Is GDX the same as bluefin-dx-nvidia but based on CentOS instead of Fedora? Or are there more differences.
If it’s the former, could you explain the advantage of each? As I understand with Fedora (gts) nothing can go wrong because the base image is always clean and you can’t end up with a broken or unbootable OS, so what does the CentOS base add compared to Fedora?
Thank you
I’ve been working on the docs for this, check it out here:
This is probably the major point.
It is also for users that depend updated user space applications via Flathub and Homebrew, but may prefer the slower enterprise cadence for their host operating system. We expect less churn and maintenance over the course of its lifecycle.
It’s important to set expectations here. We can never guarantee this. I doubt anyone could on consumer hardware. 
We certainly provide a great safety blanket though. The difference here is that the container method solve the delivery mechanism. The part about getting the software onto your disk exactly as intended. That’s basically the one problem that is solved.
But what’s inside the package? Well … ask anyone with an Nvidia driver issue. At the end of the day we’re the delivery people and invisible, the software itself is what’s important. This is interesting to me in the context of an LTS. They typically release software as a snapshot and don’t update it as aggressively. Fedora will keep on trucking through major releases of major components and delivering them as usual.
The way I think of it is if you want a machine to mostly never change and you think it’s perfect, you have that option now, Bluefin LTS. Bluefin and Bluefin GTS will be for people who want to follow along, are OS enthusiasts who always want the latest versions of GNOME/KDE, etc.
And yeah, gdx is just dx-nvidia.
Thank you for your reply
So all the AI goodies are present on both then? Ok, from the GDX announcement it was not clear and it seemed like the AI stuff was going to be unique on GDX (at least out of the box without extra steps)
That’s good feedback I’ll work on that! It’s looking like -dx will be the base, -gdx is effectively dx + cuda so it’ll end up being the image Nvidia users will probably want to use.
What’s been happening over the last few days is we’ve been playing with ramalama. It’s become clear to me that this is analogous to the role podman plays with containers.
I am laughing as I am typing this because this was explained to me as it’s purpose when it was announced, and they say all of that on the website, but sometimes you just gotta play with it to really “get it”. And it’s far enough along now that I can see the major pieces. So we added it last night to -dx. This solves some problems for us:
And my favorite, --generate=quadlet and --generate=kube, which will export the thing you just set up as a service unit. In the past we shipped an ollama service unit and it’s system integration just wasn’t where it needed to be. Now if you have your exact deployment the way you want it to be you can have that integrated with the system.
I think what will likely happen is this some smart choices with our defaults so that system components can use whatever. I’d love to just connect my IDE, my shell, my chat app to the centralized llm and go from there.
I have another question, is it possible to have all the developer and AI related stuff and all the gaming related stuff on a single image out of the box? Bazzite has no option for dx and Bluefin GTS or GDX) has no option for gaming. Fedora or CentOS is not really important, I’m just looking for gaming and AI/dev stuff together on the same image OOTB.
Bazzite is working on a dx. For gaming I’ve been using flatpaked steam for years and it works great.
I have a couple of friends who use their computers for AI/machine learning/deep learning (all that stuff) development work during the week, and game heavily during the weekend. Both like Linux but don’t have time or knowledge (or time to increase their knowledge) about managing Linux. One used to use PopOS just because the Nvidia GPU worked OOTB, the other gave up and now uses MacOS or Windows. I would love to point them to Universal Blue and tell them “hey, install this OS that will take care of itself forever and you’ll just have to do your work and play your games and think of nothing else, no terminals, no setups, no manual update”. What should I tell them to dowload? By your answer it seems like Bazzite will include the development stuff, but I’m not sure as these things are not very clear to me. Will installing Bazzite have all the development, DevContainers, Docker, AI and Machine Learning stuff advertised in the Bluefin GDX (Alpha) announcement out of the box?
No, someone still needs to make bazzite-dx still. I’d just use the steam flatpak on gdx, should work fine.