that CentOS and Red Hat have their weight behind these base images, whereas we are unable to get that level of commitment from Fedora. And as Steven Rosenberg pointed out, Fedora isn't really improving in this area, and with bootc's composefs work coming along nicely we now have multiple base images to choose from. It will be an interesting year!
As it turns out, Bluefin LTS HWE is in the exact same ecological niche as GTS. They will end up being competitors. There's no death knell or anything like that, once development moves on it doesn't cost us much to keep it running. And we do love our pets. Check out the awesome brand new image by Delphic Melody and ahmedadan:
As you can see, it's getting a bit crowded. We'll see how people react to LTS, and I expect we'd hide the GTS option from the website but continue to offer it.
With bootc we can deliver a desktop experience with the latest GNOME, and a new kernel -- but on a solid base with less regressions. The previous generation of thinking kept CentOS in a very locked set of use cases. The old boring ones. Now with bootc + containers + flathub + homebrew, we feel that this less churny base makes for a compelling desktop. We'll see how they compete!
Since Bluefin LTS is "bootc natural" and not a transplant, it comes with less compromises out of the box. Bluefin LTS doesn't support local layering at all and AppImages don't work either. (Told ya'll those things were not gonna make it lol.) Bluefin LTS also does not support older machines with v2 CPU instructions.
This also lets us be less strict in Bluefin. We've decided to leave local layering enabled by default in Bluefin and Bluefin GTS. There are users who use that ecosystem, so no worries there. Savages. The Fedora based images will continue to serve these use cases. James also has his own tunaOS, which offers a wide variety of Bluefin-derived variants, including an AlmaLinux based sister to Bluefin LTS. That covers just about everybody - The bootc community around CentOS is quite diverse, and offers a variety of options.
The downloads page is looking pretty good these days but I am very interested to see what you decide since we do measure everything, so feel free to peruse that list. 😄
Now let's get on to the good stuff. store.projectbluefin.io will take you to the new Bluefin store, which has a ton of awesome items!
We celebrate this release with this T-shirt, the "Reign of Achillobator", signifying Bluefin LTS's role in this ecosystem as a top predator, along with some other goodies:
And of course we've got stuff for the kids, and some other weird things! Currently this store is US only for now.
Proceeds from the store items will go towards paying for more paleoartwork. I think this is a fair deal, Bluefin would have never gotten this far without the work of these fine artists. Having a way for the community to sponsor the artwork in return for the awesome comfort of an Achillobator giganticus hoodie? Peak Linux.
Bluefin is brought to you by Tulip Blossom and James Reilly. The team grew this cycle with some fantastic new folks helping out to finish Bluefin LTS:
Yulian Kuncheff (Daegalus) hopped in to help with the GitHub actions and the lts-hwe branch. Ahmed Adan and M. Gopal (Delphic Melody) round out the new team with fantastic work on the artwork, website, documentation, and testing. And don't forget to check out the new coloring book!
Special thanks to Carl George, Laura Santamaria, Shaun McCance, and the entire bootc team for their (continuing) support of this project! The game has started. The clue is: Gardener
And lastly, there is some missing functionality compared to the Fedora build as there are some creature comforts that are missing. We call these parity bugs, so if find them, file them. There are some things that won't be coming with; CentOS Stream's focus is on long term support, so we may choose to drop a feature if it's not straightforward to bring to Bluefin LTS.
Imagine choosing between LTS, GTS, and stable with just a slider on an update page in a control panel. They should feel and act the same as each other. I'm pretty much there with my personal machines, sometimes I have to check which machine is which because it doesn't really matter. I feel the pain on the infrastructure side instead. 😄
Two new soundtracks accompany this release, enjoy!
Remember you cannot rebase between CentOS and Fedora Bluefins, ain't no one testing that. Beware. Also this is the new installer -- you'll love it.
The long term support experience.
📖 Read the documentation to learn about features and differences.
| Version | GPU | Download | Checksum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bluefin LTS | AMD/Intel | 📥 bluefin-lts-x86_64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
| Bluefin LTS | ARM (aarch64) | 📥 bluefin-lts-aarch64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
| Bluefin LTS HWE | AMD/Intel | 📥 bluefin-lts-hwe-x86_64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
| Bluefin LTS HWE | ARM (aarch64) | 📥 bluefin-lts-hwe-aarch64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
The AI workstation with Nvidia and CUDA.
