Mastodawn

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.

#GNOME #Linux #Bazzite #UniversalBlue

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?

Also, would it be a terrible idea to rebase from Bazzite to a stock GNOME uBlue image (if it exists) or Silverblue? I’ve successfully rebased between images before but it’s been a while. 😅

@cassidy Can't you just fix the fonts? And turn off the other extensions? Going pure vanilla should be easy.

Jordan Petridis 20h ago

@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.

https://github.com/alatiera/unblue

Jorge Castro 19h ago

@alatiera @cassidy Is there a good way to ship the upstream defaults and then ours as an optional set on top?

Jordan Petridis 19h ago

@jorge @cassidy I don't think so, I can't think of a way since the gschemas are a global compiled db that ends up in /usr

Adrian Vovk 19h ago

@alatiera @jorge @cassidy You can drop in overrides at a dconf level

Jorge Castro 18h ago

@AdrianVovk @alatiera @cassidy Yo man maybe if we do dakotaraptor this way it'll give you just enough bluefin QoL but give you a default experience?

Adrian Vovk 16h ago

@jorge @alatiera @cassidy So, https://github.com/projectbluefin/common/issues/221? 😋

Bluefin as a systemd system extension. · Issue #221 · projectbluefin/common

updatectl enable bluefin on a GNOME OS system would be a cool idea. Is there any tooling we could use to turn the combo of common, brew, artwork, etc. into a sysext? We've been discussing wether a ...

GitHub

Matt (It's really me) Hartley 15h ago

@AdrianVovk @jorge @alatiera @cassidy Nothing to add, but obviously following closely with interest where this lands. :)

@jorge @alatiera you can as a session-specific override, I think. And then you would have the Bazzite session which would be distinct from the GNOME session. Iirc this is how elementary OS, Endless OS, and Ubuntu handle(d) it, so you could always get a stock GNOME session without conflicting default settings.

Julian Hofer 9h ago

@jorge @cassidy oh good that you mention that. I actually planned to switch to bluefin after years with silverblue. Does one of you know if it has the same problems? I was hoping I would only need to disable shell extensions.

Tobias Hunger 9h ago

@ju @jorge @cassidy I got back to "standard" gnome by disabling extensions.

Julian Hofer 8h ago

@hunger @jorge @cassidy that's good then. I was afraid I would have to hunt through settings to get somewhat close to defaults

Steven Deobald 7h ago

@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`

@cassidy @hunger

Steven Deobald 7h ago

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@matthartley/116366012662373062

@ju @jorge @cassidy @hunger

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)

@ju @hunger @jorge yeah extensions are the big obvious one, but there's a bunch of random gsettings that are also changed and that's what finally drove me away. I just want stock GNOME, as configured by GNOME.

Tobias Hunger 1h ago

@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.

Jorge Castro 1h ago

@cassidy @ju @hunger "random gsettings"? which one, there's nothing random.

Jorge Castro 1h ago

@ju @cassidy Which problems specifically?

Julian Hofer 1h ago

@jorge @cassidy that's what I tried to figure out from Cassidy, but if one GNOME's designer thinks many things look off, then I'd probably stick to Silverblue and my overlays 😅

Jorge Castro 1h ago

@ju @cassidy I'd like to know what's off instead of being told that things are just "randomly" broken.

passthejoe 14m ago

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I run Bluefin because it makes all the changes I wish Silverblue would make.

Jorge Castro 1m ago

@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.

Alexander Vanhee 5h ago

@jorge @cassidy Is there even a reason why the font size is slightly larger than upstream for some reason? It really confused me when I first switched.