https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/Bluefin Blog2026-05-23T00:00:00.000Zhttps://github.com/jpmonette/feedOfficial Blog and Announcementshttps://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/img/logo.svg<![CDATA[Gradia Capture Comes to Bluefin]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/gradia-capture-bluefin/2026-05-23T00:00:00.000ZScreenshots 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.
Gradia Capture enhances GNOME's screenshot flow with annotation, OCR and Gradia integration.
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.
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.
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 β 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Disclaimer
This section is my opinion and does not reflect the views of the team, but is instead a reflection of my 20+ year journey working in Linux.
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.
Speeeeed
We will participate in both of those large ecosystems; that brings in the largest group of talent. Projects live and die based on the contributors that show up. We will always endevaour to work the best people at the cutting edge of Linux. We're ops people, mastery of all Linux is a requirement.
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!
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.
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.
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!
It really is just a conspiracy
We built Universal Blue. Aurora, Bazzite, and Bluefin, as a team.
Then opportunites opened up for our contributors to work for organizations at the forefront of Linux. The Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Chainguard, Red Hat, and others. Driven to build around open standards but leaving room for commercial entitities to exist and thrive. And that's just the core team, as you can see from our contributor lists, the cloud native ecosystem is a significant center of gravity in open source.
You have proven that enthusiasts matter and can shape the future of the desktop. Level up your skills and organizations looking for open source talent will take you seriously, and in today's brutally competitive job marketplace, expertise in open source matters.
There's no right way to Linux, but there are certainly wrong ways to Linux. If you're new to Linux, welcome. We are your starter dungeon. We're your sysadmin team, nice to meet you, we've got your back. Greatness awaits. And also pain. Mostly pain.
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!
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[The Dinosaur and the Hummingbird]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/the-dinosaur-and-the-hummingbird/2026-05-12T15:30:00.000Z
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!
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.
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.
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Bluefin Spring 2026: Part of a Growing Ecosystem]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/bluefin-spring-2026-2/2026-05-12T13:00:00.000Z
Bazaar is the application store on Bluefin systems. It is designed to bring the best of Flathub to your fingertips, with a focus on directly supporting application authors. It accomplishes this by focusing on highlighting donations to app authors and ensuring that you get those applications as soon as they are released upstream. No jank.
We're proud to ship this as our app store. Flathub has over 1 billion downloads and 21% Year over Year growth. Nice.
Bazaar β a Flathub-focused app store for GNOME
We can't get there from here without a working delivery platform β please donate to Bazaar. Built by @kolunmi and @AlexanderVanhee.
The ublue-os/tap is the production Homebrew tap for Bluefin - a curated collection of software packaged to work great on all Linuxes. Run ujust bbrew to open the interactive browser and install anything from the tap in a few keystrokes. Here are the highlights of apps added over the last cycle:
Visual Studio Code β Microsoft's open-source code editor. You can now install this without needing to use a DX image
VS Code Insiders β The daily preview build of VS Code with the newest features.
VSCodium β VS Code binaries built without Microsoft telemetry or branding.
JetBrains Toolbox β Install, update, and manage every JetBrains IDE from one app. This installs Jetbrains into your home directory as intended by Jetbrains.
framework-tool β Official CLI for Framework laptop hardware: fan control, battery charge limits, charge LED mode, input module configuration, and firmware update checks.
heic-to-dynamic-gnome-wallpaper β Convert macOS HEIC dynamic wallpapers into GNOME XML dynamic wallpapers that change with the time of day.
pmbootstrap β The sophisticated chroot/build/flash tool for postmarketOS development and porting Linux to mobile devices.
asusctl β CLI and daemon for ASUS hardware: fan curves, battery charge limits, keyboard LEDs, GPU mode switching, and more.
ROG Control Center β GUI front-end for asusctl, providing a graphical interface for all ASUS ROG hardware controls.
The operating system usage is also interesting. One of the reasons we picked homebrew was to be in the same group as everyone else. It's also nice to know that we're helping represent Linux:
Bluespeed is our catch all term for agent-centric tooling in Bluefin. It is a play on RHEL Lightspeed, Red Hat's tooling in this area. We continue to collaborate with the team and ship their tooling, such as linux-mcp-server. Bluefin ships a full cloud and AI native development platform ready to go. We default to a "Bring your own LLM" approach, with a focus on pushing towards an all-local opt-in approach for system troubleshooting.
Our flagship tool is Goose from the Agentic AI Foundation, which serves as our "portal" to other tooling. We recommend using the ramalama tool for model management. This features full GPU acceleration for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs to work with local models out of the box. Models and drivers are kept in containers for flexibility. It's an awesome set up, give it a shot!
Ask Bluefin is a natural-language system assistant that can diagnose, explain, and help troubleshoot your machine using our community's data. You can hit it up on the website, the dedicated discussion forum, the soon-to-come shortcut in the menu, and the soon-to-come Discord app.
Ask is done in partnership with Dosu - here's the gist. Ask Bluefin is trained on all of the documentation and source code for all of the tooling in Bluefin, Bluefin's source code, issues, documentation, and discussions. Podman, bootc, vscode, systemd, etc. Everything on your system. AND THAT'S IT. It is only trained on the code and docs. The results are usually much better than a generic LLM, and light years ahead of Linux subreddits. (That's not a high bar, but let's have some goals). I have it write service units for me, because the era of writing these by hand is now almost over.
Dosu also runs an MCP server if you want to connect your clients to it or work on apps that can index our community's collective knowledge.
Proprietary operating systems are falling over each other trying to implement the worst possible anti-privacy features with AI. Of course they are, it's the nature of the beast. We take a different approach. If someone's going to invent this thing, then we're going to use it for good. Our first stab at this is to use it for a more natural goal - fix broken computers. (Computers are awful)
linux-mcp-server is an MCP server that gives any AI agent live read only access to your system: OS info, processes, services, logs, network, and filesystem. When connected to Goose it gives your LLM access to the following features:
"Bring Your Own LLM" β use it with a local Ramalama model for fully offline diagnostics, or connect to a hosted API for more capable reasoning β same data, your choice. Current this works best with paid frontier models, but also has been working great with the cheaper "fast models". Our team continues to experiment with the latest local models. Our final goal is for your computer to be able to diagnose itself with 100% local workflows on open weight models. Kyle Rankin in particular is going hard on this and has been making some incredible progress. It's only a matter of time, open always wins.
