Aurora Announcement

Bluefin and Aurora
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Hi there, fellow Bluefin enjoyers!

Many of you might have already heard that there is a fork of Bluefin with a KDE desktop floating around.

I am here to “formally” announce Aurora as a fork of Bluefin. Aurora is Bluefin but with another coat of paint, the KDE Desktop. Many people love and cherish GNOME, but others want the customizability or the looks of a vanilla KDE experience. For those people, Aurora is here to serve them that need!

Aurora includes everything that makes Bluefin and Bluefin-DX awesome, including brew on host, the bluefin-cli, the starship CLI experience, Tailscale and the container-native Ptyxis terminal. You’ll find that most of the things you’re used to in Bluefin are the same under the hood, including the just commands. Aurora is not designed to be a drastically different experience than Bluefin, which also means we ( I ) can keep it regularly in sync with upstream so you get the latest changes.

Aurora is built on the kinoite-main Images. The images feature almost no customization, aside from some quality of life features and some branding :stuck_out_tongue:. You can expect a vanilla KDE experience with developer batteries under the hood.

The image is considered beta currently as we ( or I ) wrinkle out all the little details and clean the image tree up a bit from the Gnome stuff that does not belong in a KDE image :grin:.

I’m excited to hear your thoughts on this!

To see everything Bluefin and Aurora can do, see this blog post announcement about Bluefin!

https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/introduction-to-bluefin/41

Follow the project on GitHub and star it if you like! You can also find all the ISO download links in there.
https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin

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Thank you to @kylegospo for the awesome work on coloring the ASCII logo and all the other help in making this image work in the way it does now.

And thanks to the contributors on Bluefin and Ublue that make it as awesome as it is now!

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Is this something that is living under the uBlue organization, or is this a separate project and we just vibe? Very exciting and looking forward to the branding twist. Bazzite does it so well and I love it.

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This is all my personal project, if you can call it that, for now. The only affiliation I have with Ublue that I have is using upstream Bluefin and their Akmods, Images etc.

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Will this be eventually merged with main ublue-os?

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No. Main images will not stray away from upstream too much.
Nevermind, I apologize. I misunderstood the question :sweat_smile:

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Congrats on such a good work.
I am Bluefin user (ex now, as I had some issues which I can not solve) so I wanted to try KDE.

Bazzite is really good but too much for me as I don’t game that much.

And Aurora seems perfect spot.
Did install like 2 days ago. Without issues. Installation was fast. On GitHub it is stated beta image, on first boot it says alpha :stuck_out_tongue:

Didn’t find any big issues.

Btw how did you get those terminal, colors and the rest :slight_smile:

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That should all be included right on the image, the terminal in question is Ptyxis and fastfetch is aliased with the colors ootb.

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Hi there! @NiHaiden :sparkles:
Super cool that you’ve contributed with this, looks really good!. I’ve recently found Bluefin project and am also a big KDE enjoyer, so this seems like the perfect choice for me. However, I am a bit curious to the longevity of this project. What are your long-term plans to keep this updated and maintained, considering you’re doing this solo(?).

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I suppose it will be long term project. He did really great job with design, full work on bluefin kde and dx version. I am waiting for new website, that would be dope I guess. And the Aurora is really stable so :slight_smile:

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This is definitely a long-term project and I’d like to keep it maintained, updated and making it more awesome while I can. This is currently a solo-adventure with some help of some Ublue Team Members (esp. Kyle and Nickname). I’m currently working on the website, yesterday I made the third major rebase on top of Bluefin so now the Epson Printer drivers are available in Aurora as well.

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Awesome to hear that. So new .iso will be ready or not so big update?
Previous Aurora is really stable, no issues (at least noticable)

If you need help with testing or something else just ask :slight_smile: You are not alone!

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very cool project! I see you already have a ton of images, would you like to add some images using the userns images from secureblue as base?

This would be a cool mix, as I would really like the “opinionated” experience of bluefin but with KDE and secureblue settings.

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This is up to @qoijjj since they maintain secureblue. There is already Bluefin secureblue images, but I would say wait a little while before adding Aurora this early in my opinion.

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depends on the direction ;D my idea was consuming bluefin-userns-hardened and bluefin-userns-nvidia-hardened into Aurora-hardened images.

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I don’t think it will go this direction. The most likely direction will be having Aurora part of Bluefin similar to how Bazzite has both KDE Plasma and GNOME builds, but that is being discussed. The priority has been prepping for Fedora 40.

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that would be a cool idea too!

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Tracking issue:

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Glad to hear! As mentioned by others, let us know if we can be of any help in terms of testing or any sort :slight_smile:

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Nice job! It’ll be even better if you could write more specifically about the differences between Aurora and Kinoite