📖 Read the documentation to learn about features and differences.
| Version | GPU | Download | Checksum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bluefin GDX | AMD/Intel + Nvidia | 📥 bluefin-gdx-x86_64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
| Bluefin GDX | ARM (aarch64) + Nvidia | 📥 bluefin-gdx-lts-aarch64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
Today we're happy to announce that Bluefin was one of the 71 projects selected for Github's Secure Open Source Fund. We applied for and were selected earlier this year, with tulilirockz representing the team and working with GitHub -- getting some awesome training and some funding to work on improving our security posture. Also awesome to see CNCF Projects like bootc and fluxcd. We're in excellent company. 😄
This has led to us publishing our SBOMs and in general giving everything a once over. p5 also dove in to ensure we're rocking and rolling to secure our supply chain. Though we still depend on many third party sources for our software, we've severely cut that down, bringing things inhouse when necessary or removing a dependency alltogether. Thanks to p5's automation work the project is constantly rebuilding when there's a new base image, ensuring that you're getting those timely security updates!
This was also a good time for us to work with Alan Pope and the rest of the crew at Anchore. The team deployed Syft across our important repos and got to work.
This work is of course, always ongoing. I am still green in this field myself, if you're looking to learn more start here with the OpenSSF
A little over four years ago some of my fellow ex-Ubuntu friends helped me complete the first prototype for Bluefin. It was our pocket vision of a "what if we could start over and make exactly what we want?". For you archaeologists, here's the first version.
Technically a day early but we intend to make this a weekend long celebration. Eighteen months later we would form a community ... Universal Blue, with the goal to provide modern Linux operating systems for the next generation of open source users and contributors.
Now we have Bazzite, Aurora, and Cayo. Finally, the tools to make our own fate. 😈 I don't have anything especially insightful to say other than thanks! Let's take a quick look at where we stand:
We're sitting at about ~25,000 weekly checkins of Universal Blue systems, and now that we have sort of functional installers, who knows how fast we can grow!
As Kyle mentioned in the Bazzite update our communities continute to grow as well! We're now well over 30 million pulls of our images (we kind of stopped counting that). Here's the contributor stats:
Here's our rolling totals:
And as we can see, the amount of contributions since Bazzite started to gain traction has really improved. I'm particularly proud of our contributor distribution here - it proves that non-code contributions around support can help keep our project healthy:
(This chart is measuring the partial month of July, ignore that drop off we're not collapsing. 😃 )
You have my thanks, you've made my operating system invisible, it has been a pleasure destroying the Linux desktop with you. 💙
Today is also Bluefin's fourth birthday. I suppose as the first product she was the one who would push the hardest, and will always strive for the pure bootc experience. The dinosaurs remind us that we need to force change in order to achieve the best possible desktop we can. Here's a peek at something special:
I was unfortunately unable to find out the lifespan of a Deinonychus, so we'll have to just roll with it.
Things are pretty calm right now, Bazaar is in and once that gets put into Flathub we can chill more. There's plenty of folks on what we call "chillops": they rotate out and relax while the automation hums along for a while.
But also now is the time when the new folks start to step up, so it's encouraging to see people come in and drive for a while. Bluefin LTS is looking pretty good, probably on track for fall GA but we're not in a rush. Next major effort will be adding F43 as beta channels and cycling back into release mode. The game has not started. The clue is: Winnower
This work wouldn't be possible without Timothée Ravier and the bootc team! You have our thanks.
Guardians, today Bluefin switched its base from Fedora 41 to Fedora 42. The gathering of raptors is over, Bluefin GTS remains with F41 while Bluefin stretches her legs with the latest Fedora goodies.
As a bootc derived project we tend to align with the cadence of the rest of cloud native. That means we do status reports like this depending on where we are in the world at the time, and to ensure transparency. Previous status update: KubeCon US 2024 Project Report
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First things first, here’s the Bluefin Spring 2025 playlist – like previous playlists, each song was picked for a certain reason, the interpretation is up to you. Rock out while you read this update and refresh yourself up on the docs!