Natural language diagnostics β Ask questions like "why is my fan running loud?" or "what process is eating my RAM?" and get real answers grounded in your actual current system state
Works with any MCP-compatible agent β Goose, OpenCode, and any client that supports the Model Context Protocol can connect to linux-mcp-server and get the same system access
(Optional, requires setup) Bluefin knowledge base built in β Dosu integration means the assistant already knows the Bluefin documentation, common issues, and community-reported workarounds.
I became a fan when on a trip to the Southern California Linux Expo. My computer was acting weird. I had the tool diagnose the problem, ends up we had made an error in our swap config for Bluefin LTS. It confirmed the issue, and then linked me to the existing issue that someone had reported a few hours before. Clanker + Human confirmation found the issue. We rolled out a fix. I am never going to diagnose a Linux machine by hand ever again.
My favorite part of Bluefin, the artwork! I'd like to thank the two new major donors who are funding two new future Bluefin renditions. The future is bright for more art!
Jay joins the prestiguous list of paleoartists to render Bluefin. Jay is a London-based science communicator, paleoartist, and television producer β her credits include Earth, Walking with Dinosaurs, and Evolution.
Bluefin was first modelled in Blender, similar to the technique used in Walking With Dinosaurs, before the finishing work added the feathers. This is so cool! Dinosaurs are typically portrayed as blood thirsty killers murdering constantly. But like real animals there are plenty of times when all you want to do is lay down. This rendition of Bluefin reflects a more chill day, a full belly, and no worries.
Did you know birds once had teeth? Crazy I know. This is another banger from Dr J and Delphic. Delphic has painstainkingly vectorized the original artwork so that we can enjoy this artwork on any size monitor.
Our last wallpaper from Dr. J is one of my favorites. It features a microraptor hunting a poor butterfly. Did she catch it? We'll leave that interpretation up to you.
We've been working pretty hard this cycle on the docs. Specifically around getting more information of what's in Bluefin so that we can be more transparent about what we ship:
Automated weekly changelogs for every image stream
This page will show you all of the versions and releases of every Bluefin. It is automatically generated from Bluefin's Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), so it will always show you what's on the image. This took way more work than we realized, but thanks to awesome tools such as <a href="https://oras.land">oras</a> and <a href="https://github.com/sigstore/cosign">cosign</a> we now have a nice way to show you what's in Bluefin. We also include the updates from the default homebrew and flatpaks shipped in Bluefin for convenience.
This page aggregates all of the work from the volunteers that are landing in Bluefin. This report is generated monthly and features all of the contributors who work on Bluefin. My favorite feature is it highlights people's first contribution as a milestone. Welcome aboard, Guardian.
This page is a reference of all of the images we publish, and features rebase instructions if you need them. This includes the testing branches of every image (if they exist), as well as the Nvidia images.
Ever update and get a regression? When was the last kernel update? When was the last time Uncle Jensen left us an unexpected gift? This page shows a matrix of major component version bumps so you can quickly see what updated when so you can at least make a better guess as to what past image you should rebase to. This page is clutch for troubleshooting.
Every release ships with a curated soundtrack highlighting Bluefin's cloud native journey. The music page archives every playlist we have released, with notes on the artists and the vibe we were going for.
Browse and download all wallpapers and artwork assets
Bluefin is not just tech, the artwork of her world is just as important to us as the software.<br/><br/>All of Aurora and Bazzite's wallpapers are also available here, in dark and light variants.<br/><br/>All of Bluefin's artists are compensated for their work. Bluefin will never ship AI generated art.
The downloads page provides direct ISO links with checksums and torrents for every Bluefin variant β Bluefin, Bluefin LTS, and Dakotaraptor β with GPU-specific entries so you always grab the right download when you need it!
Charts! My favorite. Usage remains steady at about 3.5k weekly devices. This feels about right for our target audience, but Bazzite is still 10x larger. And Ubuntu even more so. I've personally really never cared too much about this - you always need to make the contributor and team structure healthy before these numbers can ever go up.
This is the year that Aurora and Bluefin will start to focus on this number.
Unfortunately due to limitations in LFX, we can only track one Bluefin repository - so the charts below reflect the reduction of contributions to the one monorepository. This is a bummer because we intentionally split the project up into more granular repositories. The work in all other Bluefin repositories is NOT tracked here. When we can aggregate all of the contributions across all repositories we will have better data. It's all in git so we will be able to come back and correct past charts. Here are the numbers anyway:
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Bluefin Spring 2026: Fedora 44]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/bluefin-spring-2026/2026-05-11T16:00:00.000Z
I found this app called Speed of Sound, a speech to text app that makes writing long winded release announcements a breeze - so this is a series of blog posts over the next three days.
I am not going to lie I haven't been this excited about Bluefin since the start of the project. This spring is particularly relevant for us, with GNOME 50 being a particularly nice roll up of tech. First more of a project update. As I've alluded to in the past, we're learning to come out of the shadows more for people looking for a great desktop for every day use. We've purposely avoided this audience for a few reasons - mostly because normal people don't install operating systems.
But now that we've got five years of production under our belt it's probably time to be louder. First we're partnering with Michael Tunnell on a set of video content that should be more appealing to the general computing audience. Then you can expect more visible changes in our approach as we (as they say in the biz) "Go To Market". Expect that some time this summer!
This is Lazy Days by Jay Balamurugan. Jay is a London-based science communicator, paleoartist, and television producer β her credits include Walking with Dinosaurs and Earth. This is Bluefin as you rarely see her: full belly, no worries, just a chill day in the sun.
Bluefin was first modelled in Blender, similar to the technique used in Walking With Dinosaurs, before the finishing work added the feathers. Dinosaurs are typically portrayed as blood thirsty killers murdering constantly. But like real animals there are plenty of times when all you want to do is lay down. You can follow Jay on Bluesky and Instagram.
Some of you know that Bluefin wasn't really an accident - it's a distillation of decades of OSS experience from a bunch of experienced people. I am particularly priviledged to be exposed to this audience of open source gurus. Part of our appeal is we get you one step closer to knowing how Open Source actually works from the people doing it at the professional level. We're taking this team-work based approach to the maintenance of our desktops. That's basically it. Here are the collective lessons we have learned:
Digital Sovereignty: There is an actual demand for a Linux client that can be built, from the ground up and verified to the very end. We're not talking about what you would typically consider "an Ubuntu remix". It's gotta be at the top level of supply chain security and be deployable at scale. Only modern Linux can compete here.
