In the spirit of the Bazzite survey I threw up a feedback form, you can find it via feedback.projectbluefin.io!
The form is anonymous and the team reads each one. Also I’m planning on just keeping it there so if you want to submit things later as you find stuff feel free to do so! It’s purposely open ended so you can write long-form answers.
Actually since the form is anonymous we can use this thread for discussion. If you want to share your feedback in here it can start a fun discussion about stuff.
Feel free to drop in one of your answers below!
Something I’d love is an image that has some of the niceties from Bluefin (codecs, homebrew, distrobox, Tailscale, docker) but without as many tweaks to gnome or some of the non flatpak installed apps (input remapper for example).
I found bluefin to be nice and stable (with the exception of an outside issue with the kernel) but I did love how clean and minimal OpenSUSE Aeon was for example. Bluefin has better support for things like TPM, disk encryption, etc and a better community though - would be cool to customise/strip it down a little bit.
You can run it with Fedora’s defaults instead if you want, here are the instructions on how to do that:
Sorry for the (potentially annoying) question, I saw those instructions but couldn’t work out the best way to remove system installed apps like input remapper, couldn’t remove them in Software.
Yeah those are included in the image, you can’t remove them, you can throw in a custom .desktop file in .local/share/applications if you wanna hide it, but I just leave it in one of the menu folders and move on with my life.
Thank you for all the work with Bluefin and Aurora.
I think a different approach to theming QT/KDE apps in Bluefin (and GTK apps in Aurora) would be nice. I recently came across this call to stop theming apps, and I agree with the general gist: https://stopthemingmy.app/.
I think that Gnome apps should look like they would in Gnome, GTK apps should look like they would without any extra theming, QT/KDE apps should look like they would in KDE without any extra theming. I know that “extra theming” is not always a clear line, but I think apps should look like the developers wanted them to look like. In the case of LibAdwaita, trying anything else simply becomes an ugly mess.
However, many distros/DE try to make everything look similar, weather KDE with their own GTK Breeze theme or, in Bluefin, the (now deprecated) QGnomePlatform. The latter adds a title bar to QT apps that clashes with the Breeze colors of the main window and contains hacky-looking Breeze buttons.
In KDE, it is relatively easy to make Gnome applications look like they would in Gnome. In Bluefin, I deinstalled QGnomePlatform to get the default QT Wayland titlebar, which looks decent and uses Breeze colors. I then set QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=kde for all flatpaks so that all KDE apps look like they would in KDE. I may have also added theme files somewhere. The only thing missing is automatic switching between light and dark theme; I don’t know how to implement this.
Now, my apps all look like their developers intended them to look. I don’t need all apps to look the same, other operating systems do not work this way either, and many proprietary programs, such as Spotify, have their own looks anyway. I think if would be nice if in Bluefin and Aurora, apps would look as their developers intended to by default. This approach also simply seems the least hacky and most clean, although that is of course particularly subjective.
I must add that I am no expert in this area, and I know that it is not always clear what the “default” theme is for some apps, but I think my points do make sense. Finally, I did rebase to Bluefin from Aurora, so this maybe have impacted the theming; maybe any issues I had were because of that, at least in Bluefin.
We don’t add this on purpose, something pulls it in (I think it’s Fedora Media Writer). We’re not really purposely trying to theme anything afaict.
Thank you for the fast response. I noticed it myself just now that QGnomePlatform etc. is installed every time I install a QT app. Oh well, thankfully I can easily change these things myself, so it’s not a big issue, thought I’d just mention them.
Thank you, btw., for detailing how to go back to the Fedora Gnome defaults regarding fonts, icons, etc. in the Bluefin Introduction. I like the light approach Bluefin has in regard to theming (with easy options of using the defaults) and hope it stays that way.
I don’t have time to write out every answer so I cobbled together a video discussing some of ya’lls feedback!
If I missed something you’d like to see answered feel free to ask followup questions in this thread!
Thank you very much @j0rge for making the feedback form and the feedback video. While I don’t use bluefin myself, Aurora-DX has been my go-to for my computers that I don’t game on as much and Bazzite on my Steam Deck LCD.
I will contribute to the feedback form, but for now I will post a couple of things here, if nobody minds. 
I use fish has my default shell, so it would be nice to see some standard extra bin paths already set when switching, such as /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin, ~/bin and ~/.local/bin.
I would love to see the ability to use zfs with bluefin, aurora and bazzite. I was so happy to see that there was a zfs tag for ucore, which is now my server OS of choice in my house. I switched from TrueNAS SCALE and was able to import my zpools without issues.
Atomic images make a lot of sense to me, as well as podman, so I am happy to see the technology mature. I need to see some more time looking at how I can tweak things by building my own ISOs and how much maintenance I will have to continue to put into it when I do set it up.
Thanks so much for you and the rest of the people working on these projects!
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