General Improvements you'd like to see?

[castrojo]

This new pipeline is letting us fix lots of things so I'm looking for actionable feedback for things you'd like to see improved.

General things, so think more like like "I wish Bluefin had a WSL option out of the box" and not "swap out this flatpak for another". :)

Also if you have any long-term annoyances, now is the time because people can opt into the new images and shake them down much quicker than before, so when we start to move people over we can have actual improvements!

For example coming up we've made the dx mode a bunch of toggles instead of so "all in one" with multiple options. Stuff like this!

Also remember the trick is to enable options not ship a ton, we don't want to end up in a situation with too many justfiles etc. so for now try to think of things that improve what we have now, then we can roll with that before adding more stuff. Thanks!

[znmeb]

1. ghostty on all the variants ... I'd have to check but I think it can do all the fancy 'images in a terminal' things some modern workflows can use.
2. xfs option at install time on all the variants. It's on the enterprise distros for a reason.

Longer term, Raspberry Pi 5 and NVIDIA Jetson installers.

[castrojo]

The new installer let's you use xfs, that's what I use. We'll move all the images over to that so people can choose whichever fs they want.

The problem with ghostty in the distro variants is we'd need to add a third party copr and that's a hard no for us these days. It's probably best to leave the other two there until a proper flatpak of ghostty is made.

[znmeb]

What's keeping them from making a flatpak - they've got an AppImage?

[znmeb]

What's keeping them from making a flatpak - they've got an AppImage?

Now that I think of it, this is a perfect opportunity for an AI solution. For example, I'd dearly love a flatpak of RStudio Desktop. They have automation in their repo that builds .rpm and .deb packages using CPack. Surely an AI can add a flatpak build wrapper around that. Same for ghostty - they build the .rpm, the .deb and an AppImage.

[mheuvel-dev]

Homebrew added support for AppImages in V6. This could bridge the gap short term.

https://brew.sh/2026/06/11/homebrew-6.0.0/

Homebrew/brew#20334

[Yam9032]

Having Tailscale show up in the systray automatically after initial setup would be nice.

Also, how about adding the Night Theme Switcher extension by default?

Basically making it act a little more polished/feature complete like MacOS.

[mheuvel-dev]

Thanks for the awesome work.

Mark curated brew taps trusted out of the box.

As a stretch: enable a starters profile for Neovim tapping into the Astronvim release and their community extensions (e.g. docker, justfiles, git).

[pfalkingham]

"Mark curated brew taps trusted out of the box." <- because they are not, the pre/post install scripts fail. Starship doesn't get installed, for instance.

[Yam9032]

Could "Activity Monitor" be added as a search term for showing Mission Center?

This is how its called on MacOS and I still instinctively type that in - maybe it will help apple users migrate to Project Bluefin?

Or do I need to post this somewhere else?

[polycatenane]

Make it easier to use different kernels on the same release (or at least the option to pick what kernel you want to use).

Add https://github.com/travier/sysexts-manager to the base image.

Tooling for editors/IDEs besides vscode to work natively with container environments (devcontainer, distrobox, devbox, etc.).

[pcarlip]

For example, they have btrfs-assistant, which is one of the only two packages I still need to layer (along with snapper). A lot of them are either already on bluefin or available through homebrew or flatpaks, but not quite all.

[castrojo]

btrfs-assistant and snapper are unsupported and don't really make sense on our systems anyway. That's a feature!

[zilexa]

For example, they have btrfs-assistant, which is one of the only two packages I still need to layer (along with snapper). A lot of them are either already on bluefin or available through homebrew or flatpaks, but not quite all.

Please no. Snapper is really very specific. I would never use it simply because it puts snapshots inside the actual subvolume. That's just logiically incorrect. And btrfs-assistant is not necessary for normal usecases. There was some use for it in the past but by now, you really don't need it.

If you want to automate a proper backup strategy, I'd suggest including btrbk as a nice tool. As a matter of fact it's a great drop in replacement of btrfs snapshot & send/receive commands. No database nothing.

[polycatenane]

Not everything is available from homebrew casks. This is just another tool out there to help people get rid of layering. Also for cli tools, mise is really good as well.

[castrojo]

We offer a preconfigured mise setup for people who install it. What else on that list isn't available?

[repires]

Aarch64 for all images

[pfanzola]

Actually, Bluefin is by far the best OS (not distro, lol) for every modern laptop/PC I have. It suits my needs so well that the only issues I have are related to software availability or dash to dock (man that extension needs some love) anyway.

