I use Arch for all my computers, including my "critical" systems. I only do full upgrades when I know I have the time to troubleshoot something broken, but rarely need to do so.
More than this, I actually use Arch as the OS for thousands of computers for my work that end up in customer hands, who expect stability. I'm not sure at what point it stops being Arch, though - I pin the package repositories to internal mirrors with fixed package distributions from specific dates to control the software that goes to them, so it's not really rolling release anymore I guess - I control the releases and when updates go out.
Arch is what you make of it. My Arch project desktop pc is constantly shifting and breaking and needing attention as I continually improve it and play with things. My Arch laptop that runs my life and work and is the most important computer I own is a paragon of stability and perfect functioning.
Nope 😂 though, despite their decision obviously having nothing to do with me, I did find it to be somewhat flattering and a bit reassuring that the fine Valve engineers seemed to make similar decisions to me.
So glad they’re moving forward on the non destructive front! Non destructive editing such a useful feature. I will always prefer to be able to non-destructively edit things I’m working on to easily be able to change things if necessary or to be able to see how I did something in the future!
The survey was absolute hell on mobile until I actually read the part where it says you can just double click. Made it so much easier. I personally chose the more intricate designs as my favorite and less intricate and more simplified designs as my least favorite. Detailed and intricate designs or nothing for me.
The easiest step into this world is KDE. It has a store for users to share global themes, color themes, even sddm animations.
You can use kwin rules to send certain apps to certain desktops, start shaded, all sorts of fun stuff.
And then you can throw a tiling manager on top of that. If you want to use the control panel, you can install bismuth. If you’re comfortable editing text files, awesome or i3 (but I have yet to go that far).
If you really want to go for it, hyperland looks incredible, but it is a lot of up front work.
I don’t get it. What’s the spirit of ubuntu? Is the underlying OS based on ubuntu instead of fedora?
What’s the actual difference to fedora silverblue?
Half the answer to “why did you make your own linux?” is that it’s awesome being able to revert back to the original fedora OS.
Because it follows a cloud-native approach, the end user has the flexibility to rebase back to the stock Fedora or any Universal Blue image. It’s more like having someone install, configure, and maintain a polished Fedora setup for you.
And the other half doesn’t provide any info either
Bluefin utilizes Fedora’s OCI features to compose and build an OS image. This process is overseen by a well-structured community that is committed to automation and sustainability. The end result is akin to a configuration management tool like Ansible or Salt, but without the typical challenges associated with maintaining a custom distribution.
I think it boils down to: “because we can”. “We can automatically build our own setup on github and that’s what we do”
Installing tailscale, zsh, fish, vscode, extension manager, codecs, etc. out of the box isn’t enough for a new distro. Especially because you break the signing of fedora by doing so.
I’m a bit surprised that they mentioned “distribution” on the Bluefin website, as the Universal Blue site (the base project behind Bluefin) explicitly mentions not being a distro - and I know that Jorge tends to be very clear that they’re not building a distro:
This isn’t a distribution, you can always rebase back to Fedora without reinstalling. This is a unique relationship between upstream and downstream that is popular in cloud, but still new to the Linux desktop. “Custom images” seems to be a decent place to start since that’s what people call them in cloud.
I checked the github page you link and can find no differences listed, just three bullet points that appear to have be written by a PR team. You say an Ubuntu Desktop experience melded with Fedora Silverblue. Don’t you mean GNOME? Ubuntu isn’t a desktop environment, it’s a Linux distro. GNOME is the desktop environment. That seems like an embarassing blunder in your copy when you claim to be building a distro for “serious” developers.
If it weren’t open source, I’d think this was a scam. Weird choice.
IIRC, Bluefin uses the GNOME extensions that Ubuntu uses - so yes, GNOME in the same way that the current version of Pop!_OS is GNOME + their own extensions.
Instead of linking to articles full of buzz-words, can you explain what’s the difference between this distro and Fedora Silverblue?
I’m guessing the “spirit of Ubuntu” means they took Silverblue and preconfigured some stuff.
I’ve spend a good amount of time on it trying to figure out what the project is about. Even after clarifying the confusion and multiple people asking for clarification from your side and multiple upvotes, there’s nothing from your side. You reference to something that has been saying nothing for many people.
You didn’t even clarify the magical wonders of ubuntu in your project. I kind of feel insulted if I think properly about it.
Delete following part of your post
Bluefin
A familiar(ish) Ubuntu desktop for Fedora Silverblue. It strives to cover these three use cases:
For users it provides a system as reliable as a Chromebook with near-zero maintenance, with the power of Ubuntu and Fedora fused together. For developers we endeavour to provide the best cloud-native developer experience by enabling easy consumption of the industry’s leading tools. These are included in dedicated bluefin-dx and bluefin-dx-nvidia images. For gamers we strive to deliver a world-class gaming experience via Flathub or bazzite-arch “Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.” - Stephen Jay Gould This image heavily utilizes cloud-native concepts.
GNOME Software with Flathub: Use a familiar software center UI to install graphical software System designed for automatic staging of updates If you’ve never used an image-based Linux before just use your computer normally Don’t overthink it, just shut your computer off when you’re not using it Should I trust you? This is all hosted, built, and pushed on GitHub. As far as if I’m a trustable fellow, here’s my bio. If you’ve made it this far, then hopefully you’ve come to the conclusion on how easy it would be to build all of this on your own trusted machinery. :smile:
The difference between silverblue and your image is that silverblue is signed by fedora and yours isn’t. There’s no reason for anyone but you to use the image. Even if I were to us tailscale and fish, I’d be better off with silverblue.
