Bluefin LTS Is Released
23 comments
·September 19, 2025upboundspiral
I absolutely love what the universalblue team has been doing. They are one of the few organizations that are truly dedicated to providing a first-class, enjoyable, batteries included linux experience on the desktop.
I truly believe that updates are seamless not just because of all the buzzwords about the underlying technology but because its made for people who actually use the system daily. They gate the fedora kernel and track breaking changes so you don't get them, and generally care about the user experience. If you want sensible gnome defaults and extensions they are there (or there to be disabled at the click of a button). If you want remote desktop streaming (sunshine/moonlight) its there. On the flip side, their distribution model also means no more need to keep track of out of tree kernel modules on upgrades (zfs, nvidia, waydroid even on Bazzite).
Now onto the post specifically: LTS from a CentOS Stream base seems interesting. Fedora is nice, and the universalblue team tames it 99%, but its edge can be a bit too bleeding sometimes. My only reticence with CentOS Stream though is that it is veering dangerously close to Red Hat proper which I am unsure how to feel about. I am eagerly awaiting when non-rpms distros will be able to use the same underlying technology Bluefin uses, and see how the space evolves. A debian base especially seems interesting in theory. There has recently been some progress on that front: https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc/issues/865 https://github.com/bootcrew/debian-bootc
baobun
Mostly agree.
I think they have some improvement to do on supply-chain though. A lot of random COPRs and kernel patches pulled in from various random third- and first party repos that I think should get consolidated before I can consider it mature and really ready for prime time.
Similarly it would also be nice to see end-to-end builds being reproducible locally. (Things are currently hardcoded to github.com or tied to GitHub Actions in a few places. The patching required for that is nothing crazy - Good First Issue material :))
jcastro
For Bluefin LTS we're in control of all the 3rd party repositories we use. We depend on EPEL but so does everybody else. I am unaware of any kernel patches that we are shipping since we ship the default CentOS Stream kernel and the optional hwe kernel ships CentOSs' kmod kernel.
dggdyh
How quickly and safely are bugs fixed in Bluefin?
It looks like Debian equivalents might be VanillaOS, EndlessOS, and (though not as similar) StarlingX, since all are OSTree-based for atomic updates.
I’m curious what others’ experience is with developing on these- do drivers work out-of-the-box and is it easy to configure, similar to macOS stability with something like brew to get latest packages and apps?
Eventually I’ll probably have to go back to free OSes because things don’t seem to be getting better.
rvrb
As someone quite happy with a vanilla Fedora Silverblue install on both my desktop and laptop, can anyone explain why I would rebase to Bluefin instead? It seems like there must be technical merit to the Universal Blue spins beyond adding preinstalled software/configs, but I can't find it, despite looking.
jcastro
Co-maintainer here. I dogfooded Silverblue for about 2 years before deciding to do this. Initially Bluefin was just a "fix me script" that did the usual bits. When bootc came around this let me put that script in GitHub CI and then just consume the fixes I want. A few of us started to do this and then since a bunch of us were kubernetes nerds we defaulted into "let's make this together."
Here are some of the changes:
- We add all the codecs, and drivers in the build step so the user never has to care.
- We turn on automatic updates by default, these are silent
- We remove Fedora's broken flatpak remote and go full Flathub out of the box
- We handle major version updates for you in CI, there's no "distro release day" update that's just a normal update that day
- Since we use bootc it's easy for people to FROM any of our images and make a custom build, and we ship a template for anyone to do so: https://github.com/ublue-os/image-template
- You can turn on "developer mode" which gives you vscode with devcontainers, docker, incus, etc in addition to podman.
- We integrate homebrew out of the box for package management for the CLI, flathub handles the GUI packages - we don't want to be a distro, in this world the base image is a base image and my relationship is with brew and flathub. I don't need or want to have a relationship with my OS.
As for the desktop, I worked on Ubuntu for about a decade and wasn't happy with the direction Ubuntu was going at the time. Fedora had rpm-ostree/bootc but didn't know what to do with it so they were just sitting on the tech. So I just combined them, the desktop has an Ubuntu-like layout and vibe.
