I absolutely love what the universalblue team has been doing. They are one of the few organizations that are truly dedicated to providing a first-class, enjoyable, batteries included linux experience on the desktop.
I truly believe that updates are seamless not just because of all the buzzwords about the underlying technology but because its made for people who actually use the system daily. They gate the fedora kernel and track breaking changes so you don't get them, and generally care about the user experience. If you want sensible gnome defaults and extensions they are there (or there to be disabled at the click of a button). If you want remote desktop streaming (sunshine/moonlight) its there.
On the flip side, their distribution model also means no more need to keep track of out of tree kernel modules on upgrades (zfs, nvidia, waydroid even on Bazzite).
Now onto the post specifically: LTS from a CentOS Stream base seems interesting. Fedora is nice, and the universalblue team tames it 99%, but its edge can be a bit too bleeding sometimes. My only reticence with CentOS Stream though is that it is veering dangerously close to Red Hat proper which I am unsure how to feel about. I am eagerly awaiting when non-rpms distros will be able to use the same underlying technology Bluefin uses, and see how the space evolves. A debian base especially seems interesting in theory. There has recently been some progress on that front:
https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc/issues/865https://github.com/bootcrew/debian-bootc
I think they have some improvement to do on supply-chain though. A lot of random COPRs and kernel patches pulled in from various random third- and first party repos that I think should get consolidated before I can consider it mature and really ready for prime time.
Similarly it would also be nice to see end-to-end builds being reproducible locally. (Things are currently hardcoded to github.com or tied to GitHub Actions in a few places. The patching required for that is nothing crazy - Good First Issue material :))
After about 5 years away from desktop Linux, I have now been using Bluefin/Bazzite for the past few months as a Windows/MacOS replacement on my personal desktop and laptop.
I knew that Bazzite was supposedly good for gaming but never looked into it any more than that. When I eventually learned about Bluefin, I was surprised to find that it, Bazzite, and all the other Universal Blue “distros” are built with the same container-native tech that I use every day at work. Needless to say I was immediately sold.
I have been very impressed so far. I don’t find the immutable OS limiting in my day-to-day work at all. I guess I’m all about that “defaults lifestyle” now.
Each version of CentOS Stream is maintained for about 5.5 years, plenty to qualify as an LTS and significantly longer than Fedora (the base for non-LTS Bluefin).
Meh. I haven't seriously considered GTK ecosystems since 3 got released. Between the increased usage of screen real estate, feature minimalism as a philosophy, becoming infested with ever more JavaScript that hampers performance, the continuous API instability that strangles extension development, and "my way or the highway" approach to workflows... I just don't get why people like it.
While not mentioned in the post, there is a KDE flavor of the same project called Aurora/kinoite. While it doesn't get the LTS treatment (IMO it would have been the better pick over Bluefin), it's still viable.
I absolutely love what the universalblue team has been doing. They are one of the few organizations that are truly dedicated to providing a first-class, enjoyable, batteries included linux experience on the desktop.
I truly believe that updates are seamless not just because of all the buzzwords about the underlying technology but because its made for people who actually use the system daily. They gate the fedora kernel and track breaking changes so you don't get them, and generally care about the user experience. If you want sensible gnome defaults and extensions they are there (or there to be disabled at the click of a button). If you want remote desktop streaming (sunshine/moonlight) its there. On the flip side, their distribution model also means no more need to keep track of out of tree kernel modules on upgrades (zfs, nvidia, waydroid even on Bazzite).
Now onto the post specifically: LTS from a CentOS Stream base seems interesting. Fedora is nice, and the universalblue team tames it 99%, but its edge can be a bit too bleeding sometimes. My only reticence with CentOS Stream though is that it is veering dangerously close to Red Hat proper which I am unsure how to feel about. I am eagerly awaiting when non-rpms distros will be able to use the same underlying technology Bluefin uses, and see how the space evolves. A debian base especially seems interesting in theory. There has recently been some progress on that front: https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc/issues/865 https://github.com/bootcrew/debian-bootc
Mostly agree.
I think they have some improvement to do on supply-chain though. A lot of random COPRs and kernel patches pulled in from various random third- and first party repos that I think should get consolidated before I can consider it mature and really ready for prime time.
Similarly it would also be nice to see end-to-end builds being reproducible locally. (Things are currently hardcoded to github.com or tied to GitHub Actions in a few places. The patching required for that is nothing crazy - Good First Issue material :))
After about 5 years away from desktop Linux, I have now been using Bluefin/Bazzite for the past few months as a Windows/MacOS replacement on my personal desktop and laptop.
I knew that Bazzite was supposedly good for gaming but never looked into it any more than that. When I eventually learned about Bluefin, I was surprised to find that it, Bazzite, and all the other Universal Blue “distros” are built with the same container-native tech that I use every day at work. Needless to say I was immediately sold.
I have been very impressed so far. I don’t find the immutable OS limiting in my day-to-day work at all. I guess I’m all about that “defaults lifestyle” now.
I'm a little surprised that an LTS product is based on CentOS 10 stream. Doesn't that have the shortest support?
Each version of CentOS Stream is maintained for about 5.5 years, plenty to qualify as an LTS and significantly longer than Fedora (the base for non-LTS Bluefin).
So Bluefin GDX is a good fit for the Nvidia DGX workstations going for 8-15k on ebay?
I don't even do language model stuff I just want a gold computer
A backported Gnome with a recent kernel definitively needs a current MESA backport.
Mesa is kept current enough in CentOS that a backport isn't necessary. It's currently at version 25.0.7, same as Fedora 41.
Meh. I haven't seriously considered GTK ecosystems since 3 got released. Between the increased usage of screen real estate, feature minimalism as a philosophy, becoming infested with ever more JavaScript that hampers performance, the continuous API instability that strangles extension development, and "my way or the highway" approach to workflows... I just don't get why people like it.
While not mentioned in the post, there is a KDE flavor of the same project called Aurora/kinoite. While it doesn't get the LTS treatment (IMO it would have been the better pick over Bluefin), it's still viable.
https://github.com/ublue-os/aurora
https://getaurora.dev/
Well, everyone's different. It's great that Linux caters to all of us.
I prefer Gnome because it does what I need but mostly just disappears and gets out of my way.
I used to love fiddling and customising everything. Plenty of options for that if that's your thing, like KDE.