I'm looking forward to the AI help bundled for troubleshooting and the new developer experience without the need for a separate image this is so cool!

For general improvements:

1. A post-install tour that replaces the actual Gnome tour and provides an overview of all the possibilities that Bluefin offers. This would help new users who have never used Linux (or Gnome) before, and of course there could be a link to the documentation for more in-depth information!
2. A built-in way to use the Rebase Helper and Update OS button in the settings without using the terminal at all,
   I actually don't know if GNOME let you do that but it would polish up the experience a lot.

EDIT : 3) TPM out of the box if available like ubuntu 26.04 and opensuse aeon do would be a good bonus

PS: thanks once again for bluefin!

[castrojo]

Looked into doing our own static tour but it wasn't worth the effort given the work to do. So partnered up with Michael Tunnell. We're working on a video in the installer since it's a captive audience. I'll add an option to plop it into ~/Videos for later consumption. This will be a 10m "Intro to Bluefin" video here and then a companion Admin guide video online that is basically a video version of the docs. Here's what it looks like in the new installer:

There's no real rebasing around images in Bluefin since we've only got stable and testing branches, that will be a "Opt into Testing" button or something. @hanthor is working on the GUI stuff hopefully he can post some bling.

I'm doing the TUI here's that part.

[castrojo]

EDIT : 3) TPM out of the box if available like ubuntu 26.04 and opensuse aeon do would be a good bonus

The latest Dakota installer does this out of the box but we need more testing on it, I updated the dakota alpha thread with the latest URLs. I'm working on test bluefin:stable images now to see if we can get this ootb on the fedora ones.

[pfanzola]

That's so cool actually and the partnership with MT could give bluefin a great spotlight for more userbase and "improve" the existing one, can't wait to see it!

you guys are always a step ahead 🤓

[deepdowntraumahound]

the two biggest minor annoyances I have:

get atuin working again?

add an easy way to set up network shares via a systemd .mount file?

[pgjersvik]

I agree with making it easier to set up network share automounting. I've been using Gigolo in distrobox to automount my NAS shares, but it would be nice to have something built in to do that and not have to edit system files or use Gigolo.

[passthejoe]

I reallly like dev mode being broken up. I like adding just what I want.

TBH, everything is working so well, I'm pretty happy.

[zilexa]

If I'm not mistaken, currently the uupd timer is set via systemd to only run X minutes after a reboot.

Would it be possible to add/expand it with something like "After=hibernate.target", so that it will also be run after waking from hibernation?

Enabling hibernation (with the swap file on a btrfs subvol) has become super easy on Bluefin since kernel 6.19 (no need to mess with SElinux anymore). And it works very well, both on old and modern laptops.

Perhaps a second suggestion (I think the above could really be super easy?) maybe add a ujust script to enable hibernation?

The below is how to automatically enable hibernation on Bluefin, it's a snippit of my post install configuration:

# For hibernation to work, the RAM memory has to be written to the Storage device, specifically for the BTRFS filesystem: to a subvolume. This is better than a separate partition as it will keep your SSD healthy. 
SWAPSIZE=$(free | awk '/Mem/ {x=$2/1024/1024; printf "%.0fG", (x<2 ? 2*x : x<8 ? 1.5*x : x) }')
sudo btrfs subvolume create /var/swap
sudo chattr +C /var/swap
sudo restorecon /var/swap
sudo mkswap --file -L SWAPFILE --size $SWAPSIZE /var/swap/swapfile
sudo bash -c 'echo /var/swap/swapfile none swap defaults 0 0 >>/etc/fstab'
sudo swapon -av

# Now configure the system: Power key -> hibernate. When suspended (and also when closing the lid) -> suspend for 75min then hibernate (zero power consumption, to prevent battery drain). 
sudo mkdir -p /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d
sudo tee /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/lid.conf > /dev/null <<EOF
[Login]
HandlePowerKey=hibernate
HandleLidSwitch=suspend-then-hibernate
LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=yes
HoldoffTimeoutSec=20s
IdleAction=suspend-then-hibernate
EOF

echo "Creating /etc/systemd/sleep.conf.d/sleep.conf ..."
sudo mkdir -p /etc/systemd/sleep.conf.d
sudo tee /etc/systemd/sleep.conf.d/sleep.conf > /dev/null <<EOF
[Sleep]
HibernateDelaySec=75min
EOF

This is a minimal configuration that does not mess or replace anything in Gnome Settings > Power. Suspend will automatically become suspend-then-hibernate. The time out for suspend on battery or on AC are still configured in Gnome Settings.
(Logind cannot differentiate between AC or battery so it makes no sense to configure the timeouts there.)

