OCI images that you can turn into a full-fledged developer workstation shipping Devbox, Nix, Homebrew, devcontainers and DevPod with one command. Pretty swanky!
Can someone ELI5 why this is so great? I watched the video and I hardly get it. (Linux user for 18 years)
Because it uses OCI images, it auto-updates like a Chromebook, and you can switch between modes, like say a gaming mode that’s a full SteamOS replacement, to a mode that gives you an entire development environment without needing to install and configure these layers or stacks of capabilities yourself.
That’s very powerful. For cloud native developers like myself who are used to working with container images as the deliverable artifact, this makes that workflow very easy. Podman is included. You can create entire development environments at will that are totally “pure”: no side effects because everything you need is in the container. That’s a Dev Container.
I’m still having a hard time grasping this, probably because I don’t understand OCI images. How would this be different than say using fedora with docker to spin up containers with stuff I need?
Hmm, well Fedora on its own (so no Silverblue) is very much your classic way of shipping a distro. That tends to mean that, over time, “cruft” accumulates as you upgrade your system, uninstall/reinstall packages, etc. They leave bits of themselves behind that can cause unwanted behavior.
Fedora Silverblue, that Bluefin is based on, treats the entire system layer as “immutable”. Basically, it ensures consistency so that upgrades and package upgrades don’t leave the system in an inconsistent state.
What Bluefin adds on top of this is a set of opinionated, pre-configured layers suited for getting particular groups of tasks done. Those layers are also immutable and tested as a whole, which makes shipping those layers at velocity easy (faster upgrades, less wonky behavior on upgrade) and easy to swap between, so you can go from gaming to developer mode without worrying about an accumulation of cruft.
Is that helpful at all? There’s also this announcement blog post, which I found very helpful in understanding the value proposition.
Yes!! Super helpful. Thank you!
I genuinely don’t understand the value proposition of, over just regular silverblue. As far as I can tell, they have a opinionated desktop setup out of the box, and a shell script that is a bunch of aliases to things you might want.
In the end, it is just an extra layer of testing. Silverblue only provides the base imgaes and confirms its stability. uBlue/bluefin adds the layers on top to the image and tests their stability with the base image before pushing the combined image to users. It is good for people who don’t want to do the layering and want something with those defaults out of the box.
Edit: for clarity, my comment is mostly directed at ublue or universal blue, which is what bluefin is based on.
I think the really value comes from the ability to easily roll new custom images and for the community to collaborate on those images to produce images that require minimal layering after the application locally.
The idea is very interesting. The marketing is the worst I’ve seen in a decade, easily.
I quote:
“Or she may disembowel us on the way. Clever Girl.”
Thinking the evolution metaphor gives you license to say that and sound acceptable, is total insanity. Absolutely out of place, touch,
Like most others in this thread, I’m having trouble understanding what this is. Fedora Silverblue with dev-related pre-installed stuff? (rhetorical question)
Their presentation feels like NixOS. You open their webpage and the entire thing is unclear. If even the target audience doesn’t get it, they probably won’t use it out of their own volition or without hand-holding.
Dunno if there are Fedora maintainers on the fediverse or reading this thread, but IMO they should tell their BlueFin team to fix the marketing. Most people don’t get what they’re trying to sell.
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Fedora based 🤮🤮🤮
more like fedora cringed lmao
If anyone stumbles upon this and was confused like me, I found this link to be a super clear explanation of OCI Linux delivery- https://universal-blue.org/introduction/
Gnome
Visual studio
Bleh
Probably my next distro! Can’t wait to try it out. The only next steps I would take is getting k8s into manage my services by default.
