A little over three years ago some of my fellow ex-Ubuntu friends helped me complete the first prototype for Bluefin. It was our pocket vision of a “what if we could start over and make exactly what we want?”.
As you can see it was literally a script to install some flatpaks on Silverblue, nothing special, just another “fix me script” on the internet. Eighteen months later we would combine our vision with Fedora’s support for bootable OCI containers.
The result is Universal Blue, our more formal attempt to reboot the linux desktop. After founding a community, sorting out the base images and all that “open source stuff” came uCore and Bazzite. More recently Aurora has joined the flock. Finally, the tools to make our own fate.
I don’t really have anything insightful to say after working on this thing with so many awesome people other than I’m just so proud of everyone that has contributed to Universal Blue. You have my thanks, you’ve made my operating system invisible.
But more importantly we’ve learned a ton, it makes me so happy to see people who started in Universal Blue go on to get great jobs in open source. You helped make that happen! There are advantages to learning in-demand tech skills to build your desktop with!
So here we are, just a short three years later. 16.5 million pulls, nice. Cheers to you, here’s to another three more! Post a pic of your desktop/laptop setup!
First post here, but just wanted to say thanks for everyone’s efforts on this! I’ve been trying to make the full time switch to Linux for years, but always clung on to a Windows dual boot for one reason or another. Then Microsoft came out with Copilot Recall, and I also saw a recommendation for Bazzite. Decided to wipe the slate clean on my Framework and go with a single Bazzite partition, and haven’t looked back. I’ve had the odd glitch, particularly with the eGPU, but nothing that I can’t live with. It’s easily the best Linux desktop experience I’ve ever had!
I have always wanted to daily drive Linux desktop, and with the amazing work being done here, I could finally feel confident to completely switch over. Thanks everyone involved in this amazing project!!
Night blue setup!
Is there a way to donate financially? I don’t have the skills to contribute in any of the ways listed on the Contribute page.
I couldn’t find a link on the forum, the UB page, or the Aurora page.
It truly is an amazing Linux experience on a laptop. All of the contributors have done so well to make such a reliable and newbie-friendly distro (I am a newbie myself, having switched from Windows to Aurora in May!).
Happy 3rd birthday to Universal Blue, and congratulations to you, Jorge, as well as to the development team and the contributors, for reaching this milestone!
Discovering this project was a turning point in my personal Linux journey, and experiencing Bluefin made me feel certain that the approach envisioned by the team is exactly what I want on my machines. It also inspired me to learn and put together my own Silverblue image, which is what I’m currently running right now (and hopefully, far into the future, too!) on my two machines. From here onward I can see many many possibilities - and big big biiig thanks to this project and everyone behind it for opening up those possibilities, not just for me, but also for countless computer enthusiasts, tinkerers, as well as users out there! I look forward to celebrate many more milestones in the future.
Lenovo T480s with i7-8550U and UHD Graphics 620 for work and mobile personal use, running my T480s-specialized image, and desktop with Ryzen 5 5600 and Radeon RX 6600 for home personal use, hobbies, and pretty much everything else, running my desktop-specialized image. Inspirations were greatly taken from Bluefin and Bazzite! Also looking to replace my years-old monitor with a better one, preferably something wider, 2K and in white.
You can sponsor Jorge since he is currently paying for all of the Github Stuff (including the image builders), the domains for Ublue and Bluefin and so on.
Aurora (or myself) doesn’t need donations, the only recurring costs are 3$ a month for the Aurora ISO hosting on cloudflare (not even 2 scoops of icecream here in Austria) and the yearly fee for the domain which is like 10 bucks which I am happily paying out of my pocket since I dont want to ask for donations. Your money is better spent sponsoring jorge since he has a lot more upkeep costs^^.
Joined team Bazzite around January (though my current install is from April) <3
Love it and you guys are doing an amazing job, you’re the OS I’ve been recommanding to my gamer friends looking to switch over from Windows
Happy Birthday Universal Blue! Crazy that time flies so fast since I started using and contributing to this project, here’s to the future of linux desktops!
(framework setup below as requested )
and THANK YOU for this truly AWESOME project & team effort. Much appreciated! 
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