Hey ya’ll! I’m happy to announce that we’re about to cross the 10 million image pull milestone. Here’s a happy chart:
Plans for F40
Over the past few weeks the team has been focusing on going into General Availability (GA). After discussing our plans with Fedora’s Timothee Ravier we feel we are ready to go. The project will now focus on sustainability and maintainability and less experimentation. The main images are now pushing out Fedora 40 builds. They may or may not build every day depending on RPMFusion dependencies but generally speaking they tend to figure themselves out as we inch closer to release.
We consider the main images complete and don’t expect major changes in the future. Most of the new goodies will be in Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora, and (someday) COSMIC.
main images
We’ve decided to continue using fedora-ostree-desktops as our source for images. We initially wanted to wait for Fedora to start officially publish “finished” images in the Fedora namespace, but this work is continuing and involves infrastructure updates on the Fedora side, etc. So we’ve decided to go GA without waiting as fedora-ostree-desktops generates the exact same content and so far we haven’t had any major issues with this process so we’re keeping it.
As some of you noticed, we did remove the old ISO generator which wasn’t very good in favor of our new offline ISOs:
- ISO thread: New ISOs: Forward Unto Dawn
- Rebase instructions: How to Rebase to Universal Blue's Base Images
If you prefer a more vanilla Fedora experience we recommend generating an ISO once a release. They will update automatically after installation anyway.
Project Cleanup
Since we’re shifting to sustainability, most experimental images will not be brought forward into F40 as the team would like to focus on the main images and the actual products, which are currently Bazzite and Bluefin. We will also only be building images that are submitted and maintained in the fedora-ostree-desktops gitlab. Basically, if you want a new Universal Blue image, you need to start with a compose file in that repo or work through official Fedora channels.
We feel they achieved their purpose in proving the model and most of them aren’t being used. If you’re interested in continuing to experiment with them then feel free to clone and go! We still support and recommend base and base-nvidia for adding your own window manager/desktop to a mostly blank image. Here’s the list of repos that have been archived.
The HWE images (Asus, Framework, and Nvidia) will also be going through some consolidation. This work is being led by bsherman - we’ll post a follow up once he’s ready.
Tracking Board
Bazzite
- New Bazzite Buzz releasing tomorrow! More information will be in there!
Fedora 40 builds will likely be available on the same day as Fedora. That’s the goal. 
Bluefin
Unless there’s a Fedora delay, Bluefin will go GA at the same time as F40 releases, but will be announced on April 18th, two days after Fedora releases. Since the team depends on Bluefin as their daily drivers it will not be receiving major structural changes, we’ll instead focus on the build system and fixes.
EDIT: I should have mentioned that Thunderbird will be installed by default when the offline ISOs are finished. It’s missing in the current online setup to save time but it’ll be on the dock out of the box for the final release.
Major feature development will likely resume after systemd 256 is released as we’d like to produce and consume systemd system extensions moving forward.
COSMIC and Aurora
COSMIC and Aurora are two images that have gotten some attention lately and I wanted to address them.
COSMIC was set up by Ryan Brue, who also maintains the RPMs in a COPR and has plans to package it in Fedora itself. Since it has a clear path to Fedoraization then it’s kind of a no brainer to make an image so people can follow along. Ryan also offers images with both GNOME and KDE as backup desktops, which is a neat feature!
Aurora is basically Bluefin with KDE instead and we’ll be working with Niklas to build it out of the Bluefin repo for maintainability reasons. There will be no change in name or branding.
YAFTI
Update: I should have had this in the initial post!
Our yafti tool finally has a maintainer and will be seeing tons of improvements over the next few weeks/months.
Conferences and Stuff
This kind of wraps up the release, a quick set of bullets for everything else:
- Kyle, Noel, and Justin attended SCaLE and had a great time. They could definately feel the buzz around Bazzite!
- I represented us at KubeCon EU - Gave away a ton of stickers and got to meet with Timothee and learn about all the goodies coming from Fedora.
I’ll also be at Red Hat Summit May 6-9th as part of the Community Day. The session is Frontiers in Image-based Linux.
This will also be my first time seeing the CoreOS/OpenShift team in a while, so I will come back with information on the plan for container diffs, which we need in order to have efficient downloads. This is our last major pain point which we’d love to address as soon as we can!
And then, finally, we’ll be done!