2026-05-05-bluefin-spring

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A tale of three raptors with one mission

I am not going to lie I haven't been this excited about Bluefin since the start of the project. We find ourselves on the day of a major Fedora release with three fantastic options. This spring is particularly relevant for us, with GNOME 50 being a particularly nice roll up of tech.

I know what you're thinking (especially you McPhail). We got rid of Bluefin GTS and now the team decided to make another one. How many of these things are there it's like a string of Jurassic Park sequels. First let's level set. The product is Bluefin. That's the default Fedora one. The other two are for different kinds of Linux nerds - we won't be adding Dakotaraptor the website or anything like that.

However, we're nerds so let's take a look at the kettle and see what we've got.

Also spoiler alert, we will be announcing some awesome new news about our Fedora variant soon!

GNOME 50 "Tokyo" comes to Bluefin#

GNOME 50, codenamed Tokyo, is the foundation of this release. If you're updating today you'll be on GNOME 50.

[ screenshot ]

Full GNOME 50 release notes →

💙 Donate to GNOME

ASUS Support#

Asus support has always been a pain in the ass on Linux. In the past we had specialized images but the maintenance burden was too great. Thanks to improvements in Linux 6.19 and greater, as well as awesome work from the asus-linux community we can now better support Asus hardware. The ublue-os/tap ships asusctl and ROG Control Center — the standard ASUS Linux control stack. These packages will work on any Linux with at least a 6.19 kernel.

Fan curve control — per-profile fan curves for Performance, Balanced, and Quiet modes; customizable RPM targets per temperature point
Keyboard RGB and Aura lighting — full per-key RGB control, multi-zone effects, static, breathe, rainbow, strobing, and more — all manageable from the GUI or CLI
Power profile switching — toggle between Performance, Balanced, and Power Saver without a reboot
Battery charge limit — set a charge ceiling (e.g. 80%) to preserve long-term battery health; the limit persists across reboots
GPU mode switching — switch between Integrated, Hybrid, NVIDIA-only, and Compute modes from the system tray

Install (order matters — system daemon first, then the GUI):

# Step 1: system daemon — handles hardware access and power management
brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/asusctl-linux
sudo systemctl enable --now asusd.service asus-shutdown.service
sudo udevadm control --reload && sudo udevadm trigger

# Step 2: GUI and user daemon
brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/rog-control-center-linux
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now asusd-user.service

ROG Control Center lands in your system tray and gives you a full GUI for everything above — no terminal required after the initial setup. Someday we will automate this so you don't have to do any of this CLI mumbojumbo, but in the meantime kick the tyres and report back. Remember that these packages work on any Linux, so if you have a friend slumming it on Ubuntu they can use these too!

Bazaar#

Bazaar is the application store on Bluefin systems. It is designed to bring the best of Flathub to your fingertips, with a focus on directly supporting application authors. It accomplishes this by focusing on highlighting donations to app authors and ensuring that you get those applications as soon as they are released upstream. No jank.

[TODO: screenshot or GIF of Bazaar in action]

Bazaar is built by @kolunmi and @AlexanderVanhee. If you want to see this project succeed, support them directly:

💙 Support kolunmi on Ko-fi 💙 Support Alexander on Ko-fi

Bluefin#

Now on to Bluefin itself. First up is bluefin:stable. Here's the release card:

And here are the release notes and announcements:

Timothée Ravier's post is particularly relevant for us:

FUSE 2 removed — we don't support AppImages anyway but if you still care about these they may break even more.
Legacy polkit pkla rules dropped — the ecosystem has moved to the JavaScript-based format and this cleans up the last stragglers
Unified Atomic Desktops documentation now lives at docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/atomic-desktops

The biggest news of all is the announcement of new sealed base images. These will end up being the most fundamental change to Bluefin in its 5-ish year history. The new sealed bootable container images will bring us:

systemd-boot replaces GRUB as the bootloader — GRUB is now an extinct species in our world. Goodbye old friend.
Unified Kernel Images (UKI) — kernel, initrd, and command line bundled into a single signed EFI binary.
composefs with fs-verity — every file in the OS image is cryptographically verified at read time and managed by bootc. We also say goodbye to ostree. With both projects now in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation we have a vendor neutral stack to base Bluefin on. Nice.
Full verified boot chain from firmware → bootloader → kernel → OS image — see the FOSDEM 2025 deep-dive for how it all fits together
TPM-backed passwordless disk unlocking via systemd-cryptenroll — the headline user benefit; LUKS unlocking is bound to the verified boot state so no password prompt on a clean boot
UEFI on x86_64 and aarch64 - Legacy BIOS support goes away too, but we don't support that anyway.

