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Project Bluefin Linux
- catlover76 3y agoI don't understand what this is. Is it another Linux distro? Does the OS live on my hardware or not?
- LeoPanthera 3y agoIt explains, quite clearly, right on the front page. You don't even have to click. Just scroll down.
- catlover76 3y agoIt most definitely does not. And I find that to be the case with a lot of the things posted here.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoI have no idea what to say to you because it absolutely does. Scroll down.
- webstrand 3y agoNowhere do they explain what "cloud-native" means. It does seem to run on local hardware, so I'm unsure what the even mean by "cloud".
- dopidopHN 3y agoTo give another data point: I’m familiar with that project and the parent’s project but I also agreed with you. I would have no idea what that project is just looking the website. It’s a immutable distro, and that particular flavor is more opinionated on what package is installed at first. Cool birds picture tho
- bigpod 3y agoCloud native is a set of principles with which you develop and build software to make it less likely to break and be more conducive to rapid iteration(In theory you dont even need to deploy your app to cloud to be cloud native) ublue and project bluefin just cherry picked those principles that make sense for a desktop OS to try and bring what cloud native did for server world into desktop linux and hopefully make it not suck. one of those sucky things about linux desktop is package management which is just sad at best problematic at worst which is why image-based and flatpak first
- rawoke083600 3y agoEven if it does "say so clearly" you have quite a bit of data and users, claiming they can't find or are confused. One can be right and die on this hill, or be thankful that you have the feedback to make it better.
- _lvbh 3y ago> Is it another Linux distro yes > Does the OS live on my hardware or not yes Feels like just Fedora Silverblue with some extra packages installed by default. Haven’t tried it yet but not really interested.
- djbusby 3y ago> Bluefin is a custom image of Fedora Silverblue. The best of both worlds: the reliability and ease of use of a Chromebook, with the power of a GNOME desktop.
- catlover76 3y agoSo what does that mean? How is it like a "Chromebook"? Are they selling a piece of hardware? If not, then how is the comparison apt? For example, it would be a weird thing to say "compare Ubuntu 23.x.x with a Chromebook, which one should I use?" because one is an OS and one is a hardware + OS combo, with the hardware manufactured by multiple different companies.
- msla 3y agoHas a distro Cloud-nature? This is the most serious question of all. If you say yes or no, You lose your own Cloud-nature.
- bigpod 3y agosame principles, Buzzword, Excitement
- catlover76 3y agoThis is clearly a reference I don't understand lol
- The_Amp_Walrus 3y agoZen Buddhism reference: A monk asked Zhaozhou, 'Does even a dog have Buddha Nature?'
- bigpod 3y agono project bluefin doesnt sell a piece of hardware but chromebook is far more known as a technology then the operating system it runs ChromeOS(based on gentoo) so its wording targeted at layman
- JustinGarrison 3y agoIt’s closer to a spin of Fedora than a completely different distro because it uses Fedora silverblue with some options about what should be installed by default (including drivers). Different desktop environments are available, but gnome is the default.
- jcastro 3y agoHi! I worked on this with some friends over the past two years or so (we had to work on the generic tooling first: https://universal-blue.org/ https://universal-blue.org/) I'm happy to answer questions you might have! Thanks for checking it out! (I'll be at KubeCon Chicago with stickers if you want the live demo on a Framework 13)
- lagniappe 3y agoWow this looks really cool, and I'm excited that you're releasing m1/m2 support soon. I use Silverblue as a daily driver, but so far not on m2 hardware. Looking forward to giving it a shot!
- jcastro 3y agoWe are fortunate to have the Fedora Asahi SIG to the enablement work: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Asahi https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Asahi There's stuff to do as far as making ostree/oci builds out of that but we're talking to folks regularly now so hopefully we'll get it sorted. Also a huge shout out to Equinix Metal for sponsoring an Ampere builder for us, hoping to get on as many ARM devices as we can!
- lagniappe 3y agoThat's great news, keep up the good work! Thanks for your time
- smitty1e 3y agoDo any vendors offer this on a laptop with all of the drivers, and a pony to be friends with the dinosaur?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- phendrenad2 3y agoMy problem with respins and derivatives like this is, they're usually only backed by one developer, and when that developer gets bored with the project, or gets too busy to keep up with bugfixes and patches, everyone has to abandon it and go back to the base distro. They'd be better off just tweaking silverblue themselves at the end of the day.
- doubled112 3y agoI feel exactly the same way. I use plain old Debian now, but used to love some of the Debian based distros. CrunchBang springs to mind. I tend to stick pretty close to defaults these days, so some scripts and Ansible playbooks configure everything on all of my machines with not a lot of maintenance or future worries.
- hk1337 3y agoI like Debian for servers but prefer fedora for a workstation. Maybe I’m weird.
- doubled112 3y agoNot at all, Fedora Workstation is a pretty decent desktop. I run Debian on all of my server stuff at home too. It's not a perfect desktop, but the consistency between machines is something I appreciate. I use it as my stable base while running most applications from Flatpaks. They're up to date but the OS itself never surprises me.
