The next generation cloud-native Linux workstation, designed for reliability, performance, and sustainability.
OCI images that you can turn into a full-fledged developer workstation shipping Devbox, Nix, Homebrew, devcontainers and DevPod with one command. Pretty swanky!
I have long loooooong ago given up on distro hopping because, at the end of the day, most distros are close enough to each other that it doesn't really matter which one you choose at the end of the day. These new immutable ones though.. They seem cool as hell. I need to give one a go someday.
I've been distro hopping a bit lately trying out some immutable distros like nix,fedora kinoite,microos,but I always end up back on arch. I think that settles it and I should just stop,cause distro hopping is a waste of time.
I mean, if you are not happy (and dont fear your home getting messed up with configs) you can just rebase an immutable OS to another one, one reboot and you are from GNOME to KDE to Sway to whatever
They need to work on their branding. "Cloud Native" triggers images of subscription services and data mining. But the idea here is that the whole OS and its components are all sort of containerized, so you can just pull pre-configured "cloud" images that are guaranteed to work out of the box to your machine.
That is one of the dumbest ways I've ever seen someone try to connect their product to the cloud buzzword. By that logic all stable linux distros are cloud since you pull the packages with preconfigured sane defaults from the repos.
CNCF projects themselves are indeed FOSS, but "the cloud" as it is most commonly interacted with, by tech workers,
are enormous collections of closed-source systems run by Amazon, Google or Microsoft (all under antitrust investigation either now or in the past).
Because it uses OCI images, it auto-updates like a Chromebook, and you can switch between modes, like say a gaming mode that's a full SteamOS replacement, to a mode that gives you an entire development environment without needing to install and configure these layers or stacks of capabilities yourself.
That's very powerful. For cloud native developers like myself who are used to working with container images as the deliverable artifact, this makes that workflow very easy. Podman is included. You can create entire development environments at will that are totally "pure": no side effects because everything you need is in the container. That's a Dev Container.
I'm still having a hard time grasping this, probably because I don't understand OCI images. How would this be different than say using fedora with docker to spin up containers with stuff I need?
Like most others in this thread, I'm having trouble understanding what this is. Fedora Silverblue with dev-related pre-installed stuff? (rhetorical question)
Their presentation feels like NixOS. You open their webpage and the entire thing is unclear. If even the target audience doesn't get it, they probably won't use it out of their own volition or without hand-holding.
Dunno if there are Fedora maintainers on the fediverse or reading this thread, but IMO they should tell their BlueFin team to fix the marketing. Most people don't get what they're trying to sell.
Not sure if it's right, but it seems to me this is really just a bunch of preconfigured fedora instances for specific use cases with containerized packages you can mix and match to your needs. Then they slap on a bunch of buzz words to make it sound novel.
I genuinely don't understand the value proposition of, over just regular silverblue. As far as I can tell, they have a opinionated desktop setup out of the box, and a shell script that is a bunch of aliases to things you might want.
Co-maintainer here. That's basically what it is. The value proposition is included hardware enablement on the image (nvidia drivers, controller support, etc). and flathub ootb.
In the end, it is just an extra layer of testing. Silverblue only provides the base imgaes and confirms its stability. uBlue/bluefin adds the layers on top to the image and tests their stability with the base image before pushing the combined image to users. It is good for people who don't want to do the layering and want something with those defaults out of the box.
Edit: for clarity, my comment is mostly directed at ublue or universal blue, which is what bluefin is based on.
I think the really value comes from the ability to easily roll new custom images and for the community to collaborate on those images to produce images that require minimal layering after the application locally.
If anyone stumbles upon this and was confused like me, I found this link to be a super clear explanation of OCI Linux delivery- https://universal-blue.org/introduction/