First Installation Bluefin Horror and Broken Terminal

Hello,

It’s very unfortunate that I have to write here at all, as I’m quite confused. First off, I’ve been a Mac user for years and now finally want to switch to Linux. That’s why I bought a Framework13 AMD. I know Bluefin from my Steam Deck, but although I like KDE, I prefer GNOME. I like the Mac look.

However, I have to say that I’ve had one of the creepiest installation experiences. After the installation, with the GTS version, half of all GNOME extensions were broken. Switching to Stacked finally fixed it. One would assume that the GTS version, of all things, would work properly.

Anyway, now let’s get to my current problem: my terminal only opens in the Ubuntu Toolbox. Even if I click on “MyComputer,” it still only opens the Ubuntu Toolbox. I have no way to access a standard terminal. If I uninstall the toolbox, it just reinstalls itself. I have no way of opening a normal terminal.

What is the problem?!

I’m using Bazzite, and I’ve never experienced anything like this before. I’m absolutely clueless, and unfortunately, this is turning into the worst Linux installation experience I’ve had in years. I’d blame myself, but the system (Framework13 + Bluefin) has only been up for a couple of hours.

I’m completely at a loss as to what to do now.

Have you run an update yet?

We’ve had some problems with the last ISO run of GTS due to an issue, I recommend grabbing the stable release instead of GTS:

I’ll update the website to remove the dropdown for now, sorry for the inconvenience!

Hello, so Sable is running quite well except for the broken terminal, which only shows the Ubuntu toolbox and is unable to do anything else. I reinstalled Ptyxis as a Flatpak, but it only displays the system terminal. Neither the official terminal nor the one in the Appstore can switch to or away from containers. The official terminal always shows the Ubuntu toolbox, and all attempts to change this have no effect. Ptyxis also only shows the system terminal. By the way, I know this terminal from Bazzite, where I could easily switch – initially, that worked here as well but stopped at some point. I’d like to fix this, but I have no idea why it’s behaving so strangely.

That’s strange did you do a clean reinstall? Can you paste the output of distrobox ls?

Is there a way to reset the entire Toolbox/Distrobox setup to its initial state, or even reset the entire system, without having to recreate my entire home directory? Basically, a complete system reset?

I’ve already tried rollbacks and other options, but the Toolbox/Distrobox setup is completely broken. Now, BoxBuddy doesn’t work at all. Every attempt to install a containerized Linux fails: the terminal appears for about 10 seconds and then disappears without doing anything.

I managed to fix the terminal issue by deleting and recreating the user account. Now the terminal works normally again. But is there a way to reload the entire system, overwrite the existing configuration, and end up with a clean system again?

Can this be done with RPM-OStree? If yes, how?

Sorry, I’m not very experienced in this area. The whole situation feels like I’ve never used Linux before – even though I’ve been using Bazzite for over 1.5 years and have successfully installed software in containers before. I really have no idea what went wrong.

sudo rpm-ostree reset should reset your OS files to it’s default state. leaving your home directory intact

distrobox ls and distrobox rm should remove the toolboxes. You can also open boxbuddy to remove all your distroboxes if you want

1 Like

We can’t help without technical information.

That’s strange did you do a clean reinstall? Can you paste the output of distrobox ls?

A sudo bootc status would help here too.

So, I’ve tried everything. The command distrobox rm ends with the message “Cannot find container my-distrobox”. I have no idea what that means, except that it doesn’t work.

Additionally, the command sudo rpm-ostree reset says there is “nothing to do.” Everything seems empty—no distroboxes, nothing.

I had uninstalled BoxBuddy. After reinstalling it, it still doesn’t work. When I try to install a system, the terminal opens briefly, but then nothing happens.

However, I still have a Fedora toolbox, which now throws an error. The system attempts to report a crash during the build process (“Found incomplete layer…”). I think that’s everything—basically, nothing has changed.

When you try everything, things can get broken along the way. Unless you’re experienced (and sometimes even when you are), this results in digging a deeper and deeper hole. This leaves the system in an unknown state, and no one can help you.

I suggest backing up anything you want to keep, then installing bluefin stable.
After the system is up, try to do one thing. If it doesn’t work, stop. Create a post on this discourse with a descriptive title detailing what you did (with details) and what you expected to happen. Someone can probably help you.

E.g. in the bluefin category:
—-

Fresh install, terminal opens Ubuntu instead of host

I just installed bluefin stable from the website on my <laptop details>.
When I open the terminal, it seems to be creating an Ubuntu system, then I get an Ubuntu prompt.

How do I get a prompt for my host system?

—-
Then wait for someone to respond.

1 Like

Sorry for the digression, but I recently installed Bluefin in a laptop and used GTS-- the only issue i noticed is that it seemingly installed an “older” version of bluefin, but it got solved immediately after running an update. Is there something else I should be looking for?

1 Like

Yeah that should be fine!

1 Like