My Next Long Term Review Is...

It's time to start another review, this time we're going to try something different.
👇 PULL IT DOWN FOR THE GOOD STUFF 👇

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#review #linux #thelinuxcast

[nunchucker]

Welcome to the blue side homie.

The one thing I haven't heard people focusing on is the zero-maintenance aspect of it. Experts are maintaining the system for you, and you get to just enjoy your life.

[Novalax]

The default release channel for bluefin (called gts) defaults to latest fedora version - 1 (so Fedora 39). It's the one they're confident on installing on anyone's machine. For the latest fedora, you have to move to "stable" or "latest" channel. They are both on the latest fedora, but stable has a slightly older kernel.

But you're absolutely right, flatpaks and containers make this difference not a big deal.

[JoshuaT]

You should move to the latest tag and they supported fedora 40 since day one. gts tag is the default one you get from installing from their iso and it's based on Fedora 39 currently (gts = latest-1). Note for anyone who installs with a seperate home dir - mount it on /var/home during the install.

edit - you can also use stable and use command 'ujust rebase-helper' to easily rebase.

[rgbmew]

In relation to the wallpapers, I believe that's just a GNOME moment. Every time I've opened the appearance tab on a fresh GNOME install, it takes ages to cache, but after they're cached it's all good. I've seen similar things happen on other GTK DEs, my guess is that GNOME is saving those wallpapers in extremely high quality, and GTK is using a slow resizer to make them thumbnail sized or something.

Regardless, I wish you luck on this review! The Silverblue line of distros are some of my favorites ever. I LOVE how they handle updates, switching desktop environments, installing software onto the base system, just about everything is awesome except the typical Fedora multimedia codec crap (which you won't have to deal with on Bluefin!). It's amazing, there's really nothing like it.

[kwemo]

I use Aurora as my daily driver. I absolutely love it so far. I used to just use Linux Mint and the LMDE for years. I got into "immutable" distros and thought itd be good. I know they call it cloud native but honestly, I don't know what the difference is lol.

Have had a great experience and look forward to what you find that i may not have

[russjr]

I'll definitely be eagerly awaiting the final verdict for this one!

[vwduder]

The slowdown on first boot is that you have to populate the OpenGL/Vulkan shader cache which is dependent on the combination of GTK version (shader sources), Mesa version, and what features the app uses. There is no "pre-compile that can work on all GPUs" unfortunately, especially when the combinatorial matrix of GPU features lands you in the hundreds of thousands of variations.

[VektrumSimulacrum]

Aurora and Bazzite are both pretty nicely polished. Both of my installs are both on Fedora 40 I believe. Aurora for my "work" laptop, Bazzite on my old gaming PC. Runs all my steam games just fine and getting the 1650 up and running was smooth.

[repairstudio]

Love to see the longterm review on BlueFin! 💙

[burnt_]

btw, it wouldn't be just bluefin anymore, but i would be interested in seeing you rebase to some other images too. there's quite a lot out there. like there's one with hyprland for example.

[cameronbosch]

4:14 That's an appropriate way of putting it! 😂

[fabioarturo]

Yes, I love bluefin and bazzite. Bluefin GNOME is awesome!! 💙

[advaitc]

Does Bluefin offer GUI tools to take Btrfs snapshots and manage them? Does Bluefin automatically put snapshots in a Grub startup screen where a snapshot can be easily selected for rollback? I'm asking because I use Tumbleweed which does offer these things. So I'm always curious if other distros offer built in and easy to use tools to manage Btrfs snapshots. In a simplistic way, Btrfs snapshots offer something like immutability. PS: I love Tumbleweed!

[sherx]

Is it time to give a first update on the use of Bluefin?

[cameronbosch]

I actually had random microstutters with Bluefin increase over time, but I originally thought it was because I installed it to a Framework 1 TB Expansion Card. Maybe I'm not alone!

[siljrath]

Well....
Did not see that coming. Could not have seen that coming.
Bluefin. Cloud. Fedora. Gnome. Not my cuppa, but will be interesting to see your take on it.
Looking forward to void. ... I really thought for sure it was going to be a last ditch chance to do Funtoo.

[squarepeg]

Hey Matt, what's your favourite so far NixOS or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed?

[VHSJayden]

I'm really curious about making bazzite my desktop distro. Im afraid that it will be too handheld focused for desktop use though.

[danilaros]

Hi there Matt. I'm using BlueFin for about 3 months and is been a a smooth experience, maybe the most solid Linux experience i have. You system on boot is slow probably because you are using the normal GTS version that updates in background daily and is base is Fedora 39. You can use the stable version that only update once a week and is base is Fedora 40.

[onewa]

I see you're using soolar, do you know any good tutorial where I can learn how to use it? or Will you make a small tutorial about it? I love my MX 3s but I cannot find a way how to properly use it in my Linux machine 🫣🥺