The clear benefit is that you have one image for everything, whereas local layering in Silverblue doesn't really make sense to me anymore, if you want to handle a bunch of local packages just use a traditional distro. Because doing that in Silverblue breaks just as often as it does in package distros. Pure image mode is the strongest benefit. It's 2025 I refuse to do "post installation crap" that should be automated, bootc lets me do that!
More info here since I'm leaving out a bunch of stuff: https://docs.projectbluefin.io/introduction
null
cosmic_cheese
Haven't used Silverblue or Bluefin but the way I've seen it explained is that Bluefin, Aurora, etc include a number of QoL and practicality adjustments that make them nicer/easier to live with as a desktop OS than baseline Silverblue is.
joemccall86
I can answer for me coming from the same boat... exactly zero risk to try, given how easy it would be to rebase back onto silverblue. I didn't have to worry about the codecs Fedora couldn't legally ship so I could remove an overlay, plus I figured bootc was the future and I wanted to see it working.
rvrb
Sure there is zero immediate risk, I just genuinely don’t know what I would get out of taking on the risk of adding a community maintained middleman into the supply chain. I know, because rpm-ostree, it’s not the same as some random distribution. If there’s nothing to get out of it personally that layering a package or two can’t give me (or better, writing my own simple image).. why?
I’m not saying there isn’t a reason; I’m genuinely looking for it
lsbussell
After about 5 years away from desktop Linux, I have now been using Bluefin/Bazzite for the past few months as a Windows/MacOS replacement on my personal desktop and laptop.
I knew that Bazzite was supposedly good for gaming but never looked into it any more than that. When I eventually learned about Bluefin, I was surprised to find that it, Bazzite, and all the other Universal Blue “distros” are built with the same container-native tech that I use every day at work. Needless to say I was immediately sold.
I have been very impressed so far. I don’t find the immutable OS limiting in my day-to-day work at all. I guess I’m all about that “defaults lifestyle” now.
joemccall86
I'm a little surprised that an LTS product is based on CentOS 10 stream. Doesn't that have the shortest support?
carlwgeorge
Each version of CentOS Stream is maintained for about 5.5 years, plenty to qualify as an LTS and significantly longer than Fedora (the base for non-LTS Bluefin).
jazzyjackson
So Bluefin GDX is a good fit for the Nvidia DGX workstations going for 8-15k on ebay?
I don't even do language model stuff I just want a gold computer
jcastro
Co-maintainer here. When I saw one of these I immediately want to run Bluefin on it.
In spirit I would love to support this, someone with one of these would need to PR in support, but it's usually taking the enablement instructions from NVidia and putting it in a dockerfile. Bluefin is already working well on on the Ampere ARM workstations that System76 sells. Getting it on one of these would be awesome.
anthk
A backported Gnome with a recent kernel definitively needs a current MESA backport.
carlwgeorge
Mesa is kept current enough in CentOS that a backport isn't necessary. It's currently at version 25.0.7, same as Fedora 41.
MrDrMcCoy
Meh. I haven't seriously considered GTK ecosystems since 3 got released. Between the increased usage of screen real estate, feature minimalism as a philosophy, becoming infested with ever more JavaScript that hampers performance, the continuous API instability that strangles extension development, and "my way or the highway" approach to workflows... I just don't get why people like it.
baobun
While not mentioned in the post, there is a KDE flavor of the same project called Aurora/kinoite. While it doesn't get the LTS treatment (IMO it would have been the better pick over Bluefin), it's still viable.
mnmalst
Kinoite is not from the same project tho, it's the fedora KDE spin.
astralkraft
[dead]
MattPalmer1086
Well, everyone's different. It's great that Linux caters to all of us.
I prefer Gnome because it does what I need but mostly just disappears and gets out of my way.
I used to love fiddling and customising everything. Plenty of options for that if that's your thing, like KDE.
Hi everyone! I built this 4 years ago as a passion project and now it's led to a culmination of things that led to release. Happy to answer questions!