Bazzite proves that delivering to the 95% is a thing people want
Ends up that there's significantly more to gain by throwing away the old things holding Linux back than serving edge cases.
Open Gaming Collective has proven that different distributions can work together in a way that is conducive to get all of this stuff out of the little fiefdoms and into the upstream Linux kernel. And they're just getting started.
The Team:
Seven(!) people have gotten jobs through Universal Blue.
Chainguard, Red Hat, and Microsoft have all recognized the talent from the enthusiast community. Users like you have proven to the industry that enthusiasts matter.
It's not about what we're building these days, it's about what we're choosing to NOT build.
Ends up that the development techniques from Open Source infrastructure apply very well to people who love to work together as a team. You don't succeed in this business as an individual, you bring your individual talent to a team, and you succeed together.
Efficient downloads are coming: It never made sense to push too hard with this limitation. Now it's not going to be an issue. I'll explain more in the third blog post.
I find digital sovereignty in particular to be interesting. The discussions around Linux are predictable. Once again people are fighting over who is going to ship the least-worst Debian. The discussion should be focused on infrastructure and how you build it. You know who are really passionate about infrastructure? The European Cloud Native communities. The Kubernetes nerds expect and demand a modern Linux, and in order to deliver that you need world class infrastructure. The communities are mixing, and with modern tooling like bootc and buildstream the bare minimum standard for what constitutes a Linux desktop is about to go up substantially. So yeah, it's probably time to be louder.
But enough preaching, let's go into how we plan to get you there!
Asus support has always been a pain in the ass on Linux. In the past we had specialized images but the maintenance burden was too great. Thanks to improvements in Linux 6.19 and greater, as well as awesome work from the asus-linux community we can now better support Asus hardware. The Asus Linux community is a participant in the Open Gaming Collective, which gives us the confidence that this will be well maintained over time. Thanks so much for your efforts!
The ublue-os/tap ships asusctl and ROG Control Center β the standard ASUS Linux control stack. These packages will work on any Linux with at least a 6.19 kernel.
Fan curve control β per-profile fan curves for Performance, Balanced, and Quiet modes; customizable RPM targets per temperature point
Keyboard RGB and Aura lighting β full per-key RGB control, multi-zone effects, static, breathe, rainbow, strobing, and more β all manageable from the GUI or CLI
Power profile switching β toggle between Performance, Balanced, and Power Saver without a reboot
Battery charge limit β set a charge ceiling (e.g. 80%) to preserve long-term battery health; the limit persists across reboots
GPU mode switching β switch between Integrated, Hybrid, NVIDIA-only, and Compute modes from the system tray
This is in Bazzite's testing branch as ujust asus and we'll pick it up at some point. Sorry that you have to do this by hand:
Install (order matters β system daemon first, then the GUI):
# Step 1: system daemon β handles hardware access and power management
ROG Control Center lands in your system tray and gives you a full GUI for everything above β no terminal required after the initial setup. Someday we will automate this so you don't have to do any of this CLI mumbojumbo, but in the meantime kick the tyres and report back. Remember that these packages work on any Linux!
This support has turned my 2022 G14 AMD Advantage Edition in a pretty great Linux laptop. It wasn't always like that!
composefs with fs-verity β every file in the OS image is cryptographically verified at read time and managed by bootc. We also say goodbye to ostree. With both projects now in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation we have a vendor neutral stack to base Bluefin on. Nice.
Full verified boot chain from firmware β bootloader β kernel β OS image β see the FOSDEM 2025 deep-dive for how it all fits together
TPM-backed passwordless disk unlocking via systemd-cryptenroll β LUKS unlocking is bound to the verified boot state so no password prompt on a clean boot
UEFI on x86_64 and aarch64 - Legacy BIOS support goes away too, but we don't support that anyway.
Want all of these things? It will take some work to move Bluefin and Aurora to these new base images, and we're looking for people to help. If you've been worried about the lack of progress in bootc in Fedora then this one set of images brings us back to the forefront of Linux desktop tech. Our man from France was not going to let Dakotaraptor run away with it, so if you want to help make this dream a reality, now is the time to step up and volunteer!
Honestly I just work on Fedora to toss RPMs right at Jorge's smug cloud native face.
-- John Bazzite
It took lots of work to get Fedora back on track with bootc, after all, Bluefin was intended to be a weekend project inbetween Fedora 39 and 40 to prove how easy it was. See? Look how easy that was! Jef you're doing great, I'm sorry for riding you so hard over the past few months. Fedora has two awesome avenues and a brand new sandbox to play in -- good to see some "Fedora First" flexing over there! Thanks Laura Santamaria and LH!
They have a ton of work to do, so if this is your jam, now is the time to get involved. Good timing too, looks like Red Hat is hiring.
An awesome special thanks to the Fedora CoreOS team for ensuring the Copy Fail 2 and DirtyFrag issues were resolved in the kernel we use. I also have some awesome Fedora news for you ... tomorrow.
Bluefin LTS launched with GNOME 48 and has been updated to GNOME 49. This release delivers two full GNOME upgrade cycles in one β GNOME 49 and GNOME 50 are both available β thanks to @hanthor's work backporting the full GNOME stack to the EL10 base. See the March testing announcement for all the details.
There's really not much to say here, the move to GNOME 49 wasn't as smooth as we'd like but as a result GNOME 50 is much smoother. We will keep GNOME 50 in it's own set of branches and likely move LTS to GNOME 50 sometime this Fall.
Bluefin LTS is maintained by @hanthor. If you rely on the LTS channel, consider supporting his work:
Unfortunately selling outside the US is still a struggle, we'll continue looking at options. Our store is designed to highlight Bluefin's incredible artists! Proceeds from the store fund future artist work. We adjust the prices on all the other items in the store in order to make the kids shirt as cheap as possible. Rawr.
Thanks to our awesome ISO factory we can now deliver fresh ISOs and both Anaconda and Tuna installer suck way less than before. You can find the weekly ISO builds on the Downloads Testing page - these are automatically refreshed weekly. We've also set the timer to auto publish stable releases of the ISOs each month, so you're never too out of date. We're also now publishing torrents of the most popular images. See you tomorrow for part 2 of our series!
The long-term support experience. π Read the documentation to learn about features and differences. HWE images include updated kernels β recommended for newer devices such as Framework Computers. ujust rebase-helper lets you switch between variants at any time.