A reboot is necessary. Afterwards this "just works".

But even if this isn't added via ujust, please consider running the uupd when the system wakes after hibernation.

[naheller]

Hello - what is the status of password manager integration with browsers?

If there is a "happy path" still under development, I'd like to add it to the list of improvements. And as always, happy to help with testing, documentation, etc. Thanks.

[peebs]

What do people currently do with say 1password? Just install browser addon and flatpak and just not have integrated unlock work?

1passwords website says its flatpak "isn't directly maintained" which doesn't sound promising from a security perspective. Which leads me unsure how to install on bluefin.

[zilexa]

Hello - what is the status of password manager integration with browsers?

If there is a "happy path" still under development, I'd like to add it to the list of improvements. And as always, happy to help with testing, documentation, etc. Thanks.

Why would OS maintainers have to focus on this? Bitwarden works totally fine here. Proton is working on a native app. The browser extensions work perfectly.
The issue is only with one single password manager. Isn't it the responsibility of 1Password to make their app working on immutable systems? Just like any other app developer?

[sillybilly10]

What do people currently do with say 1password? Just install browser addon and flatpak and just not have integrated unlock work?

1passwords website says its flatpak "isn't directly maintained" which doesn't sound promising from a security perspective. Which leads me unsure how to install on bluefin.

Password managers work best installed as a browser extension. I have Brave Origin installed in a distrobox container and it works flawlessly. If you use Firefox, flatpak is probably best option but it's included already in the base image. Brave doesn't work well on Flatpak and not recommended by their devs.

Anyone using Chromium browsers should check out Brave Origin - highly recommended and free for linux users.

[pfanzola]

What do people currently do with say 1password? Just install browser addon and flatpak and just not have integrated unlock work?

1passwords website says its flatpak "isn't directly maintained" which doesn't sound promising from a security perspective. Which leads me unsure how to install on bluefin.

Password managers work best installed as a browser extension. I have Brave Origin installed in a distrobox container and it works flawlessly. If you use Firefox, flatpak is probably best option but it's included already in the base image. Brave doesn't work well on Flatpak and not recommended by their devs.

Anyone using Chromium browsers should check out Brave Origin - highly recommended and free for linux users.

Yeah I use it and it works quite well sadly better than firefox especially otb (I would prefer it for ethical reason you know) but I have install it in flatpak...

[johnrellim]

What do people currently do with say 1password? Just install browser addon and flatpak and just not have integrated unlock work?

I've got a distrobox image setup for 1Pass and I export it. Once open it runs like a native app (at least as far as I can tell) .

[nlvw]

This is extremely my own biased opinion so if it doesn't reflect the direction you want for Bluefin/DakotaRaptor feel free to ignore.

I would like to see improvements in 3 areas. Fan control, Light (RGB) control, and lastly GPU control. By improvements I mean bundled default applications that provide a GUI to control these common PC features. Having these tools readily available, and properly setup/integrated, would provide a lot of out-of-box value to Bluefin/DakotaRaptor.

Fan Control

For fan control the traditional path is lm-sensors and fancontrol. Both of which are very unfriendly to use and in the case of fancontrol is very hard to get a config to stick due to constantly changing hwmon interfaces. fancontrol also doesn't have a GUI. Instead I would recommend including CoolerControl. This is an open source application with an amazing GUI and great graphs for setting up fan controls fairly easily.

The project provides official RPMs via COPR which could be used with Bluefin and a source install which could be used with DakotaRaptor. With bootc going the path of no longer including user facing layering the only other install method is a privileged podman quadlet container which I'm hesitant to recommend.

Right now setup for this requires an advanced user.

Light (RGB) Control

For physical light (aka RGB) control the standard is OpenRGB. They provide a Flatpak install on Flathub but manual setup is required for UDEV rules.

Right now setup for this requires an intermediate user.

GPU Control

GPU control is probably the most arguable on whether to include by default as it is more of a power user feature. Control in this case us mostly around overclocking and power limits. GPU fan control could also be considered though CoolerControl from earlier covers this. LACT seems to be the popular choice here and is easily installed via Flatpak/Flathub. To complete the Flatpak install you have to setup a root level systemd service that runs the LACT daemon that comes with Flatpak. This is done automatically by the LACT gui so it's really easy.

