I’m building a PC that I’ll be using remotely most of the time (sunshine+tailscale, tailscale for a remote backup for my laptop) etc so I’m aiming for a mix of stability and performance but would err more on the stability side. AMD GPU.
Given bazzite breaks occasionally (it’s leading edge and can be easily rolled back, it makes sense) I’d prefer to run Aurora and then just install steam on my own etc. Reading up I had assumed there would be a GTS version for Aurora, but with the focus mostly being desktop managers and how KDE does rolling releases there is no GTS branch for the time being.
Aurora is marketed as “Aurora is the image for people who want a reliable, safe and smooth computing experience for everyday tasks and beyond” and “Aurora is the ultimate desktop OS for your developer workstation or the perfect maintenance-free OS for your grandma.”
It seems like aside from the DE they share the same codebase and default applications etc, and Aurora is referred to as Bluefin+KDE. Bluefins branches are labelled as the following:
So…
Is Aurora Stable really more of an “enthusiast” branch, or is it more stable than Bluefin Stable? Aurora + DX seems like it’s just Bluefin with KDE vs Gnome, I suppose stripping out the dev stuff makes it more maintainable.
Aurora-stable is pretty much the same as bluefin-stable except for the DE (gnome vs kde). There is no gts version as that would mean KDE5 vs KDE6. KDE6 is a pretty big leap forwards and 5.x series is not really maintained anymore by upstream.
So if you want the experience that Aurora markets itself as, you should actually choose Bluefin GTS?
DE’s aren’t the only source of instability - there was a mesa update a few months back that broke sunshine for a while and was being pushed out in updates until it was fixed upstream. As someone who will be remotely connecting to this desktop most of the time, that and other changes would be non-ideal.
I have no right to an Aurora GTS unless I want to offer to maintain it myself (which I don’t have the skillset or availability to do) but I will say coming as someone new to this space the difference between Bluefin & Aurora is not clear and they seem like more differentiated products.
Read the websites = Bluefin is for serious developers and Aurora is for a stable focused everyday focused desktop experience. Makes sense!
However Bluefin GTS (without dev tools) makes for a more stable everyday desktop experience, and Aurora + DX is equally as capable for developers as Bluefin + DX is.
Yep, if you want the best stability, Bluefin-gts is the correct way to go. It will be one version behind the current fedora release and won’t have the newest gnome and its bling. But for stability that is the way.
Also on GTS you will be sure that all the needed extensions are working as they have gone through the whole life cycle of the current Fedora version.
Although, KDE is going to move to “gnome style” release schedule, propably next year where they will have two big released per year scheduled somewhere near Ubuntu and Fedora version releases.
Currently (personal opinion) Gnome is the more stable DE. At the same time KDE moves faster and implements new stuff (like wayland features etc) faster, which will sometimes cause some bugs/instability.
Yeah given the way the products are described on both the ublue main site and their individual ones I had assumed that Aurora was actually what I was wanting, and figured a GTS version existed after coming across that language on the Bluefin project since it’s focus was on stability and simplicity. I didn’t fully understand the implications of keeping the OS at a major release behind while not patching the DE running in it. If it’s the OS for grandmas I don’t think should be a requirement to go digging into forums, documentation and github issues to figure out.
I have no strong preferences regarding Linux DE at this point (I daily drive macOS on my laptop, am familiar with windows, have run some simple ubuntu/debian servers). KDE seems a little more resource intensive but less likely to interfere with gaming and it’s what I have on my steamdeck (base SteamOS) so I was fine with that. I’m sure I can figure Gnome out.
I’m not sure I’ll be able to get my iKVM setup before I head back on the road again, but in the future once that’s dialed in I could try rebasing to a more stable/enthusiast image.
I’m sure some of them do? The first full sentence on the website is “Aurora is the ultimate desktop OS for your developer workstation or the perfect maintenance-free OS for your grandma.” I didn’t write it, ask whoever wrote the copy!
Bluefin is described as fragile and experimental, and Aurora is repeatedly described as being simple and stable. If someone is wanting to install an OS for their grandma, or the grandma herself is looking to choose an image to install (who has zero opinions on GNOME vs KDE) going off of all the top level wording they’d end up picking the less stable image.