Bluefin is a product built by a collection of contributors spanning multiple open source projects. Thanks to all of you who contributed! It feels good to know that the contributor list is such a large part of this announcement.
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Bluefin Dakota Alpha 1]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/dakota-alpha-1/2026-04-19T00:00:00.000ZToday we celebrate a nice milestone for the project. Thanks to some awesome work by the team we have a mostly daily-driveable Alpha 1. GNOME 50 too!
"Dakotaraptor" is the codename for Bluefin based on GNOME OS. It is designed to deliver software from upstream sources and eschews the traditional Linux distribution model entirely. It's built with Apache Buildstream and published as a bootc image.
GNOME 50, Linux 6.19.11, Mesa 26.0.4, and the Freedesktop 25.08.9 libraries. systemd-boot, UKIs, Rust uutils and sudo-rs included out of the box. (Hi Jon!)
GNOME OS itself has moved on to GNOME 51 builds, so we are on a stable branch. I'm pretty sure we're the first ones to consume this thing so keep an eye out for issues. We're still recommending VMs but it's also running fine on bare metal given the gotchas below.
Those of you with keen eyes might notice the new snazzy menu Dylan Taylor landed. It's Custom Command Menu and the upstream author was kind enough to accept our patch to put your hostname right there in your menu for a little bit of bling. We're working on bringing this to other Bluefins so sit tight. Lots of great customization options with this menu, I am enjoying it. You may have also noticed that we're using Ghostty here as the terminal.
LUKS is busted so skip the encryption step on install. James has a fix for this and it should be landing soon.
Updates are one big layer. We're working on this actively and it's looking good but it will land later.
Updates will first come split up into 120 layers but will still be large.
At some point this late spring/early summer zstd:chunked support should land in bootc and then you'll start receiving delta updates. We'll announce when this is live.
Many of the issues are cosmetic and "fit and finish" - you should not be having crashers or anything crazy like that.
Some parts of the build are old, we have not automated bumping version numbers of components so that's being done manually right now. So if you find an old version of something we'll get to them eventually.
Jordan Petridis, Valentin David, Adrian Vovk, and the rest of the GNOME OS team.
Thanks for your patience and guidance!
Brian Ketelsen and James Reilly for porting the Vanilla OS installer to use bootc: Tuna installer. Yes, James' personal image is called Tuna OS lol. On the plus side at least it's not called Titanoboa.
This thing is quite cool and shaping up to be a decent generic bootc installer. Nice.
Thanks to all of you on the Discord who have been testing and reporting issues, it helps tremendously! Shout out to JumpyVi!
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[State of the Ecosystem]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/state-ecosystem-2026/2026-04-02T00:00:00.000ZI thought I'd take some time to talk a bit about the world around us. I've come back from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Amsterdam super energized and have been taking this week off to recharge and relax.
I'll be talking about Bluefin and friends a bit later - we're gearing up for release and everything is humming along nicely. Let's talk about where we are.
Let's talk about numbers that matter to us. Here's the rollup:
Cloud Native Developer Growth is up to ~20 million developers - This one snuck up on me, since we last reported 15.6 million in November of last year. That's a 28% increase in six months! And 7.3 million AI developers are now working in the cloud native space. Our audience continues to grow.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU hit 13,500+ attendees, not only was it the largest KubeCon ever, but it was the largest open source conference in the world.
First off it means a lot of tired developers. The bootc booths and talks were well attended, and everyone was talking about platform engineering and the challenges of infrastructure at scale. These are the lessons we want to bring into Bluefin and friends, we are a tiny little chicken in a world of giants. We must be crafty and efficient!
I received tons of feedback and "tell your friends hello!", but here's the lessons as I see them:
Our choice of developer tooling and investment in DX is a huge strength - people want standardized tooling across the board.
We will do the same for AI tooling by shipping things like Goose and linux-mcp-server to serve those developers. Everyone is using these tools, and everyone wants these tools in VMs and containers to keep a barrier between these agents and their host. I expect this year will lead to more tooling in this space as developers figure it out.
We will continue to support a distribution-agnostic application store that focuses on meeting the needs of application developers first and foremost.
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Bluefin LTS: Now with GNOME 49 and 50]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/2026/03/27/bluefin-lts-gnome-49-50/2026-03-27T00:00:00.000ZThe time has come. Thanks to @hanthor not only do we get GNOME 49, we get GNOME 50 too! Achillobator can be fast!
We've got fancy new testing branches so feel free to help out. I know it's tempting to go right to 50 but if you could give 49 a shakedown on your way there it would really help. We're also wondering when the best time to land 50 would be. Do we wait until Fall to kinda get the -1 feel GTS had or do we pick a happy spot in the summer? Leave your feedback below.
Find your image with a sudo bootc status and you basically adding a -testing to your image name. So instead of bluefin:lts it's bluefin:lts-testing, and so on.
Huge thanks to @hanthor on this one, and if you're as annoyed as I am with those manual branch names you can help just add a toggle to the rebase helper so that we can just have this be a nice testing switch! Once we get that going and add a testing branch to bluefin:stable we'll have a nice easy way for people to opt in and out of testing. Good luck, have fun!
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Bluefin CLI for Mac and Windows]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/bluefin-cli-mac-wsl/2026-03-13T00:00:00.000ZWe like to say "The command line is our passion. Therefore we invest in the command line experience, knowing that most people will never see it." Sounds grandiose! Bluefin CLI is a a terminal experience designed around shipping a new "default terminal experience" with modern tools. But it also has things like the just task runner, making the community shared aliases and shortcuts easy. That just lets the good stuff float to the top. Actually we should probably just call it "Bluefin for Mac and Windows", once we have the wallpaper stuff figured out, which is where we need your help!
Bluefin CLI is one of my favorite Bluefin features. I get to host meetings with CNCF Ambassadors and they have the coolest prompt setups, etc. I love checking out a fellow nerd's loadout. You start to find cool little tools that just freshen up the Linux command line experience. And of course they're all written in rust, duh. We've been building bluefin-cli β the opt-in terminal experience that ships with Bluefin β into something that runs anywhere. Today it's available as an early alpha on macOS, any Linux distribution, and Windows via WSL or PowerShell.
This work is brought to you by James, who has been working on this single handedly. In Universal Blue tradition, this feature started off as a meme. Send him a donation if you wanna support his efforts!
