A Fedora CoreOS stable channel for your desktop?!
This is currently beta
Greetings! Got some new options for you to play with today! But before we get into that let’s recap how Bluefin/Aurora publishes its versions. Right now we do the following, we publish versions of our images based on Fedora’s releases, currently this is:
latest → Fedora 40 (Always the current version of Fedora)
gts → Fedora 39 (Always Fedora -1)
You can inspect these for yourself using the skopeo tool, or just look them up on github. Additionally we add a date tag so you can conveniently rebase to a specific day:
This lets users either pin to a specific version so you can gate when you’re moving to a new major release, or you can just stick to the out-of-the-box gts or latest tag and get that hands-off experience we’re striving for.
However, CoreOS does things differently, they don’t really do major versions, they do stable, testing, and next.
As you can see, CoreOS also follows Fedora’s versions, but they do something really neat that we’ve wanted for the desktop. They gate their kernel releases and instead publish it on a biweekly basis. So this is effectively the latest version of Fedora, but with a slower cadenced kernel. This appeals to some of us as it’s an extra quality gate, and it effectively hands the throttle settings to the CoreOS team. So now it looks like this:
latest → Fedora 40 (Always the current version of Fedora)
stable → Fedora CoreOS (2 weeks behind latest, give or take)
gts → Fedora 39 (Always Fedora -1)
Note that you’re not running a different kernel, just the same one you had a few weeks ago.
Use Case
The obvious one is for people who want to follow the latest Fedora release but don’t want to go first, but still want a fresh GNOME/KDE 
We may also move this channel to a weekly publishing cadence, but that’ll depend on how it feels to drive in practice (and that’s where we need the feedback)
Note that Surface and Asus images won’t be provided for these, we wanna keep you on those projects’ specific kernels.
Special Thanks
@m2Giles worked on this over the course of the past few days, hope you enjoy!
Trying it
You’ll likely want to pin your existing image with sudo ostree admin pin 0, check the docs for more info.
Rebase instructions are in the admin guide but the tldr is:
rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin:stable
Adjust to whatever image you’re on, which you can get by running an rpm-ostree status.
When you reboot you’ll be on the older kernel:
Future Work
So why do this at all? If you’ve been following along this entire time you may have noticed that we’re fans of continuous integration.
We think it’s a good thought exercise to see what Fedora/Kinoite built on a CoreOS model would look like. It sounds good on paper, but you never know until you see how it drives on the track. So if you like the leading edge but want it backed up just a tad, kick the tyres and let us know!
Companion Video
