Draft: Dakota Alpha/Beta

[giscus[bot]]

Dakota Alpha 6 | Bluefin

Dakota Alpha 6 is out. This one is brought to you by Ahmed Ahdan/ Built against GNOME 51 and freedesktop-sdk 26.08.1, running Linux 7.2.6, NVIDIA 615.71.09. Kernel OGC 7.2.6-ogc1 for your gaming needs.

https://docs.projectbluefin.io/blog/dakota-alpha-6/

[Ffffnord]

yay! gonna test!

[Ffffnord]

the link is broken :(

[Ffffnord]

280 KB/s - 8.0 MB of 5.0 GB, 5 hours left
4.8 KB/s - 28.1 MB of 5.0 GB, 13 days left
its up now but speed is disastrous xD

[znmeb]

Running fine on my laptop and desktop.

[fonnesbeck]

I have a few key layered RPMs in my current Bluefin setup. Since Dakota is distroless, what is the preferred way to install packages like 1password that require deeper integration that Flatpaks provide?

[Ffffnord]

brew install 1password-cli or brew install 1password-cli@beta (for gui)

[Ffffnord]

there's also bold brew tui, just type bbrew

[castrojo]

Your options are:

• stay on ublue-os/bluefin
• rebase to utahraptor (but not today, people have done it, it just is missing parts)

That will get you a peer to dakota but with RPM support.

[arvindautar]

Congratulations on this release, I look forward trying it out.

I have question thought - when can we expect secureboot?

[castrojo]

Likely waiting for GNOME OS to implement it before we can.

[fonnesbeck]

I ran into a strange issue where Dakota (on my Framework laptop) went into sleep mode and therefore locked the desktop. When I woke it, there was no password dialog, nor was there a log out/restart option available. Basically had to do a hard restart. Anyone else get this?

[ericrocha97]

Hi! I have a question regarding the future of FinPilot and custom image maintainers.

I maintain a custom image based on FinPilot/Bluefin DX (COSMIC desktop, additional packages, custom OCI images, etc.), and with Dakota becoming the recommended Bluefin experience I'm trying to understand the long-term direction.

Should maintainers of FinPilot-based images expect:

Continued support for the current Bluefin DX workflow?
A Dakota-based successor to FinPilot?
Or should we be looking at Utah/Fedora Hummingbird as the future platform for custom image builders?

I'm mainly concerned about projects that build and distribute custom bootc images on top of Bluefin.

Thanks!

[KiKaraage]

Finpilot is being revamped too thanks to @Siddhj2206, Dakota-based images is on the targeted roadmap don't worry

[rowie324]

just built a new pc, i've been hopping around distros but started with the dakota alpha, gonna make my way back to dakota for the time being at least (i am very indecisive so i usually end up hopping around a bunch before settling for a while, then hopping some more and repeat to eventually find a home-base sort of distro. this is looking rly promising! also i love the dinosaur theming, it's really endearing ^~^

[shishimaru90]

Anyone tried battery life and compared to some other system(s)? Intel hardware

[ahmedadan]

Dakota stable-20261009 is out, all four variants (dakota, nvidia, gaming, nvidia-gaming) have been promoted to :stable. This rolls up about two and a half weeks of testing, here's what's new:

• Hardware video decode/encode for host apps (Intel iHD, full FFmpeg, mesa extras)
• libvirt/virt-manager fixes, it now ships properly and PolicyKit-authorized access works again
• systemd-nspawn is included for running OCI-backed nspawn machines
• ChairLift now ships its privileged helper, policy and schemas
• IBus Rime with Lua support for anyone who configures it
• Printing fixes for truncated PDF page counts and a Ghostscript CMYK crash
• /usr/local is now a real link to /var/usrlocal
• Rounded blur is back on Mutter 51, Tiling Shell gets a new default layout, and the About page uses the Bluefin wordmark
• Kernel 7.2.6 -> 7.2.9, bootc 1.16.13 -> 1.16.14

Full notes with package diffs and the SBOM are here: https://github.com/projectbluefin/dakota/releases/tag/stable-20261009

Run ujust update to pick it up. If something breaks for you, please file an issue with ujust report attached and feel free to roll back with sudo bootc rollback while we look into it.

[ericrocha97]

Thanks for the stable release!

Are there any plans to support installing Dakota on a specific partition instead of requiring an entire disk?

I currently have Bluefin Classic installed on a dedicated Btrfs partition, with other partitions on the same SSD. I'd like to replace Classic with Dakota without wiping the entire drive.

