I think this solves it nicely right here. At the end of the day, I don’t really care what it is called. I do think that Bluefin is a great name though.
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Naming is hard. I know naming wizards, I’m not one of them.
IME skill in naming is rare among software). developers.
A few years ago, I got a birthday present from a dear friend who is a naming savant. It was a company name, and the result was a PDF that described the process and identity kit. If you have a chance to get a proper naming exercise, it’s worth it.
…When you make something that is actually different, it’s good to stand out (“Bazzite” doesn’t mean many things)
Aurora, Atomic, Bluefin, Core, Universal, are all common words and easily confused with other things.
I think it’s pretty cool that everyone has a different name they prefer - it’s not the end of the world, but I think it shows everyone is invested in uBlue, Bluefin, and Aurora as a whole.
That said, it’s pretty much about preferences and what we think makes the best organizational and PR/branding sense.
My opinion is to make it Bluefin KDE, but as I think about it, it’s easy for me to just say something like “You can use Bluefin - they have a KDE variant at the bottom of the page.”
It’s sort of an embellishment, but I also talk about Bazzite like it’s its own distro anyways, just so I don’t need to explain the whole uBlue infrastructure.
While i understand the thoughts and skepticism on this, i truly believe that staying with the names we already have is the correct choice. Bazzite, Bluefin and Aurora (im skeptical about Aurora because its just Bluefin with kde for now) might not be so descriptive for users that have experience with linux but for the average user that has only used windows? Oh boy, that’s perfect.
An average user won’t care what kde or atomic even means. I would be frightened to try a distro called Atomic KDE if i was new to this. Stay stable to the branding just like all other distros. It’s the same reason why Ubuntu is called Ubuntu and not Canonical KDE or Canonical Gnome.
This convention is awesome for Linux people and terrible for new users / non-linux people. They don’t know what is KDE, what is GNOME, they know Windows, Chrome, MacOS. This old fashioned convension is basically another wall keeping users scared and away to try Linux.
Maybe it is because of my SWE background, but I found those name less confusing and more “standard”
Although I also like how “Bazzite”, “Bluefin”, and “Aurora” are recognizable and nice shortcut and showcase names
I sorta agree with this. That’s why I started the thread with the idea to fold the Aurora name into Bluefin. This way, it could be simpler. Bazzite is the ‘gaming distro’, Bluefin is the ‘non-gaming distro’, and ‘-DX’ stands for Developer Experience (aka “Don’t bother if you’re not a developer”).
Bazzite ships with KDE by default, Bluefin with GNOME - user don’t need to think about the additon of Aurora to Bluefin. They just use the default, no need to care about what DE any of them runs.
BUT, if you know what a DE is or have started to build a preference, then you have a clear label of “Bazzite GNOME” and “Bluefin KDE” images/ISO. But in the end, it’s all just Bazzite and Bluefin (and uCore, I guess).
That’s my thought process, at least. But tbh I just found it weird that Aurora is its own thing when we treat it as “Bluefin but KDE”, and the category kinda stood out while I was reading the forum.
I agree with both sides.
uBlue is nice for getting first time users. Keeping tech stuff out of the names makes sense.
But Aurora is not its own variant. It is Bluefin but with KDE, even descending from the same repo.
Its main terminal uses GTK even though Konsole profiles could work too.
It is a strange situation, and it has pros and cons. Having these images presented is cool, but I miss the old website with all the images. For sure it was messy, but now people may not know they can rebase between all of these images!
As someone coming into this space, it wasn’t clear that Aurora = Bluefin with a different desktop environment. It’s actively marketed as being the most stable product, but is it actually more stable than Bluefin GTS? Why is Bluefin for developers when DX is an option on both?
I think Bazzite has such name recognition it’d be a terrible mistake to change it, but I think like how you can choose a variety of different builds/spins and they are all just Bazzite. Having Bluefin follow a similar path would make sense - I like how you have a series of questions for what image you want for Bazzite.
Bluefin
- do you want dev tools Y/N
- do you want gnome, kde, budgie?, cosmic?, etc
- platform Nvidia or AMD (or Intel GPU, or eventually Apple Silicon if you bring in some of Asahi Linux etc)
At the very least the fact that Aurora is Bluefin KDE and you can get optional dev tools should be laid out somewhere easy to find instead of having to dig through discourse posts and comparing notes in the documentation pages. If people think it’s worth keeping Aurora separate from a branding perspective that’s fine, and it leaves room for it to grow in a different direction in the future but now the presentation is somewhere between misleading and confusing.
Pretty sure the rename won’t happen as there is already talk about splitting the aurora from the bluefin repo Split aurora/bluefin repos · Issue #1989 · ublue-os/bluefin · GitHub
They are currently built from the same repo but as there is “separate” maintainers, it looks like it will be a separate repo. Mostly as it seems the KDE updating speed compared to gnome causes lot more small bugs popping up.
Don’t know what the future actually is, but I don’t think it will be renamed to anything Bluefin based.
Keeping the brands separate if they will actually fork makes sense as I said above, but as of now the way the products are marketed is somewhere between confusing and misleading. I guess each team is able to market them as they wish, but it’s odd coming to the ublue umbrella and seeing the offerings in an umbrella and expecting there to be consistency.
I suppose I could have just dropped Quote from “Latest Bluefin and Aurora topics - Universal Blue” here but it felt like a different focus.
I do admit I haven’t looked at 5 day old github issues to determine the difference between the images. 
From that issue queue it actually seems like Aurora is less stable than Bluefin stable (let alone GTS) due to issues with Gnome centric updates to the shared repository. So Aurora actually has a little more hassle at this point (which is being addressed).
From the bluefin project page:
“Project Bluefin is not a finished product, she is an ongoing passion project […] she represents the state of the art … a fragile, beautiful, and unique creature.”
It is definitely not clear that Bluefin offers you the more stable solution, given that it presents itself as unfinished and fragile, while Aurora is the rock solid simple solution for your Grandma. It seems like that won’t be accurate (or possible to realistically aim for that goal) until KDE switches to a more focused release cadence in the future.
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