Bluefin GTS is now based on Fedora 40

Bluefin and Aurora
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A young Kentrasaurus in the Jurassic.
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Bluefin GTS

Guardians, today Bluefin GTS switched its base from Fedora 39 to Fedora 40. The team has been using F40 based builds throughout the last cycle, and we feel it’s mature and ready to serve you over the next six months.

You’ll receive this update during your next update window, or you can run an update manually. Here’s the major Fedora release information:

What is Bluefin GTS?

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

We fiercely invest in automation and distributed work, which is one of the many reasons why Linux and Open Source have devoured the industry. We strive to bring these cloud native features to the desktop.

You’ll receive the update automatically over the next day or so or click on this button to manually run an update:

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If you’re brand new you can use the website to pick the right image or use one of the direct DL links:

Bluefin-specific changes

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

  • We’ve decided to drop the custom Yaru theming and revert to stock GNOME defaults, which is Adwaita across the board, Inter for the display font, and Jetbrains Mono for the mono font. The window controls and other settings will remain as they are. The Yaru theme and Ubuntu fonts will remain on the image if you want to use gnome-tweaks to maintain that Ubuntu look.

  • The terminal (ptyxis) is now sourced from Fedora instead of our customized COPR build. This was necessary in the early days while we waited for Ptyxis to enter Fedora, but now that it’s in and is the default terminal we can drop the custom build completely.

  • Wallpapers will be changing every month, some will be new. :smile: November’s background is featured in the above screenshot. You can support Jacob Schnurr by snagging stickers from his store, featuring all sorts of dinosaurs.

Future GTS builds will include an accent color that you can tweak to what you’d like, but we didn’t want to have newer builds on adwaita and older builds on yaru, so we’re just going to switch them all as part of this release to keep them consistent with GNOME.

Important information for Nvidia users on Optimus Systems

We’ve had sporadic reports of issues with Nvidia Optimus laptops but were never able to pin down the exact cause(s). bsherman and RoyalOughtness spent a few days debugging and were able to make substantial improvements on our tested hardware.

The Children of Jensen cry out for salvation. --Anonymous

If you have an Optimus laptop that’s been affected then these fixes should make your experience less-awful, we appreciate your feedback!

More Information

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

We also accept donations to sponsor the infrastructure and artwork. If there’s a piece of software in Bluefin that makes you happy, consider donating to the upstream organization and/or authors. Thanks to the present (and past!) supporters for helping out.

Looking for Fedora 41?

You can opt in to F41 by using ujust rebase-helper and selecting the latest tag. Feel free to rock it, though we recommend waiting about two weeks until bluefin:stable is ready. KDE fans can expect aurora:stable at the same time. We’ll announce that soon.

Check the docs for all the available version options:

Is that it?

Nothing makes ops people happier than uneventful things.

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

Here’s the current lay of the land:

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Desktop DevOps folks wanted!

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

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

Stay Safe

See you in a few weeks when bluefin:stable migrates to F41. We can’t give you a solid date because we automated it to happen automatically when CoreOS flips the switch. When it comes to overengineering laziness, we spared no expense!

Feel free to ask questions!

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Can confirm. I checked whether 40 was available for my Bluefin Nvidia gts about an hour ago. It was. I updated and rebooted. So far so good.

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What happened to the Logo Menu? Where are those items now?

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Will Aurora get a GTS channel to stay on F40 like Bluefin or is it only sticking with stable only and that is switching to F41 soon?

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There was a small window this morning where these were dropped, can you confirm that you’re up to date on the newest image? Run an rpm-ostree update to make sure and then reboot. Thanks!

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A GTS Channel wouldn’t yield much difference on Aurora since both Fedora 40 and Fedora 41 are on the same latest KDE version, so sticking with stable and latest only until KDE uses a similar release cadence to GNOME.

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Thanks for the update and everyone’s hard work! :penguin::t_rex::partying_face:

Small error in the post: The bluefin doc link under More information leads to the wrong Bluefin.

(Unless you want to start trading via APIs, then it’s perfect)

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That was it. I updated and rebooted it, and it’s back and working great. Thanks for everything. I love Bluefin.

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I’m loving the new fonts and Adwaita by default :smiley:

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This link is a 404 (for me on Firefox 132.0 on an Ubuntu 24.04 machine).

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@pauldoo, you have to be logged into Github in order this link to work.

Maybe above link could be replaced with link bellow that also works for not logged users_

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Just a quick couple of questions:

  1. Looking at the table it seems to me like gts and stable (not stable-daily) are exactly the same in terms of both software versions and update cadence? I guess there is some nuanced difference? If anyone can explain…

  2. What does it mean that the kernel is gated or ungated? First time I hearing about these terms…

Thank you all.

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Re 1: You are right. For now. stable is in a transition state. As soon as F41 is ready, it will be promoted to stable.

:stable and :stable-daily will upgrade to F41 a few weeks later.

Source: Bluefin and Aurora F41 builds now available

Re 2: “ungated” has been introduced with fix: switch latest images to use ungated upstream kernel by p5 · Pull Request #1722 · ublue-os/bluefin · GitHub
It means, that the latest kernel provided by upstream will be used. When it is “gated”, then it uses the kernel from CoreOS stable. The term is also defined at Administrator's Guide (section “Gated Kernel”)

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Just a quick question. Did we make up with gated/ungated kernel term? Maybe better/simpler:

  • gated: slower cadence
  • ungated: faster cadence

would be clearer.

My suggestion for “target users”:

gts stable stable-daily latest
Target User : Most users Tech savvy users Experts Advance edge users

Probably there is one line missing in table, to be clear, specially a lot of users having huge ego and think we are all advanced users:

gts stable stable-daily latest
Purpose: for my family for me, serious work for playing around for throw-away machine
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I am not a fan of the “family” vs “serious work” vs “expert user” distinction. I consider myself experienced with Linux (20+ years), and fairly advanced (plenty of development on it), yet I choose GTS. There are people similar to me who may chose Debian (even further behind than GTS). Labelling GTS as only for “lesser” uses is a disservice.

It’s less about the expertise of the user, it’s more about what they’re interested in experiencing. No harm in a complete newbie using latest - so long as they know what that means. I’m sure they’d get a lot out of it.

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This is a great take and why GTS is one of the main products of bluefin.

Realistically, my thoughts are GTS is going to be our recommended stream if you want the best software compatibility. All major gnome extensions will be updated and gnome has gone through a full cycle of bug fixes.

The tool chain is also in a great position and won’t have just raced ahead.

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Indeed, a good point about using GTS is to let nerds like myself to willingly run into bugs head first and go for a bug hunt

That’s the reason my grandpa is on GTS right now (and likes it so far)

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Ah, that makes a lot of sense now. Thank you for replying.

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Slightly off topic, but what does GTS stand for? I’ve put in a moderate amount of effort trying to figure this out since I learned about Bluefin a number of months ago, but haven’t come up with any answers from searching this forum, the Bluefin website, the Bluefin documentation site, the GitHub repository, or a general DDG search. It’s very possible I’m missing something obvious, but I’m not sure where else I should be looking at this point.