Recently I’ve been looking into Fedora Atomic releases with great interest and via that I discovered Universal Blue.
So you target gamers and developers, which is cool. Its good to have specific niche in order to stand out.
Your websites mention Chromebook as a source of inspiration.
Which of your images would be a good fit for Chromebook hardware? Typically this means something like Celeron CPUs and small storage capacity. Fedora KDE spins run fine on these.
A Chromebook is primarily an Internet surfboard. Personally I would like a minimal image, with none of the gaming or dev stuff preloaded. One can always get the post install, if applicaple.
There shouldn’t be any difference then, Aurora or Bluefin should work fine. The issue right now is the size of updates over the air, which are still unoptimized, Ultramarine is probably a better place to start: Chromebook (Anywhere) | Ultramarine Wiki
It would be awesome if someone made a low-resource version using XFCE, but we tend to be backend people so we’re currently looking for people who want to work on the management stuff via cockpit. Hopefully someday.
XFCE is nice, but to my experience not really beneficial (performance) for anything manufactured during the last decade. It saves some RAM, but 4GB has been the minimum starndard for quite some time. KDE Plasma is nowadays lean and mean, built on a great technology stack, as you know.
I now realize my OP was not as clear as possible. What I really would like to see is a minimal image experience, with only bare essentials as pre-loads.
P.S. Totally off topic, but I noticed your websites don’t give a lot background information. Are you a company, non-profit, foundation, or what? How are you funded, do you have a business plan and what is the long game for Universal Blue? Open source community projects are great, but tend to last longer if there is a business plan or a billionare backing.
The desktop wouldn’t matter, if not XFCE then whatever efficient thing the person who creates it decides, or all of them if a few people do it.
We don’t have that because Fedora doesn’t have that. They are working on having base images available in different stages so it should be able to start with something teeny compared to what we have now. I want this badly too.
On the project side we’re really what we say on the tin, a group of cloud native nerds who liked Silverblue. Then when the move to OCI containers happened, we realized that making the linux desktop like the servers we work with will be awesome. I made a video about it.
5:47 and on is particularly hilarious because I describe Universal Blue before we started it in it’s current form. The original ublue was just a bash script.
As for business plans, etc. There aren’t any. I don’t speak for the others but right now it costs us less than a hundred bucks a month to keep it going. And that covers the github bill for more concurrent runners. We don’t have any other infrastructure costs thanks to generous open source programs for Discourse (this forum) and Cloudflare, and that’s it.
The project is already sustainable financially via github sponsors, and we’re not really looking to expand, our scope is always purposely limited because we’re a striving towards a distroless model. We’re not looking to make a ton of images, our job was to prove the model, everyone’s gonna have one of these if they want it. The people who group together will make good stuff.
For me personally, my goals are stated on https://projectbluefin.io/ and remains my mission, and then Bazzite and Aurora choose their own paths and we just share a common parent organization.
