Guardians, today Bluefin GTS switched its base from Fedora 40 to Fedora 41.
The team has been using F41 based builds throughout the last cycle, and we feel it’s mature and ready to serve you over the next six months. GNOME 47 is a banger, and I think you’ll dig it. We say goodbye to F40, it has served us well!
You’ll receive this update during your next update window, or you can run an update manually. Here’s the major Fedora release information:
- Fedora Magazine: What’s new in Fedora Workstation 41
- GNOME 47 release notes
What is Bluefin GTS?
Bluefin GTS is an operating system for your computer. It is designed to be installed on a device upgrade for the life of the hardware – we accomplish this by sharing the maintenance and care of our systems together as a community. It is designed to be as “zero touch” as possible by providing a curated GNOME experience. Bluefin GTS tracks the previous stable version of Fedora to provide a more chill “Grand Touring” experience.
Bluefin GTS continues to make waves across the cloud native ecosystem, as open source maintainers continue to give us feedback on how to keep the party going:
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:
ISOs?
Unfortunately we are still unable to generate working installation ISOs, so this release will only be important to those of you with working installs.
Work continues on this front but we have nothing new to report, we may have some test ISOs in the next few weeks. 
Major Changes
There are a few major changes from a Bluefin perspective that we’ve been looking forward to:
-
As usual most of the changes are the work we do in GitHub to deliver Bluefin and not so much in the image itself. This took up the bulk of the work this cycle. Here’s a huge changelog of the package updates. You can also check out the release notes or use
ujust changelogsto keep track of what’s going on. We really, really made some efficiency gains across Universal Blue this cycle, we were able to grow the team while getting faster. -
Some packages have moved to flatpaks: Upcoming changes to Bluefin packages for the F42 release - Run
ujust install-system-flatpaksif you want to pull in the new default set of applications. -
Devpod has been removed from the DX images, as we’re awaiting a release on Flathub any day now, exciting!
-
This cycle has also been all about being more up front about our project metrics:
-
We’ve moved over to nvidia-open for the nvidia drivers and will default to recommending them by default. If you are on an older Nvidia system we will continue to make nvidia images for the forseeable future. We’re dropping support for older Nvidia kit moving forward though.
Nice and boring! Just about everything else is the new goodness upstream!
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 42?
Bluefin’s lifecycle is unique, the first step in a new release is GTS “catching up” to the latest stable version of Fedora. This a 2-3 week period where Bluefin and Bluefin GTS are the exact same image, then Bluefin will move on to Fedora 42 whilst Bluefin GTS stays put.
You can opt in to F42 today by using ujust rebase-helper and selecting the latest tag. Then after it’s done you can boot into F42. Feel free to rock it, though we recommend waiting about two weeks until bluefin:stable is ready.
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:
gts (default) |
stable or stable-daily |
latest |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Fedora Version: | 41 | 41 | 42 |
| GNOME Version: | 47 | 47 | 48 |
| Target User: | Most users | Enthusiasts | Advanced users |
| System Updates: | Weekly | Weekly or Daily | Daily |
| Application Updates: | Twice a Day | Twice a Day | Twice a Day |
| Kernel: | Gated | Gated | Ungated |
Desktop DevOps folks wanted!
Bluefin is an active predator and is constantly hungry. You can help keep Bluefin healthy by becoming a contributor! We are an open source project and accept contributions:
- Help Wanted issues
- Contributing Guide
As a cloud native project we are always looking for contributors with skills in Podman, Docker, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, and good ole bash.
What’s Next?
- Bluefin will rebase to F42 in 2-3 weeks
- Bluefin LTS and Bluefin GDX are looking solid, mostly it’s just waiting for secureboot support. In May we will start publishing the ISOs on the website.
Stay Safe
- Always read the documentation before venturing out into the wild.
See you in a few weeks when bluefin:stable migrates to F42. 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!
Sad to hear this. Given that stable was F41 until very recently (maybe it still is as I write) and had ISOs, what makes GTS F41 ISOs not work..? Is there a GitHub issue I could follow? (Not seeing one in a simple search.)
But in the future when there’s a bootc booth we can probably do a group pic or something.