On Bluefin, ujust bluefin-cli turns on a curated set of modern command line tools: eza, bat, zoxide, atuin, starship, ripgrep, fd, ugrep, tealdeer, and more. The philosophy is simple β a greenfield terminal experience using the best tools available today, with the ability to toggle it off and return to your known-good kit at any time. That toggle is important because this is an opinionated setup you should be able to turn it off. It's also designed to not be too crazy, we want subtle bling here. And anyway it's a template for you to build off if you want to go customize everything. And we use this system to pull in Flatpaks like Podman Desktop, which is an awesome GUI way to manage your containers. This could all be adapted to bring the same developer experience to other operating systems. "Bluefin the Application" I guess.
Some of Bluefin's best parts are common aliases. I want ujust update and ujust bios in Ubuntu and Windows. PRs to make it nice and slick would be appreciated.
And our community curated ujust bbrew app lists are great, I love it when someone finds a new CLI tool in an exciting space, especially in AI. I learned about llmfit, a nice tool that figures out the optimal local model for your hardware. Knowing that we're all curating awesomeness is a really fun part of this!
I've always argued that the Linux development experience competes best when you do container development. This is the technology that forced Microsoft and Apple to adopt cloud native in the first place. MacOS even has it's own container tool, an analogue to podman. Each OS ships something, and Docker and podman run on all of them. We have a diverse set of implementations, but one common standard. I betcha distrobox would work on that Mac thing if it doesn't already.
There's just something about doing it on Linux, on the platform it was designed for, that leads to that extra bit of user experience. And the one thing I wish more Linux nerds would understand, we live in a cross platform world. Changing platforms is tough enough, let's at least give the developers a comfortable place to land! An operating system agnostic development environment is a competitive advantage when we have home court advantage.
This is an alpha. What we want is for you to be able to have the Bluefin experience on the Mac and Windows, wallpapers and everything. James is almost there, we just need people to give the thing a once over, see what needs to happen. Ideally we want one click happyness for both systems eventually.
bat β cat with syntax highlighting and git integration
zoxide β smarter cd that learns your habits
atuin β shell history sync across machines
starship β fast, cross-shell prompt
uutils-coreutils β Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils - that's right, before Ubuntu did it lol!
ripgrep, fd, ugrep β faster search tools
tealdeer β fast tldr for quick command references
You can also grab Bluefin artwork and wallpaper collections, browse and install curated Brewfiles via the ujust bbrew command, and run bluefin-cli motd show to get the same Message of the Day that greets Bluefin users at every new terminal.
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Automated reports and changelogs]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/automated-reports-changelogs/2026-02-01T00:00:00.000Z
Hi everyone,
It can be difficult to keep track of things if you're not paying attention regularly, and even if you are there's always stuff all over the place. I've been working on ways to collate all of the things happening from across the community into a regular monthly report. Here's Jurassic January.
Changelogs are actually pretty weird in bootc land. We usually extract the package version info from the last rechunking step to generate the changelogs - however that doesn't really cover the entire project, just the things in that repository. There's also a new upstream rechunker coming down the pipeline so that means that we'll need to rework how we generate the changelogs (thanks to @renner0e for investigating this!). The existing changelogs also really only tell you about the things in the image, and not the "whole" of Bluefin. These will always continue to be published on changelogs.projectbluefin.io
These reports aren't a replacement for the changelogs, just as this blog will continue to handle most of the "Why?" we do things -- for us it's a good way to blog about the meta and not the minutiae.
We've divided Bluefin into the categories that match the labels throughout the project, so that we can organize things a little bit better. Each section looks like this:
Homebrew packages, AI/ML tools (Bluespeed), and Flatpak applications
Additionally each section is divided into two categories. "Planned Work" are things we're purposely working on. These usually need planning and organization and are tracked in todo.projectbluefin.io.
"Opportunistic Work" are things that people just work on day-to-day and may or may not have a plan attached to them. This is usually the bulk of the work. We also needed a way to track what's going into the production homebrew tap, and in general tell people when something is getting promoted. Here's the first attempt:
We also took the opportunity to add stats on the builders so you can check out Bluefin's health "at a glance". And lastly we wanted to highlight the contributors. New contributors ("New Lights"), will have a gold foil usercard to celebrate their first Bluefin contribution:
Each month will list every person that contributed to Bluefin for that month, so if you're keen, apply within! This section is incomplete, it does not include discussions and issues, so if you're working in those areas you're not getting a shout out yet, but we'll keep making improvements.
If there's an area of Bluefin that you're finding hard to keep track of leave feedback in this thread!
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Modernizing custom images based on Bluefin]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/modernizing-custom-images/2026-01-03T00:00:00.000ZI've been working on a more opinionated Bluefin template here:
Originally I mostly just wanted to add copilot instructions to the Universal Blue template. Copilot does an awesome job just automating making a custom image so I kept driving in that direction.
If you are making a custom image I want you to try this!β
The existing templates mostly let you take Bluefin and modify it. But now with this new OCI layout, we can instead have you assemble your own Bluefin like how Aurora, Bluefin LTS, Bluefin, and dakotaraptor do it. This does a few things:
Let's you be at least as good as any of those right out of the gate, your custom image is built by the production setup that's well known
You can instead work on making the image
All desktop agnostic config is centralized in @projectbluefin/common and set up in a way that you can extend it.
Tulip quickly took the Bluefin containers and a bootcrew ubuntu-bootc image to create an Ubuntu Bluefin.
A ublue-os/base-main base image + cosmic would make a COSMIC Bluefin the exact way we would build one. And as a bonus since the config and stuff is centralized any custom image built by consuming the centralized OCI containers has the benefit of shared maintenance.
Anyway if you're already making a custom Bluefin I'd like to encourage you consuming Bluefin this way, adding the few containers is documented in the README so you don't have to move templates or anything like that, you could probably do this in bluebuild too.
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Bluefin 2025 Wrap-up: State of the Raptor]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/bluefin-2025/2025-12-30T00:00:00.000ZGreetings Guardians!
Today we're going to go over some of the things we're finishing up for 2025, and talk about where we're going in 2026. Check out the Autumn 2025 Update and the 2024 update if you want more backstory. We appreciate you joining us on your Linux journey, let's get going!
warnung
Bluefin GTS will be merged into Bluefin on the week of March 1st, 2026, see below for more information!
