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 ?
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!
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.
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.
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.
There’s also secureblue 🤣
My quick play w them: fedora(company) atomic distros like silver blue(gnome) vanilla way. Ublue(some independent developers) making their own versions/spins of fedora, eg bluefin, aurora, bazzite. Focused on a better experience.
Secureblue(some independent developers), also making their own versions/spins of fedora but focused on privacy/security.
None of them could see my network printer so I went back to normal fedora.
Immutable distros way bigger learning curve.
What kind of printer? What’s the name of the package that got it working? We can add printer drivers pretty easily.
Hi Jorge, Thanks so much for reply. Love your energy on your project and YouTube videos. My printer is brother MFC-L2750DW. Sorry I’m “experienced” linux mint xfce user, and wanted to give fedora gnome a go for Wayland, selinux enforcing and zram for security privacy yada yada. When I came across your project, you and your team done such an awesome job. So I guess if I can get the printer up and working I’ll go back to bluefin. Thanks again for TLC. ❤️
Secureblue ships Chromium, is lead by a single person and does not care about privacy “if it leads to worse security” (i.e. preinstalling Chromium and removing Firefox, even though there is no evidence that Chromium is more secure, it may likely be less secure)
is lead by a single person
Ultimately, (some) decisions are made by a single person. However, the list of maintainers suggests that contributions are welcome.
> even though there is no evidence that Chromium is not even less secure)
The double negation makes it hard to understand; but if I would give it a try, then I would get the following:
“even though there is evidence that Chromium is even less secure)”
If the above represents your views, could you provide said evidence?
even though there is no evidence that Chromium is not even less secure
What’s your take on Madaidan’s (i.e. security researcher on projects like Kicksecure and Whonix) article on the matter? I’m aware that it’s a bit outdated. However, would you be able to confidently claim that nothing found within is relevant today?
“even though there is evidence that Chromium is even less secure)”
That’s not how double negatives work. The alternative would be:
Even though there’s no evidence that chromium is more secure.
The article is very outdated and possibly not complete. ChromeOS uses Linux so you can assume it is very secure there.
I miss a debunk on the exact points by firefox devs.
But people everywhere told me madaidans article is not correct. Torbrowser also still doesnt use Chromium for various reasons. And that is the most security critical browser there is.
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.
Well either uBlue’s “variant focus” got too much or you are just really lazy