You’ll receive this update during your next update window, or you can run an update manually by clicking on this icon:
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Here’s the major Fedora release information:
This time Jacob Schnurr takes us to the Triassic:
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Note that composefs is now enabled via upstream Fedora!
Bluefin is an operating system for your computer. It is designed to be installed on a device upgrade for the life of the hardware – we accomplish this by sharing the maintenance and care of our systems together as a community. It is designed to be as “zero touch” as possible by providing a curated GNOME experience.
Bluefin (aka bluefin:stable) is our leading edge desktop, designed to bring you the newest version of Fedora and GNOME. It follows the CoreOS release schedule and comes ~2-3 weeks after Fedora has done it’s major upgrade. This is a great buffer without being overly tardy. This one came a bit later but it’s ready now!
Here’s a bit of a rundown with Alan Pope! Special thanks to Anchore, makers of Syft and Grype - which we use as our security scanners when making our builds and their advice has been invaluable to our project this cycle!
Universal Blue revolutionizes the Linux desktop experience
We fiercely invest in automation and distributed work, which is one of the many reasons why Linux and Open Source have devoured the industry. We strive to bring these cloud native features to the desktop.
If you’re brand new you can use the website to pick the right image or use one of the direct DL links:
There are a few major changes from a Bluefin perspective that we’ve been looking forward to, let’s roll!
Let’s get this out of the way … our installation experience continues to be the bane of our existence. Most of this project is automated, but the installation experience takes a disproportionate amount of time, most of the last two months have been us scrambling to make ISOs work. As of today there are no bootc installers that are production ready for end users, this has been a problem for years so we’re exploring multiple options. I’m kinda done with snakes.
This cycle we will be producing two sets of ISOs for installation. One is the the older Anaconda installer, and one is Fyra Labs’ new readymade installer. Both sets are listed on this download page. Production of both ISOs is automated so we can kick the tyres on both and take a closer look in October for the next set of releases. The website will default to the Anaconda installers.
Refreshed Anaconda ISOs - Thanks to a herculean effort by Jason Naggin and Noel Miller we have refreshed ISOs on the website, based on the Fedora Anaconda installer.
New Readymade Installation Media - thanks to our friends at Fyra we have a new installer that we’re making available.
And for some color (if it’s not obvious), there’s no future for legacy installers in the new world. We plan to aggressively pursue aligning our installation methods with the rest of the cloud native ecosystem so we don’t have to deal with this. I’d like to take a moment to shout out the intergration work @tulilirockz has been doing to deliver this. Without her there would be no ISOs, or Bluefin. Much love.
We are not out of the woods yet, but we’re making significant progress so this might take a few weeks still.
ComposeFS information for F42 upgrades - this is the biggest heads up, if you move to stable there’s no going back to GTS. James has added guards and warnings to ujust rebase-helper to remind you. This is a one time migration, it sucks that it’s a one way trip. On the plus side someday in the future your base OS, containers, and flatpaks will all be consuming composefs for some great efficiency wins. More to follow on this as we learn more from upstream.
As usual most of the changes are the work we do in GitHub to deliver Bluefin and not so much in the image itself. This took up the bulk of the work this cycle. Here’s a huge changelog of the package updates. You can also check out the release notes or use ujust changelogs to keep track of what’s going on.
We really, really made some efficiency gains across Universal Blue this cycle, we were able to grow the team while getting faster.
Some packages have moved to flatpaks: Upcoming changes to Bluefin packages for the F42 release
This cycle has also been all about being more up front about our project metrics:
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Bluefin GTS users will also get this documentation update.
We really spent a ton of time on the docs this cycle. I consider them mostly feature complete now. docs.project.bluefin is always linked from your terminal motd too. 😄
Thanks to the magic of princexml we’re able to generate a pretty amazing offline PDF of the Bluefin docs:
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Note that we will replace the Yelp help application with a link to this doc, which will open in the Papers PDF reader automatically. Yelp’s had some problems, so it’s time to say goodbye.
We will also replace the Documentation shortcut in the logo menu with this instead so that documentation will always be browsable when offline. The blue u shortcut to the online docs will remain in the menu unchanged. We hope to finish this up soon.
