One of the reasons we’ve been very careful about our commitments around Bluefin LTS is due to the nature of the role it has to fill. Therefore we’re pretty shy about calling it ready even though for all intents and purposes it’s ready to go.
One of these pain points has been uncertainty around secure boot. While this is handled in Fedora, after talking to leaders in CentOS and Red Hat, we now have a path forward for something that would more sustainable for us.
Therefore Bluefin LTS is back on the table, but we’ve also discovered that there are also many places we could be coordinating with CentOS. For example there’s multiple kernel configurations, and akmods work that we could be leveraging, etc. But this will take time and volunteers.
After talking to folks in the CentOS project, we think a slow burn beta is the way to go since many of us are busy and only working on this part time. I personally use this on the majority of my machines and it’s my preferred Bluefin. As outlined before, this is more about our ability to make a support commitment than a technical one.
Awesome sauce! I’ve been trying out Bluefin LTS on a test laptop and like the idea of a slow churning atomic distro since I don’t really need the absolute latest native packages on the OS when Flatpak/Distrobox can save the day. Honestly was a little down when I saw that the LTS version was about to get discontinued until I saw this post.
Is Bluefin LTS still planned to have GNOME updates from CentOS Stream? How often will the GNOME updates be compared to latest/GTS Bluefin?
There’s a GNOME backport sig or whatever that publishes backported gnome. You can opt in via bluefin:lts-testing but not sure the state of it at this time. Probably good to do it in a VM.
I tried an installation of Bluefin LTS with the iso downloaded from the website. The anaconda’s default disk layout is like fedora based bluefin, making one btrfs partition for the system. As far as I know CentOS Stream does not do the partition layout like fedora, nor does it support btrfs.
Is this a decision by the bluefin LTS development team, or is it simply because of the anaconda installer’s default settings? Thanks. I’d love to see a LTS version offering coming into fruition.
The current kernel used by Bluefin-lts is the hyperscale kernel which supports Btrfs. Since it does, the profile built for it uses the same Btrfs layout that fedora uses.
Thanks for answering! I’ve been trying Bluefin LTS on my potato laptop for two days, and so far I like it a lot. I don’t know if it’s genuine, but I found that my laptop fans spin less and produce less heat on LTS than on fedora based bluefin/aurora/bazzite.
The only glitch so far is that on the image dated on 20250520, Search Light works, and on the recent images it stopped working.
