Dinosaurs, Aurora & Branding

I love dinosaurs. Let’s get that out of the way before beginning this topic. I also love KDE Plasma! It allows me to have a much more efficient workflow with a custom layout and workspace grids.

Although I may be somewhat biased, I adore Bluefin’s branding, and because I prefer KDE Plasma over Gnome, I’d have to cast aside my appreciation for dinosaurs if I were to go for Aurora. But yeah, yeah, no big deal; it is how it is. The world doesn’t revolve around my personal tastes, and I can always customize Aurora to look like Bluefin. :wink:

Later on, while reading another topic, Rename “Aurora” to “Bluefin KDE” and “Aurora-DX” to “Bluefin-DX KDE”, I observed that there were some concerns about how the name of Aurora has no relation to Bluefin despite it being a part of the same overarching project. Although I disagree with renaming Aurora to “Bluefin KDE”, I understand where they’re coming from.

“Bluefin and Aurora” is a bit of a mouthful if you want to refer to the project behind them. Having them under one unified name would be ideal, and it would also future-proof the project for if and/or when the decision is made to expand into other desktop environments, such as Cosmic. Please consider that by the way, Cosmic looks awesome. But in the end, I just don’t believe that either Linux workstation should be renamed.

That sets the context for the idea that I’m about to propose.

Later on, while thinking back on the branding and my love for dinosaurs, I thought to myself: “What if Aurora had a titular dinosaur mascot of its own?”

Of course, the logo of Aurora wouldn’t need to be changed. Rather, she would serve as a mascot for Aurora and would be featured on locations such as the website and in brand-new desktop backgrounds.

Aurora the dinosaur, together with Bluefin the dinosaur, could bridge the gap in branding between Aurora and Bluefin. With a dinosaur to represent both projects, they could be portrayed together under a unified brand and provide a sense of consistency between how the two projects are represented.

This would also open up new opportunities. Because dinosaurs would now represent the brand of both Aurora and Bluefin, other aspects of their branding could take advantage of that; for example, we could create an overarching project name referring to them both, such as “Paleoblue.” I’m sure there are better names that could be used, but the point is, it would mean that we wouldn’t have to rename Aurora to have a label that could be used to refer to both projects.

Imagine it this way:

└── Paleoblue *(Name Pending)*
   ├── Bluefin
   ├── Aurora
   └── <new projects w/ dinosaur mascots>

But even if an overarching name isn’t created to encompass both the Bluefin and Aurora projects, I still highly encourage the creation of a dinosaur mascot for Aurora. A consistent element in the branding between both projects would provide a sense of unity, Aurora benefit from having a mascot, and I’d love to see what designs people would come up with for her. :slightly_smiling_face:

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All the dinos are in the dino gallery so that you can add them to whatever desktop you want, including mac and windows, etc.

The name of the overarching project is Universal Blue, which covers all of the images. A cosmic image does exist, check it out here! GitHub - ublue-os/cosmic: A Fedora Atomic based OSTree Image with the COSMIC desktop environment. Thanks to Drakulix for initial image. though probably start with a VM as it’s in Alpha.

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Oh, I’m already using those wallpapers on my desktop right now! In fact, as you posted that, I was just editing my post a moment ago to clarify that I could customize Aurora to look like Bluefin.

And by the way, while I’m here, I should mention that all of the wallpapers in this post besides the first appear to have been downscaled to 1920×823 by Discourse. I grabbed the full resolution versions directly from the Github.

Here’s a zip file of 'em all if anyone is interested, converted to .png for universal support: https://mega.nz/file/JcxRBaxa#5k6Yt1XHhc1o2vEvVIwQrqXV4TViCl1LCDKvfQ2Rh30

Hm, my impression was that Bluefin & Aurora are a sub-project of Universal Blue, distinct from other Universal Blue sub-projects such Bazzite. That’s because there are some distinct characteristics in how they’re built that set them apart, hence why I believe that they’re a project worth distinguishing with their own title.

Essentially, this is how I see it in my mind:

Universal Blue
├── Bazzite
├── uCore
└── n/a (Commonly called Bluefin & Aurora)
   ├── Bluefin
   └── Aurora

I’d say that this isn’t very important, but I imagine that if there were a brand that referred to both Bluefin and Aurora then a website could be created that naturally guides users towards the dedicated website of one or the other, depending on their DE preferences. This overarching brand could also be named in a manner that makes it distinct and recognizable, something that would be useful for SEO because at the moment neither Bluefin or Aurora are at the top of their respective search results.

Really though, the most important thing to me is still the idea of Aurora getting its own dinosaur mascot. :smile:

Speaking of dinosaurs, when I first saw the name “Bluefin”, my mind went to tuna Atlantic bluefin tuna - Wikipedia

The tuna is as impressive as the deinonychus for totally different reasons!

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Just to be a bit contrarian I’d be remiss to not speak up to say that I prefer the branding and theming of Aurora better imho. I find both bluefin and default fedora approaches too garish and cartooney. I especially prefer the SDDM theme which, given that it’s not-trivially alterable in atomic distros, is a nice boon if nothing else.

Spaaaaaace > dinos

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i gave up on KDE years ago - back in the KDE 3 / late GNOME 2 days. Unlike most GNOME fanatics I loved the transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 and have been with GNOME ever since.

But I’m willing to give Aurora a shot … if I understand correctly, I can pin my Bluefin desktop and rebase to Aurora and boot into either one from then on. I’ve got xpra and i3 layered in, so I can always get to the machine remotely and get stuff done.

I’m not an authority on this, so verify externally, but if I recall rebasing between gnome and KDE versions was advised against.

I’ll have to leave it to others to explain why it’s bad (or why I’m wrong) though.

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Think about making a btrfs snapshot of your home if you do not like it. That way you can get rid of KDEs config files easily

Conflicting user configs, mostly. They don’t always play nice together and can lead to unwanted behavior and possible breakages. I believe it’s recommended to create a new user profile for the the new DE. Say you’re on GNOME and want to try out KDE by rebasing, or if on a traditional non-atomic system, install KDE session packages, what you’ll do is create a new user solely for trying out KDE. Or the opposite. This should help avoid user config conflicts in theory… but I’ve never tried, nor do I intend to!

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