The PDF is built every time we update the docs and is copied over as part of the build process, so your offline documentation will always be up to date.
We are currently not producing an ARM build of Bluefin or Bluefin GTS. However we do have an ARM image of Bluefin LTS, which is in Beta, you can select it from the this list.
It’s very good and on track to GA sometime this summer, so help there is appreciated. We’re still working on ARM builds for Bluefin and Bluefin GTS.
Extinction is a natural part of life. These will take effect when we migrate to Fedora 43 this fall so we’re giving you a full release cycle heads up.
Due to Nvidia’s software support changes we can no longer support the older closed modules for Nvidia cards.
nvidia-open images automatically during an upgrade if your hardware supports it. So any GTX 16XX+ and RTX Series cards will be migrated over with no action needed from you.If you are using one of the old hwe images for Surface/Asus, this is the last cycle that we will be generating them. We haven’t linked to their ISOs in a long time but there’s a handful of you still rocking these. If you’re using one of these images you’ll see hwe in your bootc status or fastfetch output.
ujust rebase-helper and select the latest stream.Bluefin is a deinonychus, and may snap at you occasionally. Three year olds can get feisty of so there might be issues that you discover that we haven’t seen before. Filing issues is always appreciated.
We also accept donations to sponsor the infrastructure and artwork. If there’s a piece of software in Bluefin that makes you happy, consider donating to the upstream organization and/or authors. Thanks to the present (and past!) supporters for helping out.
Check the docs for all the available version options:
Nothing makes ops people happier than uneventful things.
Today is really like any other, we just updated a few tags, you always have the option to go to any version we support at any time. Wether you like the chill vibe of bluefin:gts, the refined aggresiveness of bluefin:stable, the raptor abides.
Here’s the current lay of the land:
gts (default) | stable or stable-daily | latest | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fedora Version: | 41 | 42 | 42 |
| GNOME Version: | 47 | 48 | 48 |
| Target User: | Most users | Enthusiasts | Advanced users and testers |
| System Updates: | Weekly | Weekly or Daily | Daily |
| Application Updates: | Twice a Day | Twice a Day | Twice a Day |
| Kernel: | Gated | Gated | Ungated |
M2 has moved ublue-os/main to use one justfile for builds. This means that you can just now git clone and build images on the spot. This also makes it straightforward to build our images on any infrastructure (Gitlab, etc.). Bluefin is already set up this way, so go nuts!
Bluefin is an active predator and is constantly hungry. You can help keep Bluefin healthy by becoming a contributor! We are an open source project and accept contributions:
As a cloud native project we are always looking for contributors with skills in Podman, Docker, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, and good ole bash.
And lastly let’s take a look at how we’re doing. This year started off nice and boring but soon our community experienced some amazing growth. Let’s start off with our conversations on Discord, Discourse, GitHub, and Reddit. This is a measure of just how active our community is in helping each other out.
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Lots of growth here, we’re proud to announce that we just crossed 16,000 folks on the Discord. Contributions have experienced the same level of growth.
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And here are where people are submitting pull requests in GitHub. 123 individual people have contributed a pull request to Universal Blue in the last six months. As you can see we have a nice even spread of contributions across the board, this is a good thing!
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Keep those great numbers in mind because we have a correction to make to one of our most important metrics. Timothee Ravier at Fedora was preparing his talk for Flock and noticed a problem with the countme metrics. Fedora and Universal Blue have been counting devices twice, doh! Here is the corrected chart.
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The chart is the same, all the numbers are cut in half though. If we look at the number of machines checking in with Fedora every week:
It’s fine, I mean sure, it sucks to know your userbase is half of what you thought it was, but let’s look at what the team principal at Williams F1 has to say:
Data, for me, is the foundation of F1. There's no human judgment involved. You've got to get your foundation right in data.
-- James Vowles
So error corrected, and the big takeaway from this is to remember, the contribution metrics are the key to our success. The Atomic universe is half the size we thought it was, but at least we’re consistent with each other and understanding that measuring this stuff is the key to long term success, despite the occasional bummer. We’ve always been about the slow burn, and you probably know how much we thrive under the radar anyway.
