Four Years of Universal Blue

[j0rge]

A little over four years ago some of my fellow ex-Ubuntu friends helped me complete the first prototype for Bluefin. It was our pocket vision of a “what if we could start over and make exactly what we want?”. For you archaeologists, here’s the first version.

Technically a day early but we intend to make this a weekend long celebration. Eighteen months later we would form a community … Universal Blue, with the goal to provide modern Linux operating systems for the next generation of open source users and contributors.

Now we have Bazzite, Aurora, and Cayo. Finally, the tools to make our own fate. I don’t have anything especially insightful to say other than thanks! Let’s take a quick look at where we stand:

We’re sitting at about ~25,000 weekly checkins of Universal Blue systems, and now that we have sort of functional installers, who knows how fast we can grow!

As Kyle mentioned in the Bazzite update our communities continute to grow as well! We’re now well over 30 million pulls of our images (we kind of stopped counting that). Here’s the contributor stats:

Here’s our rolling totals:

Core contributions: 61 individuals
Contributors: 1098 individuals
Participants: 3069 individuals
Visitors: 13469

And as we can see, the amount of contributions since Bazzite started to gain traction has really improved. I’m particularly proud of our contributor distribution here - it proves that non-code contributions around support can help keep our project healthy:

(This chart is measuring the partial month of July, ignore that drop off we’re not collapsing. )

You have my thanks, you’ve made my operating system invisible, it has been a pleasure destroying the Linux desktop with you.

Bluefin

Today is also Bluefin’s fourth birthday. I suppose as the first product she was the one who would push the hardest, and will always strive for the pure bootc experience. The dinosaurs remind us that we need to force change in order to achieve the best possible desktop we can. Here’s a peek at something special:

I was unfortunately unable to find out the lifespan of a Deinonychus, so we’ll have to just roll with it.

Things are pretty calm right now, Bazaar is in and once that gets put into Flathub we can chill more. There’s plenty of folks on what we call “chillops”: they rotate out and relax while the automation hums along for a while.

But also now is the time when the new folks start to step up, so it’s encouraging to see people come in and drive for a while. Bluefin LTS is looking pretty good, probably on track for fall GA but we’re not in a rush. Next major effort will be adding F43 as beta channels and cycling back into release mode. The game has not started. The clue is: Winnower

Thanks

This work wouldn’t be possible without Timothée Ravier and the bootc team! You have our thanks.

And cheers to you, here’s to another four more! Post a pic of your desktop/laptop setup!

[j0rge]

This is my 7900XTX/Ryzen 7600X system!

[klmcw]

Congratulations! You folks have built something really special.

My laptop is boring - just the way I like it

But I am super grateful to have been pushed to learn some new ways to think about a linux dev workstation. I was most of the way there, but the insistence on using a container first approach (NOT cloud native - I am retired) has been really helpful to making me more efficient.

The tools I have built since using bluefin-dx allowed me to (a) know that beta 4 of python 3.14 was released; and (b) I rebuilt and installed it in about 10 mins.

When I was done I simply stopped the custom container used to build it, did a docker system prune -af to free up the HD space.

Absolutely awesome!

Thanks! And congratulations again. I appreciate your work.

[pauldoo]

The best distro (not a distro) I’ve used!

@j0rge I would love to know.. what do you imagine Universal Blue and Bluefin being 5 years from now?

Do the mainstream distros catch up, so universal blue having done its job can go away? Does it continue, but pushing in new and different ways? What’s your take?

Obviously nobody knows where we’ll be 5 years from now, but interested in your speculation..

[j0rge]

Tough question, nice! Here’s what’s important to me, I can’t speak for the others:

• Someone who started their cloud native journey with us does a keynote at a KubeCon, Linux App Summit, or OSS Summit about something else.

• Measurable impact on app developer metrics to Flathub, GNOME, KDE, etc. Downloads, donations, engagement, all of that stuff.

• Universal Blue as a whole has accomplished all of its initial goals and is in maintenance mode, we’re really just optimizing at this point. So it’s more about the endurance of the project than anything else.

Bazzite’s an exception to this and will just follow the speed of linux gaming development so that will always be something exciting. Bluefin will have more dinosaurs. Aurora will likely have more telescope people.

At this point my overall metric of success is how many people end up contributing to open source after they’re done learning with us. Bonus if they score a job out of it!

[j0rge]

I was searching through some pics for this thread and I found this one. This is so cool I had to share!

This is my original Alienware Steam Machine on my patio. I logged in hundreds of hours playing XCOM2 outside in the summers by the firepit.

And now I can do that with a handheld instead. That’s so wild!