I accidentally started mainlining Open Source software

Sometimes people ask me how I keep track of all the cool new tools that everyone is using. One of the great things about being at the CNCF is that I kind of ended up in the middle of the intersection of lots of tech people. I'm therefore very privileged…

Announcing Project Bluefin

Today we "relaunched" ublue-os/bluefin as projectbluefin.io. This is a beta until Spring 2024. Bluefin is a custom image of Fedora Silverblue by a bunch of cloud-native nerds. We want a reliable desktop experience that runs everything but we're too lazy to maintain anything. So we automated the entire…

Homebrew is great on Linux

I'm a strong believer in the next generation Linux desktop model - which splits what is typically one monolithic system into different layers. This has been great for us at Universal Blue because it allows us to reuse Fedora's OCI images to deliver a more reliable and customizable experience for…

Distrobox vs. Toolbox doesn't matter!

Of all the things people argue about! Ultimately they both do the same thing – take an existing workflow that I know, and add an abstraction layer that gives us tons of new options. Interactivity within the container's shell is powerful, but there needs to be user experience changes in order…

Declaring your own personal distroboxes

Every once in a while I see someone complaining that they've lost work because their toolbox/distrobox got destroyed. I'm going to go over how we can use declarative config to remove this bit of jank from our lives. We don't want distroboxes to be pets either! This is part…

The distribution model is changing

One of the nice things about being on sabbatical is I get to say things like "You should be happy that RHEL is dropping LibreOffice RPMs" without the fear of being kicked out a room you didn't want to be in the first place.   I have been talking for a…

Universal Blue 1.0 - a toolkit for customizing Fedora images

If you're new to the blog I'll give you the quick TLDR: Most traditional desktop linuxes aren't reliable enough to be suitable for consumer usage, but immutable models like Silverblue are seen as too rigid to be customized to what people want. Ironic isn't it, the entire thing is designed…