We are of course, inevitable.
Let’s look at image pulls. Note that image pulls aren’t indicative of users, instead we use it as a gauge of how many successful upgrades we’ve had. Here are all the images with more than 1 million pulls:
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And lastly, let’s take a look at the last 90 days of homebrew analytics
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All of our images are represented well here considering how small we are. 😄
We’ll see everyone this summer to talk about Bluefin LTS — meanwhile enjoy the release!
Feel free to ask questions!
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Hi ya’ll!
I thought it’d be a good time to post a quick “State of the Blue” as we wrap up 2024. We’ve had the excitement around bootc ramp up over the holiday and we’ve crossed over 11,186 members on the Discord. There’s always something to do in the land of the blue!
First up, Happy Birthday to Bazzite! Bazzite continues to find it’s place:
An Asus ROG Ally X running Bazzite has all but replaced the Steam Deck in my life.
Almost exactly a year ago the Bazzite rocket took off when it was featued on Hacker News for New Year’s Eve. The rest is explosive! Let’s look at Fedora’s countme stats:
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As you can see, we’re all living in Bazzite’s world right now! And overall the Fedora Atomic community is growing!
Right now the project is mostly in maintenance mode, accepting PRs in akmods, config, etc. Most of the rest of the main components are complete, there hasn’t been much reason to do a ton of work here.
We’re remaining pretty firm on our scope focus, and continue to concentrate on removing technical debt and sustainability. From a contributor perspective, we’re getting more and more pull requests and new people, so please continue to file issues and send fixes if you have the skills!
There’s a ton of videos on Bazzite already so let’s talk about the others for a minute. Aurora split out into it’s own repo at the end of this year, allowing for it rev on it’s own by people who care and use it the most! This has led to RealVishy joining in as an aurora maintainer.
But before that m2 rewrote the build system so both of those are running really smoothly right now.
@tulilirockz has been ramping up this break, and has been consolidating and modularizing the universal blue components in the packages repo. This is a huge efficiency win since we can now centralize common components instead of copying them from image to image.
Right now the pain point with these two are the future of our Asus and Surface support, which is not in a good state right now. Additionally Broadcom wireless continues to be a plague on humanity. Help in these areas is appreciated!
We have had some interest in making CentOS-based builds since Stream10 was announced.
and @hanthor are working on a Bluefin LTS prototypeSpeaking of uCore, there’s not much to report. Builds keep happening as intended, and it’s mostly pretty boring over there, as intended. 
We’ve also been able to collaborate with HeliumOS, which is also CentOS based - this has led to some knowledge sharing across the board.
bootc’s submission into the CNCF is really making an impact on us as development continues to march forward. Features that we have needed are landing or being scoped to land throughout this next quarter. In many ways we’re getting exactly what we want and we can continue to become more efficient.
There’s not much to say here other than we’ll be working more closely with them as we provide feedback. Antheas has also been submitting pull requests to bootc over the year, so if you want to get involved, this is the time to step up!
Additionally we have been playing with bootc-image-builder: GitHub - osbuild/bootc-image-builder: A container for deploying bootable container images. - so far the results have been very promising. It’s missing a few things we need, like flatpak support, but there are open pull requests in flatpak itself that are being looked at.
This is exciting for us because the ISOs can go on a diet, but more importantly when we make a GitHub action out of this it’ll make it much easier for people making custom images to have ISOs with waaaaaaay less work.
Right now things are humming along. Most of the things we need are a matter of waiting for features to land upstream, such as the ISO builder, zstd:chunked support for more efficient update size, and consuming Fedora 42 and 43 as they come out next year.
A good number of the team will be attending SCaLE this year in March in Pasadena, California: Home | SCALE 22x - hope to see you there, I will be bringing dinosaur stickers!
Members of the team will also be at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in London, UK. I haven’t been to London in years, I’m really looking forward to this one!
And a quick easter egg to round it out, if you’ve enabled bluefin-cli, bazzite-cli, or aurora-cli you’ll have the atuin command enabled. Run atuin wrapped to get your CLI stats for the year! Flex with your friends!
With that, I hope everyone had a safe and happy holidays, and a happy new year!
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