I’m fairly new to Linux, but this is how I’d describe them off the top of head (envisioning what Aurora says vs what it is):
Aurora has a more familiar for windows visual environment for people coming from windows that you can use out of the box for a great experience or easily customized to make it your own. The release has generally up to date packages while still aiming for rock solid stability, and will lie somewhere between Bluefin Stable & GTS in terms of freshness. (aspirational)
Bluefin comes with a more maclike / classic Linux stable but more opinionated interface, and a more conservative option on the spectrum of stability and brand new features.
Both come with sensible everyday defaults useable out of the box and a well thought out set of developer tools can be easily added to either at install or after the fact.
My issue is less with the fact that they aren’t differentiated enough, but that they’re differentiated inaccurately. I think splitting Aurora off from Bluefin will allow it have more of an identity, and given it’s marketing angles I think just having one well rounded release would make sense, then a latest for testing etc.
The prior discussion on the only difference being the DE is correct, but for me personally having run both on my laptop that doesn’t have 100% of its devices supported by Linux (fingerprint reader, certain hardware controls), Bluefin has been rock solid for me.
The GTS release has never given me issues, but I recently switched to the Stable release, which has also not given me issues.
Aurora was similarly stable for most tasks, but I did notice there were issues with my wifi card simply disconnecting. This was an issue with KDE, for some reason.
Ok that makes more sense. I thought it was leftover copy that had been there a while once I was able to grok the ecosystem. Maybe have an area that just talks about it being built as part of the universalblue ecosystem (that could get loaded in a few different places across Bluefin / Aurora / Bazzite etc).
That was mentioned above by inffy, but again if this is supposed to be “you don’t have to be a tinkerer to use Linux” someone shouldn’t have to dig through forum posts, documentation, & github issues to get a high level understanding of where they want to look.
FYI I loved the article on homebrew on linux. I was a bit confused when I saw it here, but it does fit in well (and homebrew is used to running on immutable systems w/ darwin heh).
I’m critical because I think it’s a really interesting project, it’s just more confusing than it has to be.
I -think- this illustrates where Aurora could have a nice niche - bluefin stable is tested but if some non-critical piece of the system breaks upstream, that’s life on the leading edge and we given you tools to deal with it, and GTS is the “nope to all that, I’m waiting a full version bro”. Having a more opionated curated middle ground that is a little behind and releases weekly at the most (barring anything critical) feels like it could be a nice fit for the “average user”. If KDE is a bit sloppier to deal with pausing on updates here and there (where stable would plow through) seems reasonable. I’d think of it more like a macOS model where you get releases when they’re ready (or patch critical security issues) and they’re not super frequent like in the linux world.
It’s more work though, and it’s not my vision to push. If that existed that’s what I’d go for though heh.
KDE is really good, and if your is hardware typical and used by many Linux users. My issue wasn’t with Ethernet, but had to do with taking laptop out to use on networks, only for it to lose connection a weak spot. The issue was that whatever KDE was doing, it “lost” the card.
GNOME has been around longer and didn’t recently have a big upgrade like KDE did with Plasma 6. As such, GNOME is typically stable-r across more hardware in my experience.
KDE iirc is the most popular DE overall, but if it’s in a current settling in phase after a major release (which it doesn’t have at this point), then just rolling a stable at the same cadence as Gnome is bound to be buggier.
I use KDE in desktop mode on my steamdeck I’d rather keep things consistent with it on this machine as well, but where things are at now and my use case Bluefin GTS makes the most sense to me at the moment.
In a year or two Aurora will probably have differentiated itself more, or have a more curated less frequent release schedule or something and fulfill up to the current vision. Just getting off the bluefin repo should help.
I’d say give Aurora Stable a shot first honestly, and see how it goes. As keep keep in mind OSTree best practices for getting certain LInux things done, it shouldn’t really break on you through any fault of your own. If all goes well, then keep it that way.
But if you notice a bug or something that you’d rather not deal with, then by all means Bluefin Stable, and GTS especially, would be reliable backup to distrohop to.
Linux can be a lil janky at times, but unlike Windows at least it is more clear about what breaks and how it possibly broke. There is no perfect solution, no perfect distro/DE, but go around and see what you like.
I’d rather not try to distrohop remotely, especially as I doubt I’ll have time to set up power control to cold boot the desktop before I’m gone again. As I’ve said before, once I’m more comfortable with managing things remotely I can move to something more “enthusiast” but it’s not something I want to deal with now.