This year we spent most of our time on cleanup and sustainability. Bluefin is mostly feature complete so we don't really ship major user-visible changes as much as we used to. Much of it is "nerd automation" improvements that most of you will never need to actually care about. This has also been a kickass year for Bazzite, which has been a fantastic real-world test for bootc based sytems like ours! Overall the ecosystem is doing well, this year was great for bootc, here's a photo of the team from KubeCon this past November:
Jorge with members of the bootc team: Mark Russell, Joseph Marrero, Laura Santamaria, and Colin Walters
We continue to sync with the various teams at Red Hat as we journey with bootc through its CNCF Project Lifecycle. This works out well for us because we know what we need to do. Our role is to provide an independent voice, and with new orgs like the bootcrew, bluebuild, and secureblue springing up it brings more voices to the choir. 2026 will be the year where we expect participation in bootc to increase. This is also why you've seen us slowly decouple from Universal Blue more explicitly. This is a forcing function to move us away from monolithic "distributions" to an ecosystem full of different images, each with different communities and needs, while retaining the value of shared components.
My 2026 prediction
bootc dramatically drops the barrier to making an OS. We're not here to build a distribution, our purpose has always been to show that you can make operating systems using dockerfiles. That's it (lol). Millions of people know how to do this, the Universal Blue "mission" is pretty much complete. Now we just swim in that merch money and keep the builds green. People are already making a bunch of these based on other distro base images and I can't wait to see what they build. Who knows, there may be another Bazzite out there, let's see who steps up and becomes Legend!
As you'll soon see below, we can source software from anywhere and it's just a bunch of containers. This is reflected in our use of @projectbluefin as our new main GitHub org as we strive to move further away from distribution specific tooling to a cloud-native world.
But that sounds like a bunch of marketing crap, let's explain it ... this update will cover mostly "How Bluefin is made" and where we're hoping to head in 2026.
todo.projectbluefin.io will send you to the project board. Every item in this post will be tracked here. Some of the things in this post are complete, and some are close and need help, feel free to dive in!
You may notice some minor changes (like the motd colors changing), but we're hoping to be complete with the major transitions over the next two weeks. File an issue if you notice something! Exercising the fix-loop with this new architecture will immediately show dividends as we can now ship fixes to all Bluefins and Aurora.
We've also updated the Contributing Guide to reflect Bluefin's updated architecture and processes. Note, Linux nerd stuff incoming:
Bluefin is undergoing a refactor with some significant changes under the hood, which we expect to finish soon, but is mostly there. Some of this isn't done yet, so I'm going to talk about the endstate of where we want to be. Bluefin is a combination of a set of configuration OCI containers which are then shipped on different images. Originally the Bluefin repository had everything we needed, and was a result of organic growth. Everything was built here.
The team drastically refactored this repository in 2025 since it predates the usage of bootc and was falling behind. Similarly, Bluefin LTS was built from the ground up on bootc, but we had to manually bring over the Bluefin parts to build it. We want to share as much code with Aurora and Bazzite as we can. The three projects share many things, but we needed a more efficient way to do this. "One big Bluefin" wasn't going to cut it. So we rearchitected Bluefin to the following model:
These are what make up the bulk of Bluefin and are shipped as OCI containers. This moves us away from classic distro packaging and towards a pure cloud native approach. We're migrating away from the packaging repo and instead keep all the config files in an easy-to-read tree in git, that just gets copied over in the build step:
ujust, motd, service units, GNOME and CLI configuration, application choices, etc. Most things that have to do with the workload should live in this repo
This is shared with Aurora so that we can maintain consistency across images
@ublue-os/artwork - Art assets repository, shared with Aurora and Bazzite
@ublue-os/brew and associated @ublue-os/homebrew-tap - these provide homebrew itself and our selection of custom brew packages. This also simplifies adding homebrew to custom images. Thanks to those of you who have been helping homebrew be better on Linux, it's amazing!
These containers have the advantage of making consumption by other bootc projects trivial and are (mostly) distribution agnostic. Custom images now have a granular option to pick and choose the components they want to ship instead of dealing with one monolithic experience. We've structured the common repository to be extensible, here is how Aurora does it for reference. This allows the team to keep configuration centralized while allowing endpoints for custom builds.
@projectbluefin/distroless - Dakotaraptor prototype - generates a GNOME OS based Bluefin OCI container (more on this below!)
Since the bulk of what makes Bluefin is now just an OCI container the base OS can more easily be abstracted away. This means that these repositories can now do way less than they were doing before. We will continue to prune these over the course of this year.
Decoupling Bluefin this way has already allowed us to delete a bunch of duplicated code, and makes maintenance easier for the team. This also makes it way easier for people to contribute and resolves a bunch of parity bugs between the images. Maintaining Bluefin happens in the common OCI layers and not as much in the image repositories. Custom images will start moving this way too as it let's custom image builders pick and choose from whichever container they want at a much more granular level.
This also gave us the opportunity to clean up a bunch of old justfiles and scripts that have not been looked at for years. Our new justfiles are much smaller and more maintainable. We also took the time to add confirmation dialogs and other quality of life features in there. We have also been taking a less-is-more approach by shipping less customizations as just recipes.
Thanks for your patience with this transition, it did take longer than expected but we took our time since we're planning on long-term maintenance first. This is the smallest that Bluefin has ever been!
As covered in - Streamlining Bluefin Releases we will be merging the bluefin:gts images into bluefin:stable. Effectively we're merging them both.
warnung
Bluefin GTS will be merged into Bluefin on the week of March 1st, 2026.
We wanted to commit to a date as soon as we could, and will be moving you to a Fedora 43 base that week. And then everyone will be upgraded to a Fedora 44 base about a month later. Note that this won't be a zero-day upgrade and will follow the usual CoreOS cadence. By then the next -> testing -> stable workflow will be live and you'll be able to opt into the newest versions at your leisure. If this is confusing to you don't sweat it, we'll be more communicative when March rolls around to keep the transition as smooth as we can.
This will also be this single most user-affecting change in Bluefin for 2026, and we're really looking forward to having a proper gitops workflow with testing branches!
Some of you may have noticed parts of GNOME 49 landing in Bluefin LTS. Originally we had planned on backporting GNOME ourselves but this is happening as part of CentOS Stream's lifecycle. This "feels" like a good cadence for an LTS. Here's the lowdown on where LTS is today:
The tuned policy still needs a fix, this makes you have to run a workaround to get power management working on a laptop. This sucks
Many of the inconsistencies will be resolved once Bluefin LTS moves to the common OCI layers
The hardware enablement branch brings in the Fedora kernel so you do have a nice option to not fall too far behind. This has effectively replaced Bluefin GTS by bringing a relaxed desktop upgrade cadence and less regressions overall. The lts-hwe branches also now support secure boot. Despite these papercuts this is the image I use on my work machines, and the new architecture will help here.
