Project Bluefin Linux
projectbluefin.io
projectbluefin.io
An example is this bit: https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin/blob/main/usr/bin/ublue-...
That runs as root not one but three bits of mutable shell scripts from the internet.
I love me some nix, but the most reproducible package manager should not be install via a hodpodge of directly running scripts from the Internet. Really nothing from my distribution should be doing that.
At the very least they should be vendored as part of the project so you can see when these scripts change.
Literally everything is running scripts directly from the internet, without any version pinning or check summing.
There is no way to run the same build twice and have any confidence that the result was the same.
https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin/blob/41bdf294c20a3903f4a...
I'm happy to answer questions you might have! Thanks for checking it out! (I'll be at KubeCon Chicago with stickers if you want the live demo on a Framework 13)
There's stuff to do as far as making ostree/oci builds out of that but we're talking to folks regularly now so hopefully we'll get it sorted. Also a huge shout out to Equinix Metal for sponsoring an Ampere builder for us, hoping to get on as many ARM devices as we can!
I use plain old Debian now, but used to love some of the Debian based distros. CrunchBang springs to mind.
I tend to stick pretty close to defaults these days, so some scripts and Ansible playbooks configure everything on all of my machines with not a lot of maintenance or future worries.
I run Debian on all of my server stuff at home too. It's not a perfect desktop, but the consistency between machines is something I appreciate.
I use it as my stable base while running most applications from Flatpaks. They're up to date but the OS itself never surprises me.
At the end of the day it's just running a build step in CI so that your machines just end up with the final image instead of running the playbook/script on each one. Hope that helps!
For example I saw that in your blog [1] you used the base on line 1 `FROM ghcr.io/cgwalters/fedora-silverblue:37`.
I was wondering where I could find the Containerfile for that, my Google-fu and searching through the Fedora pages are failing me
[1] https://www.ypsidanger.com/building-your-own-fedora-silverbl...
That's what ends up on quay.io/fedora-ostree-desktops/ which is what we use to make our base images.
Fedora is in the middle of a transition to make more official images on quay.io/fedora, I'm sorry I don't have the info offhand, it's probably in here somewhere: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tag/silverblue/l/top?pe...
On the note of quay.io, is there a function on the website to see the Containerfile that created the artifact? I recall digging around in the past but couldn't really find a link to the source Containerfile.
Behind Bluefin is a project called Universal blue which is a whole bunch of people with many interests, but biggest one being DevOps, devOps combined with its "immutable", image-based nature which should make maintenance of distro lot easier then normal
If it's just a custom Silverblue image why not just say so. It's an idea good enough on its own to not require cloud gobbledygook.
while on other hand on bluefin and simialr image based OS-s composition of your OS is done somewhere else not directly on your running file system(could be your computer just not your rootFS) then it takes that image and pulls old image(normally on startup) and places new one in its place all in one go, so any composition errors dont get triggered during update and such. (composition before deployment is a principle cloud-native pushes) This makes updates far more stable and less error prone and automatic updates are a thing you dont even notice day to day. and what happens if image cant boot it just boots the old one or you can select the old one from grub(2 old versions are stored per default if i remember correctly) This idea has been successfully used by likes of android chromeOS and such to create seamless and risk free updates.
Those are not updates, they are just containers deployments at the end of the day (Flatpak and all related technologies).
> your normal distro does updates by pulling every package on your system and swapping files mid running this can cause miriad of issues just by doing it and another miriad if update is stopped mid updating(not always but sometimes). So this means your system is being recomposed at runtime
In practice rolling distros so that every day, with very little issues. (Arch is a good example of that).
well my experiance and experiance of many other people say otherwise and most wide reaching example look at how a single miss configured package(dependancy misconfiguration) deleted Linus Sebastians pop desktop.(and no the fact that he didnt read doesnt excuse poor package dependancies that even got to that point) that could have easily been caught if composition didnt happen at runtime
On non 0 number of occasions i lost or recoverably broke arch installs while it was updating using pacman just because X or DE's WM got crashed during update because of update. just 2 examples out of many for why composition at runtime is a bad idea for linux to be a more mainstream OS
I'll be interested in having a look at this one over the next few months as it seems to have some out-of-the-box solutions for many of those, and a lot of thought/effort has been put into it for the past 2 years!
But other than that, everything is just humming along.
Is it another Linux distro? Does the OS live on my hardware or not?
I would have no idea what that project is just looking the website.
It’s a immutable distro, and that particular flavor is more opinionated on what package is installed at first.
Cool birds picture tho
one of those sucky things about linux desktop is package management which is just sad at best problematic at worst which is why image-based and flatpak first
One can be right and die on this hill, or be thankful that you have the feedback to make it better.
yes
> Does the OS live on my hardware or not
yes
Feels like just Fedora Silverblue with some extra packages installed by default. Haven’t tried it yet but not really interested.
How is it like a "Chromebook"? Are they selling a piece of hardware? If not, then how is the comparison apt?
For example, it would be a weird thing to say "compare Ubuntu 23.x.x with a Chromebook, which one should I use?" because one is an OS and one is a hardware + OS combo, with the hardware manufactured by multiple different companies.
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say yes or no,
You lose your own Cloud-nature.
Different desktop environments are available, but gnome is the default.
Now i'm actually gonna read the page.
That talk of cloud-native definitely threw me off.