The current installer only offers "Use Entire Disk", which would erase the other partitions as well.

Is manual partition selection planned for a future release, or is there a recommended workaround?

[castrojo]

Game mode working great:

[ahmedadan]

Hey everyone, we're pausing the :next (and :btw) stream until the GNOME 52 beta, which should land around February. GNOME master is in the middle of a big restructure on the build side, and keeping :next building through that would pull time away from the images most of you actually run. The stream will come back once there's a beta worth chasing.

If you're on :next or :btw, please switch to :testing. Those tags won't get any more updates, and that includes security fixes, so don't stay on them. Use the line that matches the image you're running now:

sudo bootc switch ghcr.io/projectbluefin/dakota:testing

sudo bootc switch ghcr.io/projectbluefin/dakota-nvidia:testing

sudo bootc switch ghcr.io/projectbluefin/dakota-gaming:testing

sudo bootc switch ghcr.io/projectbluefin/dakota-nvidia-gaming:testing

If you're not sure which one you're on, bootc status shows the image name.

:testing is honestly the better fit for most of you right now. It builds daily, it gets new kernels and drivers first (we just landed a much broader set of hardware drivers there), and it's where every fix lands before it's promoted to :stable. If you want to help us find bugs early, :testing is where your reports do the most good.

One heads up: going from GNOME master back to GNOME 51 is a downgrade, so a few settings or app data written by the newer GNOME may not carry over cleanly. If something looks off after switching, ujust report and open an issue, and we'll take a look.

Thanks to everyone who ran :next and sent reports, it helped a lot. I'll post here when it's back.

[aweterings]

With Bluefin / Aurora / Bazzite I could layer nfs-utils and mount an NFS share from my NAS in Gnome / KDE Plasma through fstab. How will that work in Dakota?

[castrojo]

Same thing as everything else, if something is missing file an issue. EDIT: though I'm not sure if we're putting that in, if you depend on layering you won't be using dakota at all.

EDIT: looks like we have the desktop helpers in there but not nfs-utils, file an issue in projectbluefin/dakota and we'll take a look!

[aweterings]

Issue filed, thanks !

[devhead67]

The one thing that is missing is alsa-utils and alsamixer; without which there are key functions that I can't adjust. Can't adjust the impedance for my headphones connected to my Xonar Essence STX sound card, and can't quickly bump up the 20 dB for my microphone plugged into it. I'll stay on Bluefin Classic until alsa-utils is included. Otherwise I love it!

[karypid]

question: can you run docker in dakota (so have both, like I do in Bluefin-DX currently)

[robtalee-dev]

I found that I had to point my VS Code dev container extension to Podman -- a trivial couple of lines of code in the settings file. I didn't immediately find a solution to installing Docker but didn't spend a lot of time looking into it.

[castrojo]

This is landing nowish:

Needs more testing but getting there!

[ahmedadan]

Dakota stable-20261023 is out. This rolls up two weeks of testing and includes a security fix, here's what's new:

• Security: the system trust store no longer includes the two roots behind the compromised eMudhra intermediates (Comodo AAA Services root, emSign ECC Root CA - G3), via freedesktop-sdk 26.08.3
• Secure Boot support with Dakota's own signing key and shim, opt in with ujust enroll-secure-boot-key (this is what EAC games need)
• GNOME 51.1, Mesa 26.2.1 -> 26.2.5, systemd 261.3 -> 262, Flatpak 1.18.2 -> 1.18.4
• Broader kernel driver coverage with zstd-compressed modules, plus more boot modules in the initramfs
• virtiofsd for virt-manager shared folders, and libvirt secrets work again
• alsamixer and alsa-utils are now included
• Wi-Fi networks can be added from game mode
• sudo can find Homebrew binaries
• ChairLift now installs from the projectbluefin tap
• Kernel 7.2.9 -> 7.2.11, bootc 1.16.14 -> 1.17.1, uupd 1.4.0 -> 1.5.1

Full notes with package diffs and the SBOM are here: https://github.com/projectbluefin/dakota/releases/tag/stable-20261023

Run ujust update to pick it up. If something breaks for you, please file an issue with ujust report attached and feel free to roll back with sudo bootc rollback while we look into it.

[devhead67]

Having alsamixer and alsa-utils is the one thing I was waiting for on this - thank you all so much for the hard work!!

[castrojo]

HP Laptop Users

Also if you have an HP Laptop there's this issue breaking updates. We've reported it to the bootc team. There will be a new update when this issue is fixed, thanks!