Thanks to Sri Ramkrishna for contributing to this section
It is impossible to ignore the fantastic work happening in the the Linux Userspace API (UAPI) Group. Thanks to the work done by the bootcrew and Jordan Petridis it is now possible to decouple Bluefin from a traditional Linux distribution base image entirely and combine both UAPI and bootc approaches into one OS.
This new Bluefin is nicknamed Dakotaraptor and will be our attempt to ship a production quality bootc image based on GNOME OS. This gives us some benefits that we can't get from other images:
Faster deployment of the best tech: systemd-boot, systemd-homed, and other UAPI tech will ship much faster here - we can finally say goodbye to grub forever!
Testing branches with development versions of GNOME so that new contributors can help upstream development
New GNOME and systemd teammates who are committed to driving and shaping the modern Linux desktop. This has been a boon for us since we're forging new working relationships with these upstream projects, and their help will keep us on the leading edge.
More "take charge our destiny" by working with our critical upstreams directly instead of waiting for traditional distributions to catch up
Dakotaraptor will not be for everyone and will offer the least amount of compromises. Not only is local layering unsupported, there's no system package manager at all! We'll be using Buildstream since it's the tech behind this, and you'll hear more about it in 2026 as other projects check it out. This effort is still nascent, so no promises, but it's already got people excited, check it out at @projectbluefin/distroless.
JumpyVi's setup
Don't worry, we won't call it "Distroless".
The other Blufin OCI containers will still continue as before. Dakotaraptor will represent a faster development cycle, directly pulling from upstream, while maintaining production quality. Think of "distroless" as a model flip, the source is the main thing we interact with, the Linux desktop, and that's GNOME. And then we can bolt on whatever kernel we want, with modern Linuxes this is straightforward to make. And since the system libraries for GNOME OS are just ... the Freedesktop and GNOME runtimes, we're running on stuff that's already used by a ton of people. This way of assembly is new, but the payload is not.
That's why we're feeling confident about the quality out of the gate on this one. That just leaves a set of automation scripts and some config files, that's Bluefin!
We haven't yet finalized how next -> testing -> stable will look like, but having the next branch following the nightly GNOME development cadence is a goal. This channel will be our fastest raptor with aggressive component upgrades and no holds barred. The stable branch will be based on the stable GNOME builds and we're hoping to help GNOME maintain these branches. If you want to be part of this effort, now is the time to step up!
Oh, and in order to help us out with this you don't even need to talk to us, just go talk to GNOME directly. "Distroless" means spending more time with the things you love, and not so much time with the delivery service. We're mostly just waiting for GNOME 50 to come out. Expect this one to be VM-only for a while.
About 60% of you turn on Bluefin's Developer Mode. We purposely focus on these 15.6 millions developers and strive to deliver the world's best cloud native development experience.
Now thanks to the efforts from the team homebrew is now in a much better state on Linux, allowing us to reshuffle some things around. In 2026 we will strive to remove the need for a dedicated bluefin-dx image and give you more flexibility moving forward:
IDEs won't be baked into the images so you can use what you want.
Homebrew will continue to be our path forward for IDEs - we hope to drum up interest so that the upstream projects can just "turn on" Linux builds in Homebrew. In the meantime we'll ship the major IDEs we need.
We've added containerd to the base images and will bring Docker in as well so that everything works out of the box, there will not be a need to do the adduser mumbo jumbo, we'll take care of that for you. Research in this area is still ongoing!
How we'll accomplish this transition is still a bunch of guesstimates, so consider this one a slow burn.
Thanks to to Vito Castellano from Bold Brew for continuing to improve the experience! Check out the Bold Brew v2.2.0 post to get more info! We've got all the issues fixed so this menu should work great moving forward. The intent is less stuff baked in, and more options, that you can freely install and remove. Note that these will also all work on any Linux with Homebrew:
The first is our ide selection, which offers a selection of VSCode, Codium, and Jetbrains toolbox for graphical IDEs, as well as nvim, helix, and micro for you CLI nerds.
The experimental-ide selection includes the individual Jetbrains products if you prefer to install those one-by-one, as well as Antigravity and Cursor. These will be promoted to the production tap as we get more feedback. We've also started to add Swift tools into the list so that we can tap into this exciting open source community!
And finally, thanks to our custom tap we are investigating on how to bring bluefin-cli to MacOS, so that you can have these same convenience tools on multiple operating systems. James has a prototype that you can check out.
Our AI toolset continues to expand. I'd like to highlight goose as a tool that I have been really digging into lately. Its donation to the Agentic AI Foundation makes this a great choice for your local LLM/CLI needs.
And here's the stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else in this report!
Consolidated ISOs - we'll be centralizing ISO building into one repository and plan on having regularly refreshed ISOs every month
Powerwash is here! - ujust powerwash is now in alpha and ready for testing - use this command if you want to blow away the data on your PC for donation. This wraps the bootc install reset --experimental command for convenience behind some confirmation dialogs. Be careful with this one! Check the bootc documentation for more info
Actually Going to Market (GTM)
We're almost to the point where we can start to market Bluefin instead of purposely going under the radar
Investigating refreshed video content for the website - this will be expensive so we probably won't look into this until after the user-visible features have landed
On to the numbers! First off let's look at our critical upstreams. This level of growth confirms our decision to trust in systems that prioritize application developers.
As you can see, we not only bet on Flathub, we worked with the folks at Bazaar to ship a pure Flathub experience on our images. If you're looking for one thing to donate to in 2026, please consider donating to Kolunmi - app development on Linux will never improve unless we invest in the application ecosystem directly.
Homebrew Yearly Statistics - Bluefin (#11), Bazzite (#12), and Aurora (#15) have a strong showing in homebrew usage
This year we moved to LFX Insights as our platform. Here are our complete contributor metrics and a few charts. You can also always check out all our charts on our Analytics page, where we've finally crossed the 3k weekly users milestone!
I've selected some graphs, feel free to dive in and don't forget to check out Aurora and Bazzite too!
This ended up longer than anticipated, thank you for joining us in 2025, and we look forward to working with you in 2026! And lastly if you've made it this far and still want more backstory, make sure you check out this interview with Michael Tunnell:
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Upcoming changes to Homebrew and CLI behavior]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/upcoming-homebrew-cli-changes/2025-12-27T00:00:00.000ZWe hope that you're enjoying the holidays! We're making some important changes to how Homebrew and command-line tools work in Bluefin. These changes will land in this Tuesday's weekly build.
