Margine OS: a fast creator-focused Bluefin DX downstream (signed CachyOS kernel, tiling, scheduler GUI)

[daniel-g-carrasco]

Hi everyone, and first: thank you to the Bluefin / Universal Blue folks for the foundation. I have been daily-driving a personal image built on top of Bluefin DX, and it is finally public: Margine OS.

It keeps everything that makes Bluefin pleasant (atomic, every codec in place, quiet auto-updates, rollback) and changes the handful of things I personally wanted. I figured this is the right room to share it.

What I changed on top of Bluefin DX

• CachyOS kernel (BORE scheduler). Pulled from the bieszczaders/kernel-cachyos COPR and re-signed with Margine's own key, with MOK enrollment wired into the ISO's GRUB so Secure Boot stays on instead of being disabled.
• CPU scheduler, from a GUI. A picker to switch the scx schedulers live (scx_lavd for gaming, scx_bpfland for busy desktops, Off for BORE).
• Touchpad sensitivity. My own tool, Wayland Scroll Factor, is baked in with a GUI, for scroll speed and pinch zoom/rotate that GNOME does not expose.
• Tiling out of the box. o-tiling (a fork of System76 Pop Shell) with Hyprland-style keybindings, enabled via the gschema override (baked system-wide, the Bluefin/Bazzite pattern, no per-user install).
• Gaming when you want it. ujust margine-gaming (Flatpak) or ujust margine-gaming-native (RPM-layered, Bazzite-style).
• A creator-focused app set preinstalled (GIMP, Inkscape, Darktable, OBS, Reaper, Audacity, EasyEffects, LibreOffice, and the GNOME suite).
• Signed end to end. The whole build and multi-stage test runs on GitHub Actions, with SHA-pinned dependencies, a cosign signature and an SBOM. ISOs are distributed torrent-first via the Internet Archive.

  

Performance (the honest version)

The one structural change worth benchmarking is the kernel, so I tested it cleanly on the same laptop (Framework Laptop 13, Ryzen 5 7640U): switching only the ostree deployment between Margine and stock Bluefin DX, governor pinned to performance, start temperatures matched, median of four runs, all under a background CPU load.

Headline: about 1.8× faster context-switch latency, +54% thread throughput, and 43 to 55% lower median scheduling latency, with a small worst-case tail trade-off (the expected BORE behaviour, and a sign it is not cherry-picked). Full method, raw data and a reproduce-it-yourself script: margine.the-empty.place/docs/kernel-performance

Links

• Site and download: margine.the-empty.place
• Docs: margine.the-empty.place/docs
• Handbook (every build step): margine.the-empty.place/handbook
• Source: github.com/daniel-g-carrasco/margine-image

It is a personal, opinionated project (one maintainer), mainly aimed at creative work, so feedback and criticism are very welcome. There is also an experimental NVIDIA variant I genuinely cannot test (no NVIDIA hardware here), so if anyone runs NVIDIA and wants to help validate it, I would really appreciate it.

[tHEwEELS]

Hi Daniel,
I can't install your OS. First I tried via rebase from bluefin, but it doesn't start after reboot and today I tried a fresh install.

After the boot screen with the menu install this version or another version I get an erros ../shim_lock_verifier_write:192:bad shim signature
and
grub_cmd_initrd:260:you need to load the kernel first

If I remember correct there was no live system, only install options.
Best regards bernd

