Hi ya’ll!
I thought it’d be a good time to post a quick “State of the Blue” as we wrap up 2024. We’ve had the excitement around bootc ramp up over the holiday and we’ve crossed over 11,186 members on the Discord. There’s always something to do in the land of the blue!
First up, Happy Birthday to Bazzite! Bazzite continues to find it’s place:
The Steam Deck has finally been surpassed — by a fork of Valve’s own experience#
An Asus ROG Ally X running Bazzite has all but replaced the Steam Deck in my life.
Growth#
Almost exactly a year ago the Bazzite rocket took off when it was featued on Hacker News for New Year’s Eve. The rest is explosive! Let’s look at Fedora’s countme stats:
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As you can see, we’re all living in Bazzite’s world right now! And overall the Fedora Atomic community is growing!
Project Status#
Right now the project is mostly in maintenance mode, accepting PRs in akmods, config, etc. Most of the rest of the main components are complete, there hasn’t been much reason to do a ton of work here.
- m2 and bsherman are threatening to consolidate our main repos, so stay tuned for that in 2025!
We’re remaining pretty firm on our scope focus, and continue to concentrate on removing technical debt and sustainability. From a contributor perspective, we’re getting more and more pull requests and new people, so please continue to file issues and send fixes if you have the skills!
Aurora and Bluefin#
There’s a ton of videos on Bazzite already so let’s talk about the others for a minute. Aurora split out into it’s own repo at the end of this year, allowing for it rev on it’s own by people who care and use it the most! This has led to RealVishy joining in as an aurora maintainer.
But before that m2 rewrote the build system so both of those are running really smoothly right now.
@tulilirockz has been ramping up this break, and has been consolidating and modularizing the universal blue components in the packages repo. This is a huge efficiency win since we can now centralize common components instead of copying them from image to image.
Right now the pain point with these two are the future of our Asus and Surface support, which is not in a good state right now. Additionally Broadcom wireless continues to be a plague on humanity. Help in these areas is appreciated!
CentOS#
We have had some interest in making CentOS-based builds since Stream10 was announced.
- Desktop: @tulilirockz
and @hanthor are working on a Bluefin LTS prototype - Server: @bsherman has kicked off ccos - a CentOS-based CoreOS-style bootc image designed to be a base for uCore.
Speaking of uCore, there’s not much to report. Builds keep happening as intended, and it’s mostly pretty boring over there, as intended. 
We’ve also been able to collaborate with HeliumOS, which is also CentOS based - this has led to some knowledge sharing across the board.
bootc and bootc-image-builder#
bootc’s submission into the CNCF is really making an impact on us as development continues to march forward. Features that we have needed are landing or being scoped to land throughout this next quarter. In many ways we’re getting exactly what we want and we can continue to become more efficient.
There’s not much to say here other than we’ll be working more closely with them as we provide feedback. Antheas has also been submitting pull requests to bootc over the year, so if you want to get involved, this is the time to step up!
Additionally we have been playing with bootc-image-builder: GitHub - osbuild/bootc-image-builder: A container for deploying bootable container images. - so far the results have been very promising. It’s missing a few things we need, like flatpak support, but there are open pull requests in flatpak itself that are being looked at.
This is exciting for us because the ISOs can go on a diet, but more importantly when we make a GitHub action out of this it’ll make it much easier for people making custom images to have ISOs with waaaaaaay less work.
2025#
Right now things are humming along. Most of the things we need are a matter of waiting for features to land upstream, such as the ISO builder, zstd support for more efficient update size, and consuming Fedora 42 and 43 as they come out next year.
See you at SCaLE and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon#
A good number of the team will be attending SCaLE this year in March in Pasadena, California: Home | SCALE 22x - hope to see you there, I will be bringing dinosaur stickers!
Members of the team will also be at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in London, UK. I haven’t been to London in years, I’m really looking forward to this one!
That’s a wrap!#
And a quick easter egg to round it out, if you’ve enabled bluefin-cli, bazzite-cli, or aurora-cli you’ll have the atuin command enabled. Run atuin wrapped to get your CLI stats for the year! Flex with your friends!
With that, I hope everyone had a safe and happy holidays, and a happy new year!
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