Right now setup for this is beginner friendly. There could be a slight discovery issue due to "LACT" not really screaming hey use me for GPU control. Although searching "overclock" or "gpu overclock" surfaces the application in Bazaar really quick.

[jorti]

It'd be great to have an aarch64 version because I have an old Chromebook that I want to reinstall with Linux.

[pfanzola]

It'd be great to have an aarch64 version because I have an old Chromebook that I want to reinstall with Linux.

you mean arm right?
doesn't bluefin LTS already has that?

[jorti]

you mean arm right? doesn't bluefin LTS already has that?

You are right, there's support for arm64 in Bluefin LTS. It'd be nice if the non-LTS had support too though.

I'll give it a try. Thanks!

[pfanzola]

you mean arm right? doesn't bluefin LTS already has that?

You are right, there's support for arm64 in Bluefin LTS. It'd be nice if the non-LTS had support too though.

I'll give it a try. Thanks!

no problem mate happy to help!

anyway I think the arm version for standard bluefin is WIP but (if I'm not wrong) there's an upstream issue for this so no lack of enthusiasm 😁

edit: beaware that bluefin lts is based on centos (not fedora) so the fuse libs thing are not supported at all... in case you rely on appimages if not should totally work otb (check also the docs of the lts variant for a better info about that)

[castrojo]

anyway I think the arm version for standard bluefin is WIP but (if I'm not wrong) there's an upstream issue for this so no lack of enthusiasm 😁

What happens is we make an arm image and no one uses it and there's no kit for anyone to buy.

[znmeb]

anyway I think the arm version for standard bluefin is WIP but (if I'm not wrong) there's an upstream issue for this so no lack of enthusiasm 😁

What happens is we make an arm image and no one uses it and there's no kit for anyone to buy.

There are good reasons for that:

1. Raspberry Pis are really embedded devices at heart, not general purpose computers. Only the Pi 500+ is powerful enough to justify consideration as a Bluefin daily driver.

2. The newer Windows Arm laptops are powerful enough for something like Bluefin to be a viable daily driver. But I don't think the Linux kernel has caught up with the hardware fully, and there's not much incentive for Microsoft to let go of its "WSL running on our own hypervisor is good enough" posture. They'll probably run Podman Desktop and Docker Desktop (also on the Microsoft hypervisor).

3. That leaves Macs. Case closed.

[mcphail]

Hello everyone. Let me share a few impressions of installing Bluefin LTS (as it has an ARM version) as a VM using UTM on a 16-inch MacBook Pro M1 Max and Apple Virtualization:

1. It would be lovely to use "normal" Bluefin, if there was an image.
2. If a high-resolution display is detected, there should be a dialog to set Scaling before things like the Introductory Tour are launched.
3. Scaling is not reflected on the login screen which becomes hard to read.
4. The terminal nags me "Your current image is over 1 month old, run ujust update". Running an update and rebooting does not fix this message. I don't know if this is because the LTS updates less frequently or if the ARM version is not up to date?

Apart from this, pretty flippin' cool so far. Thanks for making this!

[mcphail]

Note that this isn't really a request for an ARM version of Bluefin; right now I'd view it as a novelty to run in a VM on a Mac rather than something I'd use regularly or become a daily driver. I can't see that it is reasonable to divert development resource towards ARM quite yet.

[castrojo]

As luck would have it I was researching this while optimizing the dakota pipe today. LTS and Fedora bluefin are annoying for us on this because we have akmods and stuff from ublue. So we need to wait for someone to make sure arm works for Fedora +1 in perpituity.

Dakota however, is rolling, and GNOME has ARM artifacts in their cache. We also purposely went with GNOMEs kernel and got out of the kernel module business entirely with this one. Which means the Github runners just need to build ghostty and a few bluefin things and assemble, GNOME has done most of the work!

This would also mean we can just turn this on without the need to "divert development resource towards ARM quite yet." This is the first solution that appears to let us just "turn on" ARM. Will let you know the first cold one will take hours. But since it's decoupled from the other builds we could easily keep the cache warm.