here my neofetch infos

▂▘▃╱▘▚▄▆▘ 󱋩  bluefin-dx:latest 🔓
▊▍▃▗▅▝╱▅▝┎▅▅▅▃▄▖ ▁ 󱍢  Bluefin (Version: latest-43.20260429)
▘▅▄▌▍▘▅▅╴▚▚▘▝▄▃▅▂▘   Linux 6.19.14-200.fc43.x86_64
▘▆▆▗╷▊▚▎▏▋▊▗▘▝▆╺▅▃▅╸ 󰅐  14 mins
▋╴▘▁▅▃▎▝▃▗╽▉▍▗▍▄▝╱▏▁ 󰔠  Forged on Feb 16 2026
▝▄╏╱▅▊▁┕▁▂▃▚▎▅▂╱╸▃▄▆
▆ ▝▖━━▂┲▚▌▋▗─▌▂ 󱍢  Murder Chickens: 3.4k (weekly)
▋▇▄▄▅▂▅▘┏▘▆▏▄▂▁   Bazaar Installs: 8.0k (weekly)
▌▖▌▌▍▊━▅▄┖▄▗▝▘▖╺▄▂
▝▘▋▝▖▖▝▖▅▄▝▅▎▝▊┕▎▋▄ 󰾰  MS-7A34 (2.0)
▝▖▋▖▝▖▝▅▃▎▘▝▘▃╷▍▉▃▝▖ 󰻠  AMD Ryzen 7 5700 (16) @ 4.65 GHz
▎▘▄▌▌▌▂╱▉▍▁▗▁┑▊▝┻▖▋▝▖ 󰍛  AMD Radeon RX 560 Series [Discrete]
╲▉▅▁▁▂╻┄▇▆▍▇╹┷┙▎▅▘▝▃▖▆▄▂▂▂▃ 󰧑  2.88 GiB / 15.50 GiB (19%)
▁▄▆▘╲▖▃▝▃▌ ▌▖▄▄▄▝┏▍▃┭▆┈╻▖▎▄▖▌▗   98.79 GiB / 444.54 GiB (22%) - btrfs
▗━▊▋▝╺▋▖╷▄▘▂╱━▄▂╶╼▍▅▖▇▆▄│▋▍▖▘┛▅   947.01 GiB / 1.88 TiB (49%) - ext4
▋╃╴▗▅▄▅▌╳╎▇▂▋╵▌▝▝▃▃▄▃▅▄▗┛▍▄▌▄▃▄ 󰍹  2560x1440 in 27", 60 Hz [External]
▝▃▂▘ ▖▁╻╺▝▄▄▄▅▄▅▄▅▄▅▄▋▌▅▋▄▄▄
▉▄▅▂┡▇▄▆▆▄▇▅▁▃▘▌▌▌▗▋▂╌▃   Hyprland 0.51.1 (Wayland)
▄┕▄▄▄▂▂▂▁▂▂▉▝▄▃▃▂▎▆▇   bash 5.3.0
▝▃▅┓▅▄▄▄▅▆▆ ╴▘▄▘   kitty 0.43.1
▊▁▄▏▘ ▋▘▌▎ 󰏖  65 (flatpak), 61 (brew)

[daniel-g-carrasco]

Hi tHEwEELS,

thank you very much for the feedback!

This is very likely a Secure Boot issue. Margine uses its own MOK to sign the kernel, so if Secure Boot is enabled, the system will refuse to boot it until that key has been enrolled.

It’s a one-time setup, and the guide explains both options: enrolling the Margine key or disabling Secure Boot if you prefer:

https://margine.the-empty.place/docs/install-iso/

If anything is unclear, let me know and I’ll be happy to help.

Best,
Daniel

[tHEwEELS]

Thanks a lot,
yes this was my fault. Secure Boot is normally switched off, but perhaps get switched on with an bios update.
Installation worked so far.

Looks quite nice and it is snappy. I come from bluefin-hyprland and there are no updates anymore.

I started one or two attempts to make my own bluefin with hyprland but this is an time issue (especially in summer...)

If I click on Margine handbook in the apps I get the "startpage" but if I click on some link I get the massage Zen browser doesn't find the document (or has no accsess?)

I'm very interested to run darktable with opencl (but it never works so far independent from the linux version)
I installed clinfo and get a lot of infos but darktable-cli doesn't work (sandbox?)
Do you think it could work with AMD Radeon RX 560 Series

Is there a better place for bug / problem report? Most probably in github -> issue?

[daniel-g-carrasco]

Hi,

glad it worked, and welcome aboard. Coming from bluefin-hyprland you'll feel at home with the tiling here, that's exactly the itch Margine scratches. (it's clearly not the same tiling experience as having hyprland , but it's the most I can get from a complete DE like gnome...)

The handbook links: that's a real bug on my side, thanks for finding it. The offline docs mirror opens fine but some internal links escape the folder the browser sandbox is allowed to read, so Zen gives you "not found / no access".
I'm on it, a fix will land in one of the next builds.

darktable with OpenCL: I just tested it on my machine (Radeon 760M) and it works, but it needs two switches, because the Flatpak ships Mesa's rusticl OpenCL and that is off by default on both sides:

1. flatpak override --user --env=RUSTICL_ENABLE=radeonsi org.darktable.Darktable

2. start darktable, preferences, processing tab: enable OpenCL and activate the "rusticl" platform, then restart it.

About your RX 560: it should work with the exact same steps. rusticl supports Polaris cards fine, and this path does not need ROCm (which dropped Polaris years ago, probably why it never worked for you before).

On the "sandbox?" suspicion: you got it right. clinfo on the host sees the host OpenCL stack, but the darktable Flatpak lives in its own runtime and only sees what is enabled inside it, hence step 1. Same reason darktable-cli alone does not work: inside the sandbox it is

flatpak run --command=darktable-cli org.darktable.Darktable

And yes, GitHub issues is the right place from now on:

https://github.com/daniel-g-carrasco/margine-image/issues/new/choose

There is a short guided form. If you feel like it, file the handbook bug there yourself, you would be the first to use it. In one of the next updates there will also be a ujust margine-report command that collects all the diagnostic info for you.

Thanks for testing so thoroughly.
Daniel