She only suggested a small “news channel” built into the OS.

Yeah we're working on that here: https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin/issues/1485

The failure with secure boot afterwards is news to me, we'll investigate, thanks!

Did you experience the Silverblue issue on a ublue image? We mitigated that last month so you should only have one problem or the other, not both.

there are a lot of tools included that are new to me, despite being a cloud-oriented developer.

Interesting! What tools do you commonly use?

We probably won't (we're not looking to grow that much anymore), but I think someone should definitely take either portainer or the proxmox stack and just slap it on top a CoreOS image with a user friendly installer and make a killer SMB server.

Here's the repo: https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin and the intro doc outlines some of the features. We include all the codecs from rpmfusion and use negativo17 for the nvidia drivers.

Yeah checkout ucore, which is derived from CoreOS instead of Silverblue: https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore

What kind of printer? What's the name of the package that got it working? We can add printer drivers pretty easily.

Hi! Universal Blue co-maintainer here, here's the TLDR. You've got the basic descriptions right, "Universal Blue" is mostly the parent organization that holds everything in github.

We take Fedora's Atomic OCI images and customize them for different use cases (Aurora, Bazzite, and Bluefin) and then publish base images so people can make their own versions of whatever they want. So if you wanted to take Silverblue, Kinoite, and make your own custom image you can mostly just grab whatever you want and shove it into an OS image. Bluefin started off as a "fix me" script for Silverblue that added all the stuff I wanted and then once I was shown what Fedora wanted to do with it the natural progression was to just make it a custom image. We just released 3.0 a few minutes ago actually!

Basically in Fedora 41 the tech will become more widely available with official OCI base images and better tooling. We just decided to start way earlier in the process so we could get all the automation out of the way, build a community, get familiar with it, etc. Happy to answer any other questions you may have!

I’m unclear how mature the project is and whether it will be updated in a timely manner long term

ublue and bluefin co-maintainer here, we've been around for a while now (3rd birthday coming up!) and have been around in a more unofficial capacity for longer.

Bluefin is feature complete and is in maintenance mode, it's just going to get updated in perpetuity to 41, 42, etc. We invested in automation first so most of the maintenance is automatic and it doesn't take much for our team to do it. Right now most of our major ticket items are waiting for things to finish landing in upstream Fedora, most of which are targetted towards F41. A good portion of the team have been around in OSS for a long time and a bunch of us work in the industry and depend on Bluefin for our jobs, so much so that we have a great working relationship with Framework, so we're supporting those laptops as a community option for them.

Aurora is relatively new, coming in just as Plasma 6 landed in fedora. Most reports with issues we get for it are things like it being a new major release, wayland/nvidia issues, etc.

Hopefully that answers some of your questions, if you have more feel free to ask!

installs all those things and sets things up properly on a standard fedora install?

That's exactly what all universal blue images do. It's just that setup is done every single day in github from scratch and stamped out as an image so that the end result gets to your computer as a finished deployment artifact. Leads to better update reliability, built in rollback.

The biggest benefit is that it's easier for a community to fix the fast moving gamer stuff as a config layer on top of a distro that's delivered this way than me having to manually figure out what component of my gaming setup changed that week.

the package entropy over time will get me the very dependency issues that Flatpak wants to solve.

You can declare your distroboxes so that they get created regularly from scratch instead of upgrading in place: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/distrobox-assemble.md

That way the entropy never hits you. Then use the Prompt terminal https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/prompt to make it just part of your terminal ootb.

Author here. The distro comes with the filesystem compression and deduplication already set up and I don't need to manage it, so of course I'm going to use it.

Given the cost of storage I have no problems spending a barely noticeable amount of space to use flatpaks given all the problems they solve.