Extra udev rules for game controllers and other devices included out of the box
All multimedia codecs included
System designed for automatic staging of updates
If you’ve never used an image-based Linux before just use your computer normally
Don’t overthink it, just shut your computer off when you’re not using it
Starship is enabled by default to give you a nice shell prompt
Solaar - included for Logitech mouse management along with libratbagd
Tailscale - included for VPN along with wireguard-tools
zsh and fish optional
Built-in Ubuntu user space
<kbd>Ctrl</kbd>-<kbd>Alt</kbd>-<kbd>u</kbd> - will launch an Ubuntu image inside a terminal via Distrobox and your home directory will be transparently mounted for the Ubuntu image to access
Use this container for your typical CLI needs or to install software that is not available via Flatpak or Fedora
Optional ubuntu-toolbox image with Python, and other convenience development tools. just distrobox-bluefin to get started. To configure just follow the guide.
Optional universal image with Python, Node.js, JavaScript, TypeScript, C++, Java, C#, F#, .NET Core, PHP, Go, Ruby, and and Conda. just distrobox-universal to get started
just assemble shortcut to declaratively build distroboxes defined in /etc/distrobox/distrobox.ini
Refer to the Distrobox documentation for more information on using and configuring custom images
GNOME Terminal - <kbd>Ctrl</kbd>-<kbd>Alt</kbd>-<kbd>t</kbd> - will launch a host-level GNOME Terminal if you need to do host-level things in Fedora (you shouldn’t need to do much).
The difference between silverblue and your image is that silverblue is signed by fedora and yours isn’t.
Of course Fedora only signs Fedora images, we sign our own images.
There’s no reason for anyone but you to use the image. Even if I were to us tailscale and fish, I’d be better off with silverblue.
Then use Silverblue! If you don’t understand the features of something then you might not be the target audience!
This is the umpteenth time I’ve come across this project but I just don’t get what they’re going for here.
These are just custom images, are they not?
If I wanted Ubuntu I’d use Ubuntu. If I wanted Fedora I’d use Fedora. Maybe I’m not getting it but I wonder how big of a population that’s out there that wants some Ubuntu mixed in with a touch of Fedora and some buzzword salad thrown into the mix.
I think you can use Arch for university, but I have a few suggestions:
Don’t update packages unless you have time to fix issues. Rare, but it happens, although usually minor.
Never mess with greeters, kernel modifications, bootloaders, or anything else before login. Fixing issues may require a live USB and take some time. Avoid the temptation! (Ask how I know…)
Use Flatpak where you can for increased stability by way of fewer packages to update.
Of course, you could also use a non-rolling release distro. Nothing wrong with that.
Excuse me if this is a bit of a dumb question, as I have never particularly worried about packaging methods and simply installed what I needed from the official Arch packages or AUR, but how does Flatpak lead to fewer updates? I know it sandboxes things, that’s why I’ve been interested in it for applications I don’t quite trust like Discord, but I never got around to actually switching applications of that sort over and trying the format out.
Speaking of Discord, hooking that out of the “normal packages”, aka everything I update via yay, would be beneficial anyways, since it’s the only thing that forces me to update my system by saying how I’m oh so lucky about a new update coming out and I don’t wanna mess with partial system updates. That’s kinda besides the point though, I just wanted to complain.
Good question. Flatpak doesn’t lead to fewer updates overall, but it does lead to fewer system packages installed via pacman or yay, which can run into dependency conflicts unlike Flatpak.
Flatpak provides a common runtime upon which different applications can be installed via containers, much like apps on a phone. You can then adjust the permissions for each app such as which directories it can access. It’s kind of like installing Firefox (e.g. Flatpak) and then a Firefox extension such as uBlock Origin (e.g. LibreOffice). It doesn’t matter if you’re on Ubuntu, Fedora, or Arch, from the extension’s perspective it’s the same old Firefox and doesn’t touch anything else on your computer. This means uninstalling is clean and it has no dependencies on other packages installed.
The disadvantage with Flatpak is they can be slower (sometimes not even noticeable) and take up more space, although the runtime can be re-used between Flatpak applications. Personally, I like Flatpak for large GUI applications like LibreOffice, which has 170+ dependencies if installed via pacman.
Huh, neat. On my current EOS Desktop PC it’s a bit too late to uninstall everything and reinstall it as a Flatpak, but I’ll keep that in mind for new Linux installs. Thank you :3
"Cloud native" technology is double speak for your shit is running on other people's computers who will be tracking your use and selling it to pay for server upkeep and also maybe profit?
In this case it's referring to the fact that the OS is built upon the same containerization technology used on cloud platforms such as Kubernetes. As a marketing tool it's a bit buzzwordy, but it's not about running the core OS components outside of the physical machine here.
Both are incredibly stupid attempts to convince people they need something they don’t.
You all should look into a ‘blue ocean’ business strategy. Lots of shitty businessmen are constantly trying to push ‘new’ things and have a vested interest in convincing laymen of their necessity.
Needs are born from solving problems, not making them.
Not really relevant, but I’ve got a “rule of thumb” for all security-related issues;
“If it doesn’t nuke my PC, then I’m good. If it does, then I’m still good since backups and logs exist, and if it was related to the latest seucirty issue? Then I make a quick patch and/or update. Then back to 1.”
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