Project Bluefin: an immutable, developer-focused, Cloud-native Linux

It would be so nice to get a brief description of what this is, and why it is useful, without a bunch of project names and buzzwords. Can it be boiled down to a few simple concepts that are delivered by this project?

Wow, I wish I'd discovered this about 12 hours ago. I just built a new PC yesterday and started installing and configuring Silverblue today, and basically everything I spent this afternoon on is automated by this project. Getting VSCode devcontainers working with Silverblue + Distrobox in particular would have saved me some time. Since I'm not particularly invested in my Silverblue setup yet, I'm installing this now.

A minor word of caution: don't use distros with unique(ish) features in production if you can't replace those features (quickly). It's of course a cost/effectiveness consideration, but I've been bitten by that when I inherited a project that ran on an immutable distribution that was withdrawn. There was a fork, but there was no upgrade path and the hosting company didn't offer it as an install on new servers, so now the thing runs on an LTS Ubuntu. When development on that stops, switching to another Linux should be easier.

What does "cloud-native" mean in this context, if anything? When I hear the term, I think of things like CoreOS, whereas this looks rather desktop-focused.

This is the announcement post, which is pretty old by now. Lots of great things have happened since, and it’s worth a look! This is my go-to distro when I build a computer for family. It’s bullet proof, practical, and everything auto updates with zero user interaction.

I went looking for KDE, but was disappointed. From the FAQ on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectbluefin.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectbluefin.io&#x2F;</a>:<p>&gt; What if I want something like KDE or another window manager?<p>&gt; Bluefin is an opinionated GNOME experience. However Universal Blue provides a maintained set of base images for anyone to be able to make a custom image. We hope Bluefin acts as an inspiration for others to build their own communities around user experiences. For example check out Bazzite if you want a great KDE gaming experience, similar to SteamOS.<p>The Bazzite link 404s, but there is info at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;universal-blue.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;bazzite-20&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;universal-blue.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;bazzite-20&#x2F;</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ublue-os&#x2F;bazzite">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ublue-os&#x2F;bazzite</a>. Seems mostly focused on SteamDeck.

Hi! I&#x27;m one of the maintainers of this project and wrote the blog post, I&#x27;d be happy to answer questions if you got em!

I&#x27;ve been a consumer of bazzite for almost a full year now. I built an AMD based gaming machine and wanted an experience as pleasant as SteamOS but for HTPC&#x27;s. That was what first turned me on to the universal-blue project.<p>I later picked up a framework (exactly 2 weeks ago) and have been daily driving Bluefin on it and the experience is exactly what I&#x27;d want from a daily driver. The durability and mindlessness of a Chromebook for updates, options to install all my tools&#x2F;utilities, and disposable&#x2F;composable development environments built right into the base system.

Bluefin has been my daily driver for over a year now. Love the community of people just trying to make Linux awesome on the desktop. I&#x27;m happy to answer questions about the project too.

I would love to know why it&#x27;s based on Fedora instead of Debian since it seems to be highly influenced by Ubuntu.<p>EDIT a few minutes of reading and I seem to get it now. this project and some of the others (Silverblue specifically but also devbox and devpod) have been under my radar but I think I&#x27;m going to try this out for a bit.

The information is well thought out and relevant but I have mixed feelings about the envelope its delivered in.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectbluefin.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectbluefin.io</a> scrolls in a really really janky way specifically on mobile firefox. It seems to work correctly on desktop firefox, and mobile chrome. It probably performs poorly in other low resource environments as well.<p>Even on a desktop browser its easy to stimulate noticeable CPU usage merely by scrolling and almost 400MB of RAM usage explicitly and only for this tab.<p>Using the 3G profile in firefox dev tools it takes over 40 seconds to load. What is remarkable is how long it took to actually load while only in fact transferring 5MB which is much slower than one would expect even when throttled to 750Kbps.<p>Even at the DSL profile (2Mbps) its a fairly shockingly slow 16s to load.<p>Incidentally 2.6 of the 5 is just a png file that could easily be reduced to ~900k without noticeable degradation.<p>Compare that to the linked blog post which scrolls normally without noticeable CPU usage, loads almost instantly while progressively loading the images and uses about 80MB of RAM.<p>I must say I love how it looks but it is a triumph of form over function that probably works only if most prospective users are viewing this on fast devices with a fast connection. Bounce rate for websites goes up enormously as one goes over 3-4 seconds.<p>If your website needs a loading screen and its not a desktop app running in a browser window stop whatever you are doing and throw it away and rethink it.

What I&#x27;m missing is a very simple step by step how to get started guide. How would I test this out? I love the enthusiasm! But if you want a new generation to use this the entry barrier should be lower than a link to GitHub release page.

NanoBSD<p>Reminded me of NanoBSD, which is a readonly version of FreeBSD.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.freebsd.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;nanobsd&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.freebsd.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;nanobsd&#x2F;</a>

What&#x27;s the immutability aspect of this? I&#x27;m trying to find that on the site, no luck yet tho (ctrl-f&#x27;ing at least).<p>Given that i&#x27;m on NixOS atm i&#x27;m quite interested in this aspect.

I highly recommend this project. Getting my own &quot;custom&quot; version forked and built with CI&#x2F;CD took me less than a day.

I love the concept here and will absolutely give this a go.<p>One bit of advice for the creators&#x2F;maintainers: stop saying “cloud native”. It’s effectively meaningless, and definitely confusing. But most importantly, it’s irrelevant. Start with customers and work backwards. And in that process, ask if they really care about “cloud native”. They don’t. So don’t water down or distract people away from a great thing, please.

It sounds like they made this to yearn for Linux stability.<p>I guess I&#x27;m fortunate in that I already made for the endgame of that quest, which is NixOS.

I&#x27;ve opened up the website <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectbluefin.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectbluefin.io</a>, but it turns out that this is not a website, but rather a web application. You cannot do things like this and claim it is built for developers. Scrolling lags, it shows a loading spinner and it does not respect navigation controls.<p>I cannot take this project seriously. Dope art, though.