Introducing Margine OS
Hi everyone. After months of work (I wanted something genuinely stable before sharing it), I’m announcing Margine OS, an atomic Linux distribution. Yes, another one; but I think it earns its place, and I’d like to explain why.
Why Margine
It grew out of a long hunt for “the right distro,” and three projects that struck me as genuinely fresh:
- CachyOS: how much more responsiveness you can get out of the same hardware. Real new life for older machines.
- Fedora Atomic (the Silverblue / bootc lineage): shipping the OS itself as a built-and-tested image gives you a level of stability and reproducibility that’s hard to get any other way, without the Debian-style trade-off where “stable” means fighting your own hardware.
- Bluefin / Universal Blue: If you are here, in this forum, you already know (and a big thanks to uBlue for all your hard work!); the hard part of Linux is usually after install: codecs, that folder of FLACs that won’t play, updates that need a terminal. Bluefin hands you a machine that works from minute one, updates quietly under the hood, and can roll back if something breaks.
What Margine is
Margine builds on Bluefin DX (same atomic model, same “ready out of the box” feel) and changes the things I cared about most:
The Margine desktop
- CachyOS kernel (BORE scheduler). Pulled from the
bieszczaders/kernel-cachyosCOPR and re-signed with Margine’s own key so it boots cleanly under Secure Boot. - Secure Boot without the pain. The ISO’s GRUB walks you through MOK enrollment, so you keep Secure Boot on instead of disabling it.
- CPU scheduler from a GUI. Switch between the
scxschedulers on the fly, no config files. - Touchpad tuning GNOME doesn’t offer. Scroll speed, pinch-zoom and pinch-rotate, via Wayland Scroll Factor with a GUI.
- Tiling out of the box. A curated, months-vetted set of GNOME extensions. The standout is o-tiling, a heavily-improved, actively-maintained fork of System76’s Pop Shell (which System76 itself is winding down as it moves to COSMIC), with binary-tree tiling, an animated accent-colour focus border and plenty more on top.
- Gaming when you want it.
ujust margine-gaming-nativelayers Steam, Lutris and RetroArch as native RPMs (full Proton/Wine, MangoHud/GameMode out of the box, Mesa always matching the system); a sandboxed Flatpak variant exists too. Bazzite-style, on the CachyOS base. - Reproducible and signed end-to-end. The whole build + test pipeline runs on GitHub Actions; SHA-pinned dependencies, cosign signature + SBOM, ISOs distributed torrent-first via the Internet Archive.
- Plus a clean three-folder home (
data / dev / scratch), full-disk LUKS with optional TPM2 auto-unlock, and an experimental NVIDIA kernel I can’t test myself.
Performance: what we actually measured
The one structural change worth benchmarking is the kernel, so I ran a clean A/B on the same laptop (Framework Laptop 13, Ryzen 5 7640U): switching only the ostree deployment between Margine and stock Bluefin DX. Same userspace, governor pinned to performance, start temperatures matched, median of four runs, all under a background CPU load.
CachyOS/BORE vs stock Fedora kernel, scheduler benchmark (median of runs)
| Metric | Margine (CachyOS/BORE) | Stock Fedora | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Context-switch latency | 4.45 µs/op | 7.97 µs/op | ~1.8× faster |
| Context-switch rate | 224k ops/s | 125k ops/s | +79% |
| Thread throughput | 88k events | 57k events | +54% |
| Thread latency (avg) | 4.1 ms | 6.3 ms | 55% lower |
| Wakeup latency (p50) | 2.08 ms | 2.98 ms | 43% lower |
| Wakeup latency (p99, tail) | 12.0 ms | 10.7 ms | ~11% higher |
Honestly, it’s not “wins everything”: CachyOS/BORE is dramatically better in the common case (throughput, median/average latency) and slightly worse at the worst-case tail. That’s the textbook BORE trade-off, and a sign the test wasn’t cherry-picked. Full method, raw data and a reproduce-it-yourself script are in the kernel-performance docs (follow the site link below).
The apps: built for creators
Margine started as a personal distro, and creative work is what I mainly use it for, which is why it’s so opinionated. It ships a hand-picked Flatpak set:
- Image & design: GIMP, Inkscape, Pinta, Darktable, Loupe
- Audio: Audacity, Reaper, EasyEffects (system-wide DSP), G4Music
- Video & streaming: OBS Studio, Showtime
- Writing & office: LibreOffice, Apostrophe (Markdown), GNOME Text Editor
- Everyday & utilities: Zen Browser, Thunderbird, Bitwarden, the GNOME suite, plus Flatseal, Warehouse, Mission Center and Déjà Dup
It’s atomic: uninstall what you don’t use. Longer term I may slim the base down and spin the creator set off into its own optional layer.
Links, and a small ask
- Site & download: https://margine.the-empty.place
- Docs: Documentation — Margine
It’s a personal project, one maintainer, still young. Feedback and criticism are very welcome. And if you have NVIDIA hardware: there’s an experimental NVIDIA kernel I genuinely can’t test (no NVIDIA machine here), so a hand testing it would mean a lot.