2026-05-12-bluefin-spring-2026

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Two hats and a dromeosaur

^^^ this post best enjoyed with heavy metal.

I found this app called Speed of Sound, a speech to text app that makes writing long winded release announcements a breeze - so this is a series of blog posts over the next three days.

I am not going to lie I haven't been this excited about Bluefin since the start of the project. This spring is particularly relevant for us, with GNOME 50 being a particularly nice roll up of tech. First more of a project update. As I've alluded to in the past, we're learning to come out of the shadows more for people looking for a great desktop for every day use. We've purposely avoided this audience for a few reasons - mostly because normal people don't install operating systems.

But now that we've got five years of production under our belt it's probably time to be louder. First we're partnering with Michael Tunnell on a set of video content that should be more appealing to the general computing audience. Then you can expect more visible changes in our approach as we (as they say in the biz) "Go To Market". Expect that some time this summer!

Lazy Days#

This is Lazy Days by Jay Balamurugan. Jay is a London-based science communicator, paleoartist, and television producer — her credits include Walking with Dinosaurs and Earth. This is Bluefin as you rarely see her: full belly, no worries, just a chill day in the sun.

Some backstory ...#

Some of you know that Bluefin wasn't really an accident - it's a distillation of decades of OSS experience from a bunch of experienced people. I am particularly priviledged to be exposed to this audience of open source gurus. Part of our appeal is we get you one step closer to knowing how Open Source actually works from the people doing it at the professional level. We're taking this team-work based approach to the maintenance of our desktops. That's basically it. Here are the collective lessons we have learned:

Digital Sovereignty: There is an actual demand for a Linux client that can be built, from the ground up and verified to the very end. We're not talking about what you would typically consider "an Ubuntu remix". It's gotta be at the top level of supply chain security and be deployable at scale. Only modern Linux can compete here.
Bazzite proves that delivering to the 95% is a thing people want
- Ends up that there's significantly more to gain by throwing away the old things holding Linux back than serving edge cases.
Open Gaming Collective has proven that different distributions can work together in a way that is conducive to get all of this stuff out of the little fiefdoms and into the upstream Linux kernel. And they're just getting started.
The Team:
- Seven(!) people have gotten jobs through Universal Blue.
  - Chainguard, Red Hat, and Microsoft have all recognized the talent from the enthusiast community. Users like you have proven to the industry that enthusiasts matter.
- It's not about what we're building these days, it's about what we're choosing to NOT build.
- Ends up that the development techniques from Open Source infrastructure apply very well to people who love to work together as a team. You don't succeed in this business as an individual, you bring your individual talent to a team, and you succeed together.
Efficient downloads are coming: It never made sense to push too hard with this limitation. Now it's not going to be an issue. I'll explain more in the third blog post.

I find digital sovereignty in particular to be interesting. The discussions around Linux are predictable. Once again people are fighting over who is going to ship the least-worst Debian. The discussion should be focused on infrastructure and how you build it. You know who are really passionate about infrastructure? The European Cloud Native communities. The Kubernetes nerds expect and demand a modern Linux, and in order to deliver that you need world class infrastructure. The communities are mixing, and with modern tooling like bootc and buildstream the bare minimum standard for what constitutes a Linux desktop is about to go up substantially. So yeah, it's probably time to be louder.

But enough preaching, let's go into how we plan to get you there!

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. It is opt-in in Bluefin LTS:

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 Asus Linux community is a participant in the Open Gaming Collective, which gives us the confidence that this will be well maintained over time. Thanks so much for your efforts!

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
This is in Bazzite's testing branch as ujust asus and we'll pick it up at some point. Sorry that you have to do this by hand:

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!

This support has turned my 2022 G14 AMD Advantage Edition in a pretty great Linux laptop. It wasn't always like that!

Bluefin#

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

And here are the release notes and announcements:

And that's it. The usual stuff. I want to focus on what's coming next because Bluefin is going to change for the better.

The Future of Bluefin and Fedora#

Timothée Ravier's post is particularly relevant for us. 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 — 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!

Fedora Accelerates#

The biggest improvement this cycle has been mostly invisible to you. Fedora's bootc efforts seem to have been finally resolved. It may come as a surprise to some of you that Fedora does not actually release an official bootc image. All of our work continues to be based on Timothée's unofficial images. For the first time it feels like Fedora have figured out what to do with bootc, and this removes a bunch of uncertainty for us. It has never made sense that Fedora would start off in the lead and end up behind the rest of the community with bootc adoption. This also means that if you're enjoying Aurora, Bazzite, Bluefin, Secureblue, or rocking your own custom image ... quality is going to go up.

Honestly I just work on Fedora to toss RPMs right at Jorge's smug cloud native face.
-- John Bazzite

It took lots of work to get Fedora back on track with bootc, after all, Bluefin was intended to be a weekend project inbetween Fedora 39 and 40 to prove how easy it was. See? Look how easy that was! Jef you're doing great, I'm sorry for riding you so hard over the past few months. Fedora has two awesome avenues and a brand new sandbox to play in -- good to see some "Fedora First" flexing over there! Thanks Laura Santamaria and LH!

