8mo ago

Difference between silverblue / universal Blue / Bluefin / Aurora / Bazzite ?

Hi ! I'm a little confuse between all immutable versions based on fedora. Is this correct : universal blue = tool to create image, based on fedora atomic desktop ?

With universal blue, they created :

Bluefin = gnome
Bluefin-DX = gnome + developper tools
Aurora = kde
Aurora-DX = kde + developper tools
Bazzite = games

What the difference between silverble and bluefin for example, and which are you using ?

31 comments

Hi! Universal Blue co-maintainer here, here's the TLDR. You've got the basic descriptions right, "Universal Blue" is mostly the parent organization that holds everything in github.
We take Fedora's Atomic OCI images and customize them for different use cases (Aurora, Bazzite, and Bluefin) and then publish base images so people can make their own versions of whatever they want. So if you wanted to take Silverblue, Kinoite, and make your own custom image you can mostly just grab whatever you want and shove it into an OS image. Bluefin started off as a "fix me" script for Silverblue that added all the stuff I wanted and then once I was shown what Fedora wanted to do with it the natural progression was to just make it a custom image. We just released 3.0 a few minutes ago actually!
Basically in Fedora 41 the tech will become more widely available with official OCI base images and better tooling. We just decided to start way earlier in the process so we could get all the automation out of the way, build a community, get familiar with it, etc. Happy to answer any other questions you may have!
- Congrats on 3.0
- Thanks ! Is there a file/site to see the difference between silver blue and bluefin ? Are they using same repositories ? Or bluefin add rpm fusion for example ?
  
  Here's the repo: https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin and the intro doc outlines some of the features. We include all the codecs from rpmfusion and use negativo17 for the nvidia drivers.
- Is it possible to build a minimal image for my home server without gnome etc? Thank you!
  
  Yeah checkout ucore, which is derived from CoreOS instead of Silverblue: https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore
- I'm contractually obligated to harass you about that key rotation slip up.
- Are there any plans to use live images instead of installers? I want to try bluefin before i actually install.

Silverblue is an official Fedora edition, almost exact Fedora Workstation, but immutable. I use it. universal blue is a third-party project and their images are bloated with additional "features": packages, drivers, etc. Bluefin contains Homebrew for example. It's how they describe it, but I haven't tried it to say more precise.

There's also secureblue 🤣
My quick play w them: fedora(company) atomic distros like silver blue(gnome) vanilla way. Ublue(some independent developers) making their own versions/spins of fedora, eg bluefin, aurora, bazzite. Focused on a better experience.
Secureblue(some independent developers), also making their own versions/spins of fedora but focused on privacy/security.
None of them could see my network printer so I went back to normal fedora.
Immutable distros way bigger learning curve.
- What kind of printer? What's the name of the package that got it working? We can add printer drivers pretty easily.
  
  Hi Jorge, Thanks so much for reply. Love your energy on your project and YouTube videos. My printer is brother MFC-L2750DW. Sorry I'm "experienced" linux mint xfce user, and wanted to give fedora gnome a go for Wayland, selinux enforcing and zram for security privacy yada yada. When I came across your project, you and your team done such an awesome job. So I guess if I can get the printer up and working I'll go back to bluefin. Thanks again for TLC. ❤️
- Secureblue ships Chromium, is lead by a single person and does not care about privacy "if it leads to worse security" (i.e. preinstalling Chromium and removing Firefox, even though there is no evidence that Chromium is more secure, it may likely be less secure)
  
  Thanks for info 👍
  
  is lead by a single person
  Ultimately, (some) decisions are made by a single person. However, the list of maintainers suggests that contributions are welcome.
  ~~> even though there is no evidence that Chromium is not even less secure)~~
  ~~The double negation makes it hard to understand; but if I would give it a try, then I would get the following:~~
  ~~"even though there is evidence that Chromium is even less secure)"~~
  ~~If the above represents your views, could you provide said evidence?~~
  even though there is no evidence that Chromium is not even less secure
  What's your take on Madaidan's (i.e. security researcher on projects like Kicksecure and Whonix) article on the matter? I'm aware that it's a bit outdated. However, would you be able to confidently claim that nothing found within is relevant today?
- There was a post about that exact issue not that long ago, basically, you have to do some networking trickery to get some printers to work.
  I agree that there's a big learning curve, though it's a nice option if everything you need can be found as a flatpak or appimage.
- It is quite opinionated though.

i use the universal blue silverblue-main image because it's basically silverblue along with some packages included that I otherwise would have to manually layer in anyway (e.g., distrobox, freeworld-amd drivers from rpmfusion) and some quality-of-life improvements (some just recipes, automatic updates enabled)
I tried bluefin, but it was "too opinionated" and I didn't agree with a lot of its opinions. Same for bazzite.

Well either uBlue's "variant focus" got too much or you are just really lazy
- Ublues = universal blue ? XD or is it again another spin ?
  
  Ublue's
  I hate apostrophes :/

Oh, I see also by their screenshots, that Bluefin also spoils the UX of GNOME with custom extensions. So I will consider it the Manjaro (or Mint) of immutable distros.

31 comments