Hi ! I’m a little confuse between all immutable versions based on fedora. Is this correct : universal blue = tool to create image, based on fedora atomic desktop ?
With universal blue, they created :
- Bluefin = gnome
- Bluefin-DX = gnome + developper tools
- Aurora = kde
- Aurora-DX = kde + developper tools
- Bazzite = games
What the difference between silverble and bluefin for example, and which are you using ?
i use the universal blue silverblue-main image because it’s basically silverblue along with some packages included that I otherwise would have to manually layer in anyway (e.g., distrobox, freeworld-amd drivers from rpmfusion) and some quality-of-life improvements (some just recipes, automatic updates enabled)
I tried bluefin, but it was “too opinionated” and I didn’t agree with a lot of its opinions. Same for bazzite.
Oh, I see also by their screenshots, that Bluefin also spoils the UX of GNOME with custom extensions. So I will consider it the Manjaro (or Mint) of immutable distros.
Silverblue is an official Fedora edition, almost exact Fedora Workstation, but immutable. I use it. universal blue is a third-party project and their images are bloated with additional “features”: packages, drivers, etc. Bluefin contains Homebrew for example. It’s how they describe it, but I haven’t tried it to say more precise.
Well either uBlue’s “variant focus” got too much or you are just really lazy
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!
Thanks ! Is there a file/site to see the difference between silver blue and bluefin ? Are they using same repositories ? Or bluefin add rpm fusion for example ?
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.
Is it possible to build a minimal image for my home server without gnome etc? Thank you!
Yeah checkout ucore, which is derived from CoreOS instead of Silverblue: https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore
Does ublue have any plans to do variants of Fedora IoT? CoreOS seems more targeted for cloud than home servers. The ignition file is a benefit if you want to spin up hundreds of servers but a bit of a hindrance if you just starting out at home with a machine or two.
If they are just installing to a single machine and don’t need drivers or kernel mods I’d suggest IoT over bothering with anything CoreOS.