Aurora & Bazzite will break major software packages to keep the cadence of a standard release schedule going. I can trigger a reboot and rollback to an earlier image in grub via iKVM, or worst case scenario have someone else bounce my box and talk them through the process, but if I come out of the backcountry and want to interact with my box I don’t want to be troubleshooting bugs and trying to restore to previous images. It’s great that the option is there, but I don’t want to be dealing with it if I don’t have to.
I’ve looked over the release notes from stable going from Fedora 40 to 41 and it doesn’t look like there’s anything there that’s can’t be lived out. it’s not that unusual for people to wait a few months or even a major version between upgrades and that seems a reasonable given the first sentence of this thread is “I’m building a PC that I’ll be using remotely most of the time”.
What does this even mean? The packages are not auroras/bazzites, they come from upstream. And breakage is pretty overstatement. Yeah there can be bugs, but total breakage doesn’t really happen. There is always Fedora Q&A for packages, they won’t just push packages to “stable repos” like something like Arch does (although even Arch does package testing, although little minimal).
So something totally broken ending up to first Fedora and then to Bluefin/aurora/bazzite is pretty much non-existent.
They’re images that contain many upstream packages. Updates to those packages can break other commonly used packages. That’s fine for an enthusiast level of stable.
Sunshine was totally broken a few months back due to a mesa update, this was a known issue that was pushed to stable branches of ublue and kept there until it was fixed upstream. Sunshine isn’t part of the image itself of course, but there is a ujust installer for it and it’s not that obscure a piece of software.
I’ll have a hardware iKVM and can also via SSH/RDM etc through Tailscale (I don’t have control over router level ports where my box will be) once in the OS, but again I don’t want to be restarting my box and rolling back images in grub remotely if I can help it. If some future update takes out more avenues of remote access it would be more annoying to deal with.
The suggestion to rebase my OS remotely isn’t one I’m super keen on either.
There’s kernel bugs, driver bugs, DE bugs, etc in stable. It’ll boot, sure.
Fedora is not Arch, but it is leading edge and their QA isn’t as conservative as some other distributions. I think it’s a nice balance myself, but again due to my use case I’d want to err on the side of stability.
Some of the issues people have been having after switching to Fedora 41 stable are probably due to user error etc, but having my system not resume from suspend, freeze, DNS failing when container software isn’t installed etc aren’t things I want to have to deal with. These all passed QA.
I’ll give GTS a shot, if it works fine for my hardware I’ll just stick with it until I’m in a spot I feel comfortable having a less stable system remote for months on end.
This topic is very interesting and I also have something to add.
I agree that KDE is buggier than other DEs, mostly because of it’s complexity and update cadence. However, if it’s used conservatively, with minimal to no applets and such, it should be more than fine.
However, as I also mentioned in a post some time ago. I do see Aurora not being as snappy as Bluefin-GTS. There are issues with Firefox on it breaking or being too slow that never happen on Bluefin-GTS.
People may say it’s subjective and without logs and hardware info there is not much to be done but I really hope that Aurora devs really have a look into it because it seems obvious to me and. from my experience, everything is slower on Aurora, even boot time which would not have anything to do with the DE, right?
I recommend uBlue project to all my friends and family but it is a shame that myself cannot enjoy Aurora since I am a KDE fan that just doesn’t do any gaming at all. At the moment I am stuck on MX Linux.
This problem should somewhat sort itself out in a year and change when it goes to a GNOMElike release cadence.
In the meantime (and after) once Aurora decouples itself from Bluefin having it be ain between GTS & Stable slower update cadence more like macOS with major versions every six months or so, then minor and point releases as it makes sense to do so would make sense to me from an end user perspective.
That will be extra work, how much I’m not sure. Automated testing could be cloned from bluefin, and just have more stringent criteria for what gets pushed up? It seems like it’d be a cool thing to aim for and would help differentiate it from bluefin & make it more grandma friendly.
Aurora has been “decoupled” from Bluefin repo yesterday, so that part is now done
GTS version is still a tough cookie, maybe when Fedora 42 releases in spring it could be thinkable, as that would then provide Fedora 41 version with KDE6. There is really no point providing GTS for now as that would mean using Plasma 5.27 which is not really supported by the upstream anymore.