They have a ton of work to do, so if this is your jam, now is the time to get involved. Good timing too, looks like Red Hat is hiring.

An awesome special thanks to the Fedora CoreOS team for ensuring the Copy Fail 2 and DirtyFrag issues were resolved in the kernel we use. I also have some awesome Fedora news for you ... tomorrow.

Bluefin LTS#

Now over to CentOS -- Achillobator giganticus 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 we'd like but as a result GNOME 50 is 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

Merch#

Unfortunately selling outside the US is still a struggle, we'll continue looking at options. Our store is designed to highlight Bluefin's incredible artists! Proceeds from the store fund future artist work. We adjust the prices on all the other items in the store in order to make the kids shirt as cheap as possible. Rawr.

Check out the rest on store.projectbluefin.io →

Download#

Thanks to our awesome ISO factory we can now deliver fresh ISOs and both Anaconda and Tuna installer suck way less than before. You can find the weekly ISO builds on the Downloads Testing page - these are automatically refreshed weekly. We've also set the timer to auto publish stable releases of the ISOs each month, so you're never too out of date. We're also now publishing torrents of the most popular images. See you tomorrow for part 2 of our series!

Bluefin, Bluefin LTS, and Bluefin GDX#

Discussion Thread #

Two hats and a dromeosaur

^^^ this post best enjoyed with heavy metal.

I found this app called Speed of Sound, a speech to text app that makes writing long winded release announcements a breeze - so this is a series of blog posts over the next three days.

Lazy Days#

Some backstory ...#

Digital Sovereignty: There is an actual demand for a Linux client that can be built, from the ground up and verified to the very end. We're not talking about what you would typically consider "an Ubuntu remix". It's gotta be at the top level of supply chain security and be deployable at scale. Only modern Linux can compete here.
Bazzite proves that delivering to the 95% is a thing people want
- Ends up that there's significantly more to gain by throwing away the old things holding Linux back than serving edge cases.
Open Gaming Collective has proven that different distributions can work together in a way that is conducive to get all of this stuff out of the little fiefdoms and into the upstream Linux kernel. And they're just getting started.
The Team:
- Seven(!) people have gotten jobs through Universal Blue.
  - Chainguard, Red Hat, and Microsoft have all recognized the talent from the enthusiast community. Users like you have proven to the industry that enthusiasts matter.
- It's not about what we're building these days, it's about what we're choosing to NOT build.
- Ends up that the development techniques from Open Source infrastructure apply very well to people who love to work together as a team. You don't succeed in this business as an individual, you bring your individual talent to a team, and you succeed together.
Efficient downloads are coming: It never made sense to push too hard with this limitation. Now it's not going to be an issue. I'll explain more in the third blog post.

But enough preaching, let's go into how we plan to get you there!

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. It is opt-in in Bluefin LTS:

Full GNOME 50 release notes →

💙 Donate to GNOME

ASUS Support#

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
This is in Bazzite's testing branch as ujust asus and we'll pick it up at some point. Sorry that you have to do this by hand:

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

This support has turned my 2022 G14 AMD Advantage Edition in a pretty great Linux laptop. It wasn't always like that!

Bluefin#

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

And here are the release notes and announcements:

And that's it. The usual stuff. I want to focus on what's coming next because Bluefin is going to change for the better.

The Future of Bluefin and Fedora#

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 — 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.

Fedora Accelerates#

Honestly I just work on Fedora to toss RPMs right at Jorge's smug cloud native face.
-- John Bazzite

They have a ton of work to do, so if this is your jam, now is the time to get involved. Good timing too, looks like Red Hat is hiring.

An awesome special thanks to the Fedora CoreOS team for ensuring the Copy Fail 2 and DirtyFrag issues were resolved in the kernel we use. I also have some awesome Fedora news for you ... tomorrow.

Bluefin LTS#

Now over to CentOS -- Achillobator giganticus remains our Long Term Support option, here's the release card:

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

Lazy Days#

Some backstory ...#

GNOME 50 "Tokyo" comes to Bluefin#

ASUS Support#

Bluefin#

The Future of Bluefin and Fedora#

Fedora Accelerates#

Bluefin LTS#

Merch#

Download#

Bluefin, Bluefin LTS, and Bluefin GDX#

Discussion Thread#

Lazy Days#

Some backstory ...#

GNOME 50 "Tokyo" comes to Bluefin#

ASUS Support#

Bluefin#

The Future of Bluefin and Fedora#

Fedora Accelerates#

Bluefin LTS#

Merch#

Download#

Bluefin, Bluefin LTS, and Bluefin GDX#

Discussion Thread#

Discussion Thread #

Discussion Thread #