I think having a nice VM solution is worth it, I've seen people mimic hashi's approach (he famously has a nix VM integrated with his desktop so he can switch over to linux and back for zoom calls, etc). Plus we should ONE arm image at least, I think this one looks like a decent way to start.

https://github.com/projectbluefin/dakota/actions/runs/27922036140

[castrojo]

Seperate request from folks, we need to figure out an awesome solution for macs so you can just have a magical thing - is there a good accel VM thing that people can use? Colima is cncf maybe we can bootstrap ourselves? What do the cool fruit people do for VMs?

[znmeb]

The closest thing to a universal hypervisor I have found is Oracle VirtualBox. But I use Hyper-V on Windows, Virtual Machine Manager on Linux, and don't use a Mac at all.

[mcphail]

VM.mp4

The VM experience with UTM is far from terrible, so maybe a straightforward ISO is fine rather than trying to integrate with other tools? The video I've posted will be a bit choppy as I had to fudge the frame rate a bit for posting here but it should demonstrate that window scrolling in the Linux VM, whilst not as smooth as in the native MacOS desktop, is acceptable. This is with the VM set to Apple Virtualization, "experimental" video acceleration (which I think is virGL based), 8GB RAM and 4 cores. I haven't run any benchmarks on this beyond playing with it for a while and finding the experience "fine", so no idea if acceleration is doing anything here. If there was a cool and fancy tool to do all of this better than that is great, but UTM is free with a support-the-developers paid version. It was the best tool I could find when I was hunting. As you can see, it is simple to switch back and forward between the host and guest with a swipe on the trackpad, albeit that does clobber GNOME's trackpad gestures.

[Ox01af]

It would be great to have a chromium based browser like helium, brave origin or at least brave NOT running as a flatpak as this is considered to modify chromium sandboxing and is not recommended.

And if it was possible to get niri with noctalia or dms on bluefin, I would be very glad. :-)

[naheller]

Hey, there's actually a great community image called Zirconium that offers a Niri + DMS experience. And in case you had any worries about "unofficial" things, one of Bluefin's core contributors is an author on the project. So it's legit!

It's unlikely that Bluefin will offer other desktop environments, so IMO Zirconium is the next best thing to rolling your own setup with something like BlueBuild etc.

[castrojo]

The sandbox reconciliation is coming in flatpak-next so this is solved upstream already design wise. Just needs to be implemented and it's the correct long term choice.

[Ox01af]

@naheller, thanks for the info about Zirconium and its developers. I had already installed Zirconium and my impression was good but I was unsure if it is "serious" enough to be a daily driver. And I like all the additional stuff in bluefin with ujust, the developer mode etc. so I would still prefer to have Niri on Bluefin. I alreardy tried it with Niri as a sysext which worked but the additional stuff like bar, wallpaper etc. is a bit of a mess. So I will reconsider to use Zirconium.

@castrojo, thanks for the info about the issue being solved upstream, that is great to hear. Do you have any guess when this might arrive?

[deepdowntraumahound]

Is there a way to install zirconium (or aurora, bazzite, dakota, etc...) and bluefin, on the same machine and be able to switch back and fortth between them without having to rebase? It would be nice to be able to test out different DE's.

[castrojo]

It doesn't exist it's just a design, people are working on it -

On Zirconium, there's no reason to be unsure just ask them, they're certainly doing a better job than Bluefin in many areas. The latest developer mode should run on any linux -dx isn't an image thing any more, we're moving as much as we can to userspace!

[romano21A]

I would love a devcontainer base image based on bluefin-dx (including bling) to make the shell inside the devcontainer feel as close as possible to the host

[castrojo]

Yeah been thinking about a nspawn system container for something like this!

[sillybilly10]

I think it'd be really cool if eventually we could use AI to create something where we can rebase from say like Bluefin to Aurora without having to do a full reinstall

[castrojo]

Rebasing has nothing to do with the image this has something to do with KDE and it's use of dotfiles.

[zilexa]

Regarding this, I went ahead to figure out how to trigger uupd after hibernation, with the same logic as currently happening (20min/6hr) and created a feature request. Hope this helps!

[yoshimintos-repos]

Maybe a desktop switcher like in Manjaro or ZorinOS.
So, like, I want a Windows-like, macOS-like, Bluefin-edited, or a clear GNOME option.
What do you think?

[yoshimintos-repos]

And a feedback keyboard shortcut: for example, if I see an error or have an idea for an improvement, I press Super+F (or another shortcut), then a Libadwaita-style dialog (a gaephic port for the ujust report and verify functions) opens with context from the currently active app.
Maybe.