Want all of these things? It will take some work to move Bluefin and Aurora to these new base images, and we're looking for people to help. If you've been worried about the lack of progress in bootc in Fedora then this one set of images brings us back to the forefront of Linux desktop tech. Our man from France was not going to let Dakotaraptor run away with it, so if you want to help make this dream a reality, now is the time to step up and volunteer!

Bluefin LTS#

Achillobator remains our Long Term Support option, here's the release card:

Bluefin LTS launched with GNOME 48 and has been updated to GNOME 49. This release delivers two full GNOME upgrade cycles in one — GNOME 49 and GNOME 50 are both available — thanks to @hanthor's work backporting the full GNOME stack to the EL10 base. See the March testing announcement for all the details.

There's really not much to say here, the move to GNOME 49 wasn't as smooth as I'd like but as a result GNOME 50 will be much smoother. We will keep GNOME 50 in it's own set of branches and likely move LTS to GNOME 50 sometime this Fall.

Bluefin LTS is maintained by @hanthor. If you rely on the LTS channel, consider supporting his work:

💙 Sponsor hanthor on GitHub

Bluefin Dakota Alpha 2#

And now for the mysterious raptor who keeps making waves:

Dakota is our newest "distroles" raptor. No layering and an even more aggressive push away from legacy technologies. Just the best desktop we can ship, direct from GNOME and Freedesktop right to you, no compromises. Dakotaraptor is daily driveable and has become my daily driver.

GNOME 50, Linux 6.13, Mesa 26.x, Freedesktop 25.08 libraries
systemd-boot, UKIs, UEFI only
Oxidized coreutils - same sudo-rs and uutils setup as Ubuntu - thanks to Canonical for funding this important work
cpu v3 instructions
Custom Command Menu — Dakota features a newly refined menu. We hope to bring this menu to other Bluefins over time.
Ghostty as the default terminal

Since Dakota is brand new there's no users to transition when we switch something. The ptyxis author is moving on from GNOME so we wish Christian Hergert well in his future endevours. We are switching to [Ghostty] as the default terminal. This has always been a fan favorite so we're starting with it fresh here.

Changes since Alpha 1#

LUKS encryption works on install
Full Nvidia Image
- nvidia-container-toolkit — [TODO: landed / still coming]
Efficient layering - this image uses the upstream chunkah tool for more efficient downloads. Note that the structures and tooling is in place, we expect efficient delta downloads to land sometime this summer, but everything is in place now.
Linux 7.x kernel will land once some of the bootc issues with 7.x are resolved
Beta target: Probably a month or so; GA target: Fall 2026
Want to help? GNOME OS upstream is always looking for help: os.gnome.org

Gotchas#

What now? It has been an absolute pleasure working with [buildstream] over the past few weeks. The team has committed to the hardware necessary to make builds faster and the local development experience has been the best we've ever had. It has become clear and obvious to me that the combination of [buildstream] and [bootc] brings a level of automation and developer experience that will be tough to beat.

Here's the hot take: If you look at all three raptors, all else being equal, the best development experience and best infrastructure always wins in this space. We have over a decade of cloud native industry experience to prove it, Kubernetes runs the world for a reason. This workflow is now in the linux desktop space. I firmly believe that buildstream/bootc combined with our gitops approach will deliver a fantastic product.

Stay tuned for my talk at [LAS] where I will be discussing the applicaiton of cloud native development techniques to the desktop. The world has changed.

