I’d been using Fedora Silverblue for forever, but have been dabbling with Bazzite recently. I don’t really game on my PC, but there were some niceties from Universal Blue or Bazzite that I wanted.
Buuut I’m getting kind of annoyed with some of the UX changes that Bazzite makes from stock GNOME. The shell extensions I can disable, but I keep finding things: fonts and window switching (alt+tab) behavior are the most recent.
I’m fine with other changes, like using Bazaar by default and the way updates are handled.
Should I just go back to Silverblue, or is there a stock GNOME Universal Blue image that would make sense to use? What would the less-visible differences be?
@jorge @cassidy The schemas and other stuff are kinda of a pain to deal with after the fact, it's why I made the unblue image instead of a vanilla-gnome mode.
Cassidy, you could try this and take over if you want even! I haven't looked at the repo though since I made it, but I think it probably still works.
@ju it's always @jorge who's arguing that gnome is the most best at canned customization anyway ... maybe bluefin itself could provide the "click here to turn everything off and go back to upstream mode" button? and by "button" i mean the script to disable all extensions and swap in a vanilla dconf profile
`./enable-boring-mode.sh`
RE: https://fosstodon.org/@matthartley/116366012662373062
errr... sorry. i see this was already probably maybe potentially solved in another thread:
https://fantastic.earth/@matthartley@fosstodon.org/116366012714908551
(posting for anyone else who missed it)
@cassidy @ju @jorge I use gnomeos on my laptop. Works quite well, too. I wanted systemd-homed support and that does not work too well in bluefin. And its a bit safer as it verifies the filesystem using dm-verity before/while mounting it.
E.g. you have to give the password twice, and keep a non-homed user or bluefin goes that initial boot mode, asking to create a user.
@passthejoe @ju @cassidy And like fundamentally to me it's all about numbers. People will argue about preferred settings all day long, we're nerds we'll do that.
But also there's millions of ubuntu desktops out there and it's just fine - there's way more broken things in linux than people's panel configurations, etc.
I'm in the "that's clearly working better than most of the competitors I think I'll go with that." camp.
It hurt on the inside whan having to move the dock to the bottom lol.
@cassidy there's this image that's basically Silverblue but with some uBlue packages applied:
https://github.com/ublue-os/main/pkgs/container/silverblue-main
I've been using the Kinoite one as a base for my laptop system. Works fine.
About rebasing, if you keep it in the same DE (Gnome in your case), should be fine.
@zak I feel like Bluefin leans REALLY hard into the developer tooling stuff which I’ve mostly ignored. I’m very happy with toolbox for like 99% of things I actually need, and layering a package or two for the rest.
I’m not strictly opposed, but honestly the amount of new-to-me developer tooling seemed daunting to try to learn or to even fully grok what was going on.
@sri @cassidy @thibaultamartin I need to start gathering testimonials from people about how shockingly stable they found GNOME OS and how it was not a big deal in the end.
You should totally try it, you have all the people you need on speedial anyway 😆
@fraggle @alatiera @cassidy @thibaultamartin
That is its first use case. But a reference platform still has to be useful since we're pathfinding paradigms. If people can't use it how can you prove it is a valid tech?
https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2024/10/25/a-desktop-for-all/
@sri
Always a pleasure to encounter another fan! I'm the maintainer of the version that's found in most Linux distros. You might want to check out the website, I'm still actively working on it and recently added support for custom missions (levels) among other things:
https://fragglet.github.io/sdl-sopwith/
The game's 40th birthday was a couple of years ago and I organized a celebration, including an interview with the author. Have a look through the history section if you're curious; I think it's on the second page
@sri @cassidy @thibaultamartin Which is probably saying a lot given the fact
- I use an Nvidia Card
- I have the most broken Arch installs of anyone on fedi*
* Claim not vetted but proly true
@cassidy that’d be the ublue image that’s called silverblue (or silverblue-nvidia if you have nvidia drivers) image. It’s the only one that I would recommend honestly. Most changes apart from codecs are CLI things like distrobox and ujust.
It’s what I use at work, or at least my own image based on that with a few default apps as well as some layers such as docker, hashcat and veracrypt.
https://github.com/sstendahl/SjoerdOS/blob/main/recipes/recipe.yml
@sstendahl alright, maybe I do need to throw my own config together. I make a couple of small personal tweaks to stock GNOME and while I don’t really mind doing them on each install, it could be nice to have them defined somewhere. Hmmmm…
Thank you for sharing the link! For now I might just use ghcr.io/ublue-os/silverblue since I didn't realize that existed.
@cassidy the repo I shared was done with bluebuild, it’s quite a nice project as they make it relatively easy.
Regarding the base image from ublue, it’s what universal blue used to be. But nowadays they mostly focus on the more tweaked ones, which are based on this base image. The base image is no longer recommended, which is a shame as it’s my favorite general purpose spin.
See: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/how-to-install-universal-blues-base-images/868 (just replace Kinoite with Silverblue in the example for GNOME)
What are the base images? The base images are the building blocks for our end-user images like Bluefin), Aurora, and Bazzite. They live in the ublue-os/main repository. These are generic Fedora Atomic Desktop but with non-free codecs, RPMFusion, and automatic updates out of the box. The base images do not deviate too far from Fedora Atomic and plan to stay as close to upstream as possible. They are intended to be built upon and used as a base for custom images. Think of them like basic st...
@cassidy what about the UBlue base images?
https://github.com/ublue-os/main
There's also blue-build base images
https://github.com/blue-build/base-images
@sesivany @cassidy Makes sense. I do enjoy using buildstream and adding my own special sauce but I'm not your typical user.
But realize that bluefin is going in the direction of GNOME OS. 🙂
https://docs.projectbluefin.io/blog/bluefin-2025#bluefins-distroless-future
Rebasing is going to be really really simple. :D
Cassidy James 
Craig Magina
Jorge Castro
Jordan Petridis
Adrian Vovk
Matt (It's really me) Hartley
Julian Hofer
Tobias Hunger
Steven Deobald
passthejoe
Alexander Vanhee
Thiago, the one they call Jedi
Zak 
burns
Dusana Mykola
Thib
Sriram "sri" Ramkrishna - 😼
fraggle
Nix Inch Nails
Sjoerd Stendahl
DNA schedule
fran
Jiří Eischmann