Homebrew's path will now be placed after the system path. This will cause brew doctor to complain, but we feel that this will lead to a cleaner experience overall. This has been working well in testing, and the change is already on the daily builds if you're using one of them.
Atuin has been causing some issues, so we've disabled it by default to ensure a stable experience with bluefin-cli. We plan to investigate a better integration for Atuin in the future.
We will be publishing a large year-in-review update next week that will cover these topics in much more detail, but we wanted to give you a heads-up on these behavioral changes before they land. In the meantime, we've set up todo.projectbluefin.io for you to follow along with the major changes coming in Bluefin. Thanks!
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Easier Homebrew Installation for Custom Images]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/easier-homebrew-installation-for-custom-images/2025-12-15T00:00:00.000ZWe've created a new repository to make it much easier to add Homebrew to your custom bootc images. @ublue-os/brew repository provides a pre-packaged OCI container image that bundles everything you need to add Homebrew to your custom image-based systems. This is an evolution of a long journey to integrate homebrew better onto our Linux systems. Instead of manually setting up Homebrew, configuring services, and managing shell integrations, you can now include everything with a single line in your Containerfile.
On first boot, the brew-setup.service automatically extracts Homebrew to /var/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew, sets up proper permissions, and makes it ready to use. The image also includes timers for automatic updates and upgrades, keeping your Homebrew installation current.
This removes a bunch of the manual stuff you had to do in your template to get the full thing, now it's much easier and reliable for everyone. Once we're done the container will rebuild after a Homebrew release, keeping us up to date and safe!
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[New Huntress and Holiday Artwork]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/huntress-holiday-wallpapers/2025-12-14T00:00:00.000ZWorking with artists can be fun because they all move at different schedules so sometimes when it rains it pours.
We're excited to announce two beautiful new wallpapers: Andy Frazer's latest creation Huntress, and a festive holiday wallpaper from Aurora.
Original Bluefin artist Andy Frazer returns with Huntress, a stunning new addition to our wallpaper collection. Following his previous work on Dusk, Andy continues to bring his distinctive paleoart style to Bluefin. We were going for a more weathered Bluefin this time around. No longer the ideal one perched on a rock ... this one has been through some things.
Andy's books make excellent gifts for dinosaur enthusiasts of all ages. Check out his Etsy shop for his full collection of paleoart books and prints.
These wallpapers are available through the @ublue-os/homebrew tap. We've finally solved the teething problems with the tap and we now consider it production ready. You can install them using ujust bbrew and selecting the artwork option: (this is broken right now sorry). We do not yet ship these by default so right now they are opt in:
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Documentation updates!]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/driver-versions-and-extensions/2025-12-07T00:00:00.000ZWe've added two pages of documentation today:
Regressions suck. And it also sucks finding out where they happened, especially with the power of bootc switch available! What good is a switch if you don't know where to switch to! I hate looking this up by hand, so we whipped this up:
The Driver Versions page tracks kernel, NVIDIA driver, and Mesa versions across all Bluefin release channels. This consolidated view makes it straightforward to:
Troubleshoot driver-specific issues - If a recent update broke something, you can identify exactly which driver version changed
Switch to specific versions - Each release links directly to the GitHub release notes and includes bootc switch commands
Compare channels - See how stable, GTS, and LTS differ in driver versions at a glance
The page includes direct links to upstream release notes for NVIDIA drivers and Mesa, so you can dig into the details when needed.
The Tips and Tricks page has a new refreshed look with extension thumbnails. We haven't touched these in a while, but the reason I was there was to add Copyous to our list of recommended extensions. This thing is so good! It puts a strip of clipboard items on the top that you can summon:
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Interview with Michael Tunnell]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/interview-with-michael-tunnell/2025-12-06T00:00:00.000ZI had the pleasure of sitting down with Michael Tunnell to discuss Aurora, Bazzite, Bluefin, cloud-native Linux desktops, and the future of the project.
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Flatpak Support in Brewfiles]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/flatpak-support-in-brewfiles/2025-12-04T00:00:00.000ZFlatpak 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.
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.
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. π
Woo! We feel that this is a nice complement to devcontainers, providing even more flexibility to your workflows!
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!
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!)
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[Bluefin and Paleoartists]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/bluefin-and-paleoartists/2025-11-27T00:00:00.000ZHappy Thanksgiving for those of you in the US eating dinosaurs! Today I am happy to show off some of the recent collaboration we've been doing with some awesome paleoartists. We've covered this before but now the collection is complete!
Our newest collaboration is with Dr. Natalia Jagielska, a world renowned expert paleontologist and paleoartist! I've always been a huge fan of her art style and she has graciously given us three wonderful pieces of art. The first you probably already recognize since it's been the wallpaper of the month for November, entitled Collapse:
The second is an homage to Ubuntu's famous Hardy Heron wallpaper, originally designed by Ken Wimer. This one is a mashup of one Natalia's pterosaurs in place of the heron. This one is called Tenacious Pterosaur.
And lastly we have Prey, starring a hungry Venetoraptor gassenae, which is a pterosaur ancestor from the Triassic. This one surprised me, I thought it was a mammal at first!
Natalia's artwork was vectorized and remastered by Delphic Melody, please consider donating so that the collaboration can continue!
Original Bluefin artist Andy Frazer returns with Dusk. I love this one.
Also Andy is working on another Bluefin for us, which I haven't seen yet. I can't wait to find out! Andy also has a 25% off special on all his books. I have a few of these and they are not only awesome to own but make great gifts as well.
This is not yet included by default so you can hop in early with a ujust bbrew and select artwork. In the future this will be automated for you:
bluefin-wallpapers-extra will bring this collection in. Also you will notice that the Aurora and Bazzite artwork collections are available. This tap is distro agnostic so go nuts putting dinosaurs, cone people, and mechs everywhere!
You can also just grab them from the repository if you prefer to do it that way. Stay tuned for a special holiday wallpaper, coming soon!
]]>Jorge O. Castrojorge.castro@gmail.comhttps://github.com/castrojo<![CDATA[New Just and Bold Brew Improvements]]>https://docs.projectbluefin.io/de/blog/new-just-and-bbrew/2025-11-24T00:00:00.000ZGreetings 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!
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 Flathubβ
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!
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!
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!