- hk1337 3y agoYeah, I like Amazon Linux for servers too but not Fedora but you can only use that on AWS
- jcastro 3y ago(Co maintainer here) Yeah this why don't call it a distro. It's just your scripts/ansible playbooks and then github runs "podman build" regularly and spits out an image at the end. At the end of the day it's just running a build step in CI so that your machines just end up with the final image instead of running the playbook/script on each one. Hope that helps!
- georgyo 3y agoA neat concept, however this doesn't give me a ton of confidence to use it. An example is this bit: https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin/blob/main/usr/bin/ublue-nix-install https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin/blob/main/usr/bin/ublue-... That runs as root not one but three bits of mutable shell scripts from the internet. I love me some nix, but the most reproducible package manager should not be install via a hodpodge of directly running scripts from the Internet. Really nothing from my distribution should be doing that. At the very least they should be vendored as part of the project so you can see when these scripts change.
- jcastro 3y agoThanks for the feedback we'll take a look!
- bketelsen 3y agoGood eye! Those scripts are not used anymore, they were early prototypes. You can see the comments in the PR here: https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin/pull/606#issue-1954476210 https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin/pull/606#issue-195447621...
- georgyo 3y agoEven if the particular script is not used, the just file there is actually much worse. Literally everything is running scripts directly from the internet, without any version pinning or check summing. There is no way to run the same build twice and have any confidence that the result was the same. https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin/blob/41bdf294c20a3903f4a0cf72105f466bf0676291/just/custom.just#L138 https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin/blob/41bdf294c20a3903f4a...
- bryanlarsen 3y agoI've been fairly happy with Kinoite, the Fedora Silverblue KDE spin. Really excited to see this ecosystem get some love.
- VoidWhisperer 3y agoRandom side note: Something with this website causes a bizarre issue when opened: I have youtube open in another browser window and it starts lagging like crazy when the website is opened. I checked to see if there was any spike in gpu/cpu usage but i didn't see anything that stuck out
- JustinGarrison 3y agoThe YouTube video starts lagging? What browser are you using?
- VoidWhisperer 3y agoChrome
- FireInsight 3y agoOh, I'm in firefox mobile and the scrolling lags. Maybe there's some heavy JS there in the background?
- johnny22 3y agoi saw cloud native and closed the tab. A few hours later i came back to HN and read the comments and realized it was work on top of universal-blue which i was familiar with. Now i'm actually gonna read the page. That talk of cloud-native definitely threw me off.
- bigpod 3y agoits more applying cloud native principles (principles that work very well in server side even if you don't use cloud) to create stable and well made "next-gen" distros
- speed_spread 3y ago_What_ is a cloud native distribution?! If it's just a custom Silverblue image why not just say so. It's an idea good enough on its own to not require cloud gobbledygook.
- ekianjo 3y agoJust word salad basically
- bigpod 3y agonot realy look for a more detailed anwser on one of your other comments under the parent of this one
- FireInsight 3y agoIt's built in the cloud every day, and your machine just fetches the changes. So same thing as image-based, basically, but more eye catching for a cloud professional or something.
- ekianjo 3y agoI dont see any difference with just any distro out there
- bigpod 3y agoyour normal distro does updates by pulling every package on your system and swapping files mid running this can cause miriad of issues just by doing it and another miriad if update is stopped mid updating(not always but sometimes). So this means your system is being recomposed at runtime while on other hand on bluefin and simialr image based OS-s composition of your OS is done somewhere else not directly on your running file system(could be your computer just not your rootFS) then it takes that image and pulls old image(normally on startup) and places new one in its place all in one go, so any composition errors dont get triggered during update and such. (composition before deployment is a principle cloud-native pushes) This makes updates far more stable and less error prone and automatic updates are a thing you dont even notice day to day. and what happens if image cant boot it just boots the old one or you can select the old one from grub(2 old versions are stored per default if i remember correctly) This idea has been successfully used by likes of android chromeOS and such to create seamless and risk free updates.
- ekianjo 3y agoWhat does cloud native even mean?
- bigpod 3y agoat the end of the day its just set of principles
- weikju 3y agoI've always been curious about SilverBlue but found many papercuts, especially related to code editors / dev environments and other issues with FlatPak that are still not solved (e.g. mDNS host resolution not working inside FlatPak apps). I'll be interested in having a look at this one over the next few months as it seems to have some out-of-the-box solutions for many of those, and a lot of thought/effort has been put into it for the past 2 years!
- bigpod 3y agobeen using bluefin while it was in beta for almost a year and for me it was very easy to move to it as my development workflow is nothing like most and i heavily utilize podman containers on the outset and not system packager or flatpak. this is what i have been recommending to most at this time as it lowers friction whether you use silverblue or not, and enchances tability of your system as if you switch versions doesnt leave lots of gooblygook of orphaned files and such brokedness
- weikju 3y agoYes, I would like to use it more or things like it... Hoping the papercuts will get fixed over time :)
- Daegalus 3y agoIve been using Bazzite for a while now. it has been great. Works great, has a solid base, but great modifications and additions.I will say I am not a fan of a lot of the distrobox stuff, so I disabled steam, supporting steam stuff, and so on in Distrobox, and replaced it all with direct Flatpak variants. They work better for my needs. I actually had games not work in the distrobox Steam but work just fine in flatpak Steam. But other than that, everything is just humming along.