Thanks to Brian Ketelsen and James Reilly for the Tuna installer

Thanks to Jordan Petridis, Valentin David, Adrian Vovk, and the GNOME OS team for their expertise and advisory roles - we couldn't do this without you!

Homebrew Applications#

The ublue-os/tap is the production Homebrew tap for Bluefin — a curated collection of software packaged to work great on all Linuxes. Run ujust bbrew to open the interactive browser and install anything from the tap in a few keystrokes. Here are the highlights of apps added over the last cycle:

Editors and IDEs#

<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/vscode.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />Visual Studio Code — Microsoft's open-source code editor.
<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/vscode-insiders.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />VS Code Insiders — The daily preview build of VS Code with the newest features.
<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/vscodium.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />VSCodium — VS Code binaries built without Microsoft telemetry or branding.
<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/jetbrains.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />JetBrains Toolbox — Install, update, and manage every JetBrains IDE from one app. This installs Jetbrains into your home directory as intended by Jetbrains.

System Tools#

<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/framework.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />framework-tool — Official CLI for Framework laptop hardware: fan control, battery charge limits, charge LED mode, input module configuration, and firmware update checks.
<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/gnome.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />heic-to-dynamic-gnome-wallpaper — Convert macOS HEIC dynamic wallpapers into GNOME XML dynamic wallpapers that change with the time of day.
<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/postmarketos.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />pmbootstrap — The sophisticated chroot/build/flash tool for postmarketOS development and porting Linux to mobile devices.

Browse the full tap on GitHub →

Bluespeed#

Bluespeed is our catch all term for agent-centric tooling in Bluefin. It is a play on [RHEL Lightspeed], Red Hat's tooling in this area. We continue to collaborate with the team and ship their tooling, such as linux-mcp-server. Bluefin ships a full cloud and AI navite development platform ready to go. We default to a "Bring your own LLM" approach, with a focus on pushing towards an all-local opt-in approach for system troubleshooting.

Our flagship tool is [Goose] from the [Agentic AI Foundation], which serves as our "portal" to other tooling. Here's what else is included. We recommend using the ramalama tool for model management. This features full GPU acceleration for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs to work with local models out of the box. Models and drivers are kept in containers for flexibility. It's an awesome set up, give it a shot! Full AI setup guide →

AI Agents and Tools#

Run ujust bbrew to install any of these:

<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/goose.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />Goose — The primary AI agent in Bluefin, from the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). Open source, extensible AI agent that goes beyond code suggestions.
<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/lmstudio.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />LM Studio — Discover, download, and run local LLMs.
<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/antigravity.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />Antigravity — AI Coding Agent IDE.
<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/cursor.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />Cursor — Write, edit, and chat about your code with AI.
<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/craft-agents.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />Craft Agents — Work with most powerful agents in the world, with the UX they deserve.
<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/opencode.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />OpenCode Desktop — Open source AI coding agent desktop client.
<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/emdash.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />Emdash — Agentic development environment for running multiple coding agents in parallel.
<img src="/img/blog/2026-05-XX-bluefin-f44-dakota-alpha-2/icons/ramalama.png" width="28" height="28" style={{verticalAlign:"middle", marginRight:"8px"}} alt="" />Ramalama — Goal of RamaLama is to make working with AI boring.
Alpaca — A graphical LLM chat interface available as a Flatpak. Launch it instantly from anywhere with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

AI CLI Tools#

Choose the ai menu in ujust bbrew to browse the full set of AI CLI tools:

Tool	Description
aichat	All-in-one AI-Powered CLI Chat & Copilot
block-goose-cli	Open source, extensible AI agent that goes beyond code suggestions
claude-code	Terminal-based AI coding assistant
codex	OpenAI's coding agent that runs in your terminal
copilot-cli	Brings the power of Copilot coding agent directly to your terminal
crush	A powerful terminal-based AI assistant for developers, providing intelligent coding assistance directly in your terminal.
gemini-cli	Interact with Google Gemini AI models from the command-line
Jan	Offline AI chat tool
kimi-cli	CLI agent for MoonshotAI Kimi platform
llm	Access large language models from the command-line
llmfit	Find what models run on your hardware
mistral-vibe	Minimal CLI coding agent
opencode	AI coding agent, built for the terminal
qwen-code	AI-powered command-line workflow tool for developers
whisper-cpp	Port of OpenAI's Whisper model in C/C++

Full AI setup guide →

Ask Bluefin (Alpha)#

Ask Bluefin is a natural-language system assistant that can diagnose, explain, and help troubleshoot your machine using our community's data.

