First impressions with Bluefin (dx)

Bluefin
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The Good

  • The installer and initial configuration experience was excellent. Adding picking your shell, asking to install homebrew and other common initial tasks would go a long way to improve the user experience.
  • Switching to the fish shell with ujust worked perfectly.
  • Installing Flatpaks was quick and worked well.
  • Overall, the system is decently fast (I assume this has the gnome mutter triple buffering patch?).
  • Ptyxis is pretty sweet.

The Not-so-good

Using Intel hardware (Lenovo t480s) and closing and opening the laptop, the DisplayLink binary began churning CPU, causing fans to run at full speed and use excessive power.

I tried removing it with the following, but it didn’t seem to do anything after the reboot (I’m new to rpm-ostree):

rpm-ostree override remove displaylink

I ended up disabling that service with:

sudo systemctl disable displaylink --now

I don’t use Tailscale and also couldn’t remove that as the tailscaled service was also using up some CPU threads, so I just disabled it and disabled the extension from Gnome extensions:

sudo systemctl disable tailscaled --now

My Gnome scaling was automatically set to 125%, which is fine besides what appears to be an xWayland issue where those apps would have blurry and stretched text. I set this back to 100% and increased font sizes where required (there are already other threads about this).

Other Suggestions

  • Adding some kind of handbook like VanillaOS for first setup, to perform common things on Bluefin, like removing/disabling services, common rpm-ostree commands, when to use distrobox etc…
  • Adding the Gnome UI Tune extension out of the box would have my vote (with hide search unchecked).
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Hah, amazing, I consider this the worst part of the experience lol.

We’re working on an initial install wizard, and hoping to put some of that in there. Would love to just automate the brew installation but we weren’t able to get that working right, but we’ll keep trying.

This landed in the F40 builds, if you opt into :latest it’s there. Likely won’t get backported to F39 (which is our default) but it’ll give us some time to shake it out.

For the services, would you mind filing an issue on bluefin for those? Maybe we should do more opting in for these two, displaylink in general feels like a mess lol: How to file issues - #2

The font scaling thing is already on our radar and probably the biggest thing we’re trying to sort out.

This is a continual pain, the docs here are a wiki and other than nickname and myself, many people aren’t contributing to the docs. Open to ideas on this one.

The first run wizard/portal will have a gnome extensions section where we’ll be able to recommend extensions, we don’t want to add more extensions to the image unless we have to. Right off the bat we’d add Just Perfection, impatience, Pano, the day/night switcher one, autorotate, and whatever things we get feedback on. So keep your favorite extension handy for when we get there!

Thanks for your feedback!

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Thanks for reading, @j0rge !

As someone very new to rpm-ostree, this is exactly the kind of docs I’m looking for without searching discourse, e.g. How do I switch to the latest build and switch back? and what exactly can go wrong?

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Added the displaylink issue: DisplayLink eats CPU after closing and opening laptop lid · Issue #1277 · ublue-os/bluefin · GitHub

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Under the updates and throttle settings section:

https://universal-blue.discourse.group/docs?topic=40#upgrades-and-throttle-settings-8

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Running :latest now, all seems good so far.

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