Organizational Migration for Bluefin LTS/GDX

[castrojo]

Hello guardians,

We're starting the transition away from ublue-os/bluefin and bluefin-lts to projectbluefin. This is part of the move to factory.projectbluefin.io. I'll have more details over the next few days. It's our fifth birthday on July 21st so in a way we're kinda relaunching Bluefin. I hope to post updates between now and then so that we can party after.

tldr: GNOME 50, newer kernel support, cleaner OCI layers, NVIDIA as a proper separate image, no more -dx/-gdx images, all userspace baby! You don't do anything but hang out.

LTS and GDX users, this one's for you, the rest of you will come later. GDX's builds have been struggling so you're going first. Thanks to those who tested we found real issues that has helped the project.

Upgrade Instructions

• There are none, this will happen automatically.
• If your Linux Lizard Brain starts to want to jump out of your skull please follow the manual directions to upgrade

ublue-os/bluefin-lts → projectbluefin/bluefin-lts

The biggest change is image consolidation, DX/GDX images have been merged:

• "Bluefin DX" will be moving off of images and into userspace with ujust devmode, if you're missing anything please file an issue.
• "Bluefin GDX" will also be moving to userspace with "ujust aimode", but this doesn't exist yet.
• aarch/amd64 all across the board, even ARM/Nvidia hell yeah! (It's Ampere time!)

We're also adding hooks for the IDEs/tools in Bazaar to highlight some of these. So instead of images these will just be modes you can add on. One the reasons we were struggling with GDX is the Github runners didn't have enough space/resources for something so large.

CUDA can now just be consumed via containers - the ujust aimode will look just like the developer mode but we'll have options for pytorch, etc. If you're on an AMD machine you might have seen the preview in bctl

Wow that's ugly! Now you see why we hid it, but you get the idea, start thinking of bundles. 😄 bctl is short for bluefin control but probably won't expose it, centralized just is just too good.

OCI Things

These images use chunka create smaller layers, and LTS was already svelte. This brings us in full upstream alignment with bootc.
CI layers |

• Signing: We moved from keys to Keyless OIDC (Fulcio/Rekor), ensuring that my shame will live on in the past. This is nice for custom image builders too, no more pub key in your root and pasting in github secrets to get going. Savage. We're still working on these across the board!
• SBOM: Each image has full SBOMs etc, I'm still working on these, but both of these steps are modelled after proper usage according to upstream. The docs, website, and ujust changelog will source from these if they aren't already.

The end state is any version of anything that you see on the website should be what's on the latest image and not manually updated.

Kernels

No one was using vanilla Bluefin LTS (who wants to use 6.12 lol) so we've consolidated everything onto Fedora's kernels

Other

• GNOME is now 50 across the board
• :testing branches will land all code, if you're a nerd hop onto these
• These images are a huge improvement, especially with our testing suite (more info later), however you will for sure find cosmetic issues since we tend to ignore those until the end lol.
• Please use ujust report, even for minor issues!

Migration Schedule

Legacy Image	Auto-Migrated?	Target	Status
ublue-os/bluefin-gdx:lts	✅ Automatic	projectbluefin/bluefin-lts-nvidia:stable	🟡 Canary rolling out now
ublue-os/bluefin:lts	⏳ Soon	projectbluefin/bluefin-lts:stable	🔜 After canary validates
ublue-os/bluefin:lts-hwe	⏳ Soon	projectbluefin/bluefin-lts:stable	🔜 After canary validates
ublue-os/bluefin-dx:lts	⏳ Soon	projectbluefin/bluefin-lts:stable	🔜 After canary validates
ublue-os/bluefin-dx:lts-hwe	⏳ Soon	projectbluefin/bluefin-lts:stable	🔜 After canary validates

Feel free to ask questions!

[znmeb]

Arm/NVIDIA: I've got an idle Jetson AGX Xavier dev kit - one of the old ones with only 16 GB of RAM. I'd love to have Bluefin on it; NVIDIA still has it stuck on focal IIRC. Is there any hope of a ujust aimode for this thing? It's not heavy enough for a boat anchor and the alternative is a couple of weeks of Yocto floundering.

https://developer.download.nvidia.com/embedded/L4T/r32-3-1_Release_v1.0/jetson_agx_xavier_developer_kit_user_guide.pdf

I also have an Orin Nano Dev Kit but that's supported by NVIDIA (Noble Numbat, Docker, etc.) so there's little need for Bluefin.

[castrojo]

I don't know what any of this means, what happens when you try to install one of the arm images on it?

[znmeb]

I don't know what any of this means, what happens when you try to install one of the arm images on it?

I've never tried ... I don't even know if it'll boot a USB stick because NVIDIA has their own way of flashing these things. After I get the Orin Nano up I'll see if it works with a USB boot.

[yuwwCode]

i upgraded to the new version.and is the “ujust update” use bootc instead of rpm ostree？
bcuz the overlay，i cant use ujust update.
can i get the same experience by run "rpm-ostree update","brew update &&brew upgrade "and "flatpak update " by myself?
in the future，Will you make bootc behave differently from rpm-ostree ？ or force using bootc to upgrade?if so. I have to switch back to silverblue.but I really enjoy using bluefin

[castrojo]

What happens when you try to run rpm-ostree update?

[yuwwCode]

rpm ostree update has no problem.
ujust update happen error bcuz bootc.and tell my shoud run "rpm ostree reset".to remove rpm package.

[arvindautar]

No one was using vanilla Bluefin LTS (who wants to use 6.12 lol)

Guess I was too busy using my computer instead of collecting kernel versions like Pokémon

[castrojo]

Unfortunately it's been almost a year since we've asked CentOS to fix countme for EL images, no such luck. As a result we're flying blind so we're doing the best we can.

[arvindautar]

Appreciate all the work you do. Thanks to you and the uBlue team, I can't use any distro other than uBlue anymore. It is fantastic, thank you for all the amazing work.

I hope you appreciate my humor. It is in no way meant as criticism of all the hard work everyone has done.

I have been using your work when it had the ubuntu fonts, man, it is sooo much better now :)

[castrojo]

I mean I can turn it on if you want? Mostly we only turn things off that no one is using but it's not too hard to keep the build running. (Won't do ISOs for it tho).

ubuntu fonts, man, it is sooo much better now :)

I love Inter now the ubuntu font looks dated but I still miss it, it's my Master of Puppets.

[visnudeva]

lol, not sure everyone one has Metallica refs.

[passthejoe]

I'm also a fan of Inter

[davestgermain]

Regarding ditching 6.12: I switched from Aurora to Bluefin-LTS because Aurora announced they're dropping ZFS support, while Bluefin-LTS seemed to promise to keep ZFS in the image, since the kernel isn't updated as often (even on bluefin-lts-hwe).

I've been using bluefin-lts-hwe (because who wants to use 6.12?), but I'm hoping that ZFS stays in the build. I would switch to the 6.12 kernel if necessary.

So, my thought is, if you do drop the 6.12 kernel, please don't remove ZFS...

[castrojo]

Very good point indeed! We'll keep it thanks for the feedback!