Ask is done in partnership with Dosu - here's the gist. Ask Bluefin is trained on all of the documentation and source code for all of the tooling in Bluefin, Bluefin's source code, issues, documentation, and discussions. AND THAT'S IT. It is only trained on the code and docs. The results are usually much better than than a generic LLM, and light years ahead of Linux subreddits. (That's not a high bar, but let's have some goals). You can also use Ask Bluefin in it's [dedicated discussion forum] if you prefer it that way.

Troubleshooting (Alpha)#

Proprietary operating systems are falling over each other trying to implement the worst possible anti-privacy features with AI. Of course they are, it's the nature of the beast. We take a different approach. If someone's going to invent this thing, then we're going to use it for good. Our first stab at this is to use it for a more natural goal - fix broken computers. (Computers are awful)

linux-mcp-server is an MCP server that gives any AI agent live read only access access to your system: OS info, processes, services, logs, network, and filesystem. When connected to [Goose] it gives your LLM access to the following featurs:

Natural language diagnostics — Ask questions like "why is my fan running loud?" or "what process is eating my RAM?" and get real answers grounded in your actual current system state
Bluefin knowledge base built in — Dosu integration means the assistant already knows the Bluefin documentation, common issues, and community-reported workarounds. No API key required to access it.
Works with any MCP-compatible agent — Goose, OpenCode, and any client that supports the Model Context Protocol can connect to linux-mcp-server and get the same system access
"Bring Your Own LLM" — use it with a local Ramalama model for fully offline diagnostics, or connect to a hosted API for more capable reasoning — same data, your choice. Current this works best with paid frontier models, but our team continues to experiment with the latest local models. It's only a matter of time, open always wins.

Full troubleshooting guide →

New Wallpapers#

And now, finally, my favorite part of Bluefin, the artwork!

Install the Wallpapers#

The default wallpapers ship automatically with Bluefin. The extra collection (Leaf Collector, Duality, Eyes, Lazy Days) is available via Homebrew:

brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/bluefin-wallpapers-extra</code>

Wallpaper Packs#

Extra wallpaper collections for every variant — install the ones that match your image. You only need the first one if you're not on Bluefin:

brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/bluefin-wallpapers
brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/bluefin-wallpapers-extra
brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/aurora-wallpapers
brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/bazzite-wallpapers
brew install --cask ublue-os/tap/framework-wallpapers

What's New on the Docs Site#

I spent most of my time working on documentation and we've been working pretty hard this cycle. Specifically around getting more information of what's in Bluefin so that we can be more transparent about what we ship:

Chatterbox#

These community members participated in GitHub Discussions over the last six months. Asking questions, sharing tips, helping newcomers, and keeping the conversation going is just as valuable as code.

Download#

Bluefin#

→ projectbluefin.io

Dakota Alpha 2#

dakota-live-latest.iso

Filing Issues#

Discussions #

[TODO: create a new discussion and replace this link — last one was #4500 for Dakota Alpha 1]

GNOME 50 "Tokyo" comes to Bluefin#

ASUS Support#

Bazaar#

Bluefin#

Bluefin LTS#

Bluefin Dakota Alpha 2#

Changes since Alpha 1#

Gotchas#

Homebrew Applications#

Editors and IDEs#

System Tools#

Bluespeed#

AI Agents and Tools#

AI CLI Tools#

Ask Bluefin (Alpha)#

Troubleshooting (Alpha)#

New Wallpapers#

Install the Wallpapers#

Wallpaper Packs#

What's New on the Docs Site#

Chatterbox#

Download#

Bluefin#

Dakota Alpha 2#

Filing Issues#

Discussions#

Discussions #