In Kubecon mode so today I can only speak for Bluefin, we’ll have this in the other images as well.
Live Images
The crew has been really organizing around getting live images done. Enjoy our first live image:
This will let you try Bluefin on any machine. Right now it’s LTS only but work is moving quickly and we expect to fully move over to LiveCDs as our default UX. This is a cool thing to have though, and let’s us do this:
Installer
It pains me to report that we’ve decided to make our own installer. We even mention that our own installer is out of scope in our own mission statement. Sigh I guess we’ll have to revise that.
As we were working on the installer we realized that our most major use case is just blasting a disk. So we prototyped out just making a wrapper around bootc install:
The TLDR here is — a bunch of Linux installers come from a world where they design for having multiple disks, partitions, and all sorts of variety and use cases. For our usecase we want to say “this disk is for the OS” and then have the OS install as fast as possible because we want to move on to the important things. And more importantly, the entire reason we do this is we need a reliable way to installation, and those weird anaconda errors just suck. So we’re just going to nuke the disk from orbit, just to be sure.
Note that anaconda support will likely get better for our installation needs, so people can still go nuts with their lorax templates while the rest of us move on. 
Note that titanoboa is a necessary evil, the “installation experience” still needs work, so we’ll have a gui that niklas is working on built on tauri to make it pretty, and then vitally, our installation experience will be more about the flatpaks and things you choose towards the end. Our anaconda ISO setup broke at some point and we’d rather do it this way. We’re aware that the website file picker and ISO selector is a hot mess. We’ll get that sorted after we get the ISOs and installers in place.
Which leads me to:
F42 based Bluefin
Come and get it. Like last time you’ll find some missing extensions and akmods. This will improve over time as people enable them and we’re usually done well ahead of the actual release. Nothing to report here other than if you see busted stuff please file an issue!
This one is looking smooth, I think there’s a few things that stood out this cycle on the stable channels:
- Some bummer times during 6.12 for AMD users, we spend a great deal of time on pinned kernels but that’s pretty good. Getting some reports of graphical glitches on the latest kernels too so there’s still some issues here to work through.
- Being able to pin the kernel so we could ignore the busted-flatpaks problem continues to show that collaborative maintenance can be a valuable thing.
Now that it’s settling down I think this will make a great GTS. If you’re new here here’s the schedule:
April
Fedora things:
- When F42 comes out Bluefin GTS will rebase to F41.
- Bluefin:latest will move to F42 - we usually prefer you stick to the stable channel but sometimes the extra hardware enablement stuff in from bazzite’s kernel helps.
- Bluefin’s stable channel will move to F42 a few weeks later on that 2-4 week kernel gated delay. This is the one I daily.
- Full ARM images, we’ll have ARM images across the board for all the Bluefins, sorry no Asahi stuff.
May
The reign of Achillobator begins:
- Bluefin LTS release - Enterprise Nerds
- Bluefin GDX release - AI nerds
This is likely when we’ll have parity between our CentOS and Fedora builds. We have big plans for LTS so it’s not just going to be some old slow poke, there are sweeter spots we can hit with this delivery model that we’re hoping to explore.
Consolidation
Most of this cycle was concentrated on two things. First off it was getting Aurora spun out into it’s own image. This could have led to two outcomes. Death, or doubling of the core team. We welcomed ledif, infty, vish, and a bunch of new chill vibes into the org.
This forced us to consolidate our configs in one place: Packages · Universal Blue · GitHub
This lets all our “ublue” bling be maintained in one place so that we can enjoy economies of scale but letting the images have their own vibe. Note that this also means that you can remove these rpm packages in your custom images if you want bluefin without the dinos or whatever.
Anaconda already broke me so why not rub some RPMs on it.
This is also now our natural onboarding point, as you can see the udev rules need some work, and there’s a bunch of abandonment going on. So now’s the time to dive in, get some of these things sorted, and it helps all the images so that can only get better. Note that Bazzite still needs to consume these but that’s a different problem since it will require more effort.
The great thing here is that we can offer a more stable experience via Bluefin LTS and a leading edge desktop like Bluefin, with a middle sibling in Bluefin GTS for the sweet spot while keeping the core “product” the same. We were mostly faking it before, but now it’s actually shared code and not just vision. We also owe you more information about Aurora Helium LTS, imbev is cooking.
Diet
Thanks to our commitment to shipping a kickass Flathub experience we will be moving some of the core apps over to flatpaks. This will slim down the image so you can enjoy the flatpak delta updates. Input leap, solaar, and a few others will be moving to flatpak. We’ll also be freshening up our default choices to the latest in libadwaita goodness as appropriate.
Normally I hate UI change like this but when they start to pile up like this it’s nice to get them all out of the way! We’ll likely do this during release week.
See ya in London!
Other than that, I’ll be in London all next week at KubeCon, I’ll likely post a few vids of some demos we’re doing with these kickass ARM machines, etc. Stay tuned!
