Flameshot is 3.6MB on disk according to flatpak info org.flameshot.Flameshot

ublue co-maintainer here. I go over a bunch of the reasons here: https://www.ypsidanger.com/homebrew-is-great-on-linux/

Namely we needed a way to complement Flatpak and brew was a natural fit. It’s an ecosystem reason not a technical one. It has everything we need and a good deal of Bluefin’s target audience are already using it on mac. So for us it’s an easier lift to just add homebrew and move on to larger problems.

Plus it’s nice that they’re working with the openssf to secure the supply chain pipeline, and it’s nice that everything is in github where we can inspect it, use the same tooling we use for the OS, etc.

Use the distrobox assemble command, that’ll let you have an ini file with all the stuff you want and then when the assemble command runs it’ll remake the entire thing. Then just toss the assemble in cron and you’ll always have a fresh container with your exact setup.

Immutable is new to me,

It’s best to ignore the whole “immutable” thing as most of the discussion around that is conflating a bunch of other concepts and it just leads to confusion. When it comes to things like host daemons, these systems are designed to deploy daemons the same way as cloud servers, so for mpd it’d be running the service as a container. A quick search of /r/selfhosted shows some options, but I’m on the road so don’t have time to recommend a specific image, but generally speaking anything server related is done via containers.

I use the 1password firefox plugin for my password management. There still isn’t a flatpak portal that allows flatpaked password managers to talk to flatpaked browsers, that can be a pain point to some people depending on your use case.

As far as how you manage your distroboxes, that’s up to you. We differ from fedora here where they default to “just use toolbox” for everything, whereas we default to “just use brew” for everything. I keep an ubuntu and fedora distrobox in case I need to check something from those distros, and arch is a popular choice. If you’re happy with your existing distro but want the reliability of atomic updates then this is a good option. For most new users I recommend not caring about distrobox, most of that stuff is for developers or people that know how to linux already and know exactly what they want.

Also, are there any issues with upgrading a distrobox to a new major release over time?

Containers are designed to be ephemeral, so that you can recreate them on the spot when something goes bad. So I never upgrade boxes, I recreate on the spot using my custom configs. That way I have the same experience on all my machines and when something breaks I don’t lose any time setting things up again. Distrobox assemble is awesome for this: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/distrobox-assemble.md

So far my mindset has been make sure I don’t layer anything, but maybe some things like mpd do make sense to layer?

I don’t really layer anything, I use everything via containers or brew. Generally speaking some people might have a few things they have no choice to layer - a good example is a VPN provider that doesn’t provide a wireguard config for network manager and instead you have to layer some 3rd party app. But it’s also not the end of the world, updates will take longer but 99% of the time I’m asleep when that happens or it happens in the background and is transparent to me. The more you layer the more maintenance you’ll have to do when you do upgrades, so if you end up adding a bunch of 3rd party repos it’ll behave the same way as a traditional distro and likely need to be babysat.

The system will update all your boxes and your brew packages as well, so whichever one you use you’ll never be out of date. Hope this helps!

I’m unclear how mature the project is and whether it will be updated in a timely manner long term

ublue and bluefin co-maintainer here, we’ve been around for a while now (3rd birthday coming up!) and have been around in a more unofficial capacity for longer.

Bluefin is feature complete and is in maintenance mode, it’s just going to get updated in perpetuity to 41, 42, etc. We invested in automation first so most of the maintenance is automatic and it doesn’t take much for our team to do it. Right now most of our major ticket items are waiting for things to finish landing in upstream Fedora, most of which are targetted towards F41. A good portion of the team have been around in OSS for a long time and a bunch of us work in the industry and depend on Bluefin for our jobs, so much so that we have a great working relationship with Framework, so we’re supporting those laptops as a community option for them.

Aurora is relatively new, coming in just as Plasma 6 landed in fedora. Most reports with issues we get for it are things like it being a new major release, wayland/nvidia issues, etc.

Hopefully that answers some of your questions, if you have more feel free to ask!

I disagree on your view about the Fedora atomic spins, especially universal blue. Who cares if the underlying OS downloads as one big image. It all happens in the background, you don’t notice that. Everytime you reboot, you are on an updated system.

Universal Blue co-maintainer here, this is a temporary situation, efficient downloads are coming, I’m actually at the Red Hat Summit and have been discussing things with the right engineering teams. This involves an intersection of podman, ostree maintainers etc. all aligning on it. It’s definitely a priority for them to fix this.

We’ve pushed pretty hard and pretty fast on the cloud native model, part of it was convincing people that this was a thing that users want, they hear us loud and clear now, it’s going to be an awesome year.

/etc is completely writeable. This is why we don’t use the term “immutable distros” because Bazzite and the rest of universal blue are neither immutable nor distros.

(This is why Fedora moved to the term Atomic)

installs all those things and sets things up properly on a standard fedora install?

That’s exactly what all universal blue images do. It’s just that setup is done every single day in github from scratch and stamped out as an image so that the end result gets to your computer as a finished deployment artifact. Leads to better update reliability, built in rollback.

The biggest benefit is that it’s easier for a community to fix the fast moving gamer stuff as a config layer on top of a distro that’s delivered this way than me having to manually figure out what component of my gaming setup changed that week.

being a mutable minimal CentOS. So all the linking and making immutable would need to be done.

No it’s designed to be consumed as a base image for ostree enabled OCI containers.

This requires the presence of rpm-ostree and a kernel, which are both missing in the CentOS Stream image.

There are ostree-enabled OCI containers of centos if you know where to look. :D

This should be enough until they start publishing official ones, never used it:

https://quay.io/repository/centos-bootc/centos-bootc-dev?tab=tags

https://github.com/ublue-os/main/blob/main/packages.json

Docs for future reference: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/docs?topic=868

Yeah it’s 2024, this stuff should just be built into the OS! I’m at kubecon so don’t have time to look into it now but it’d be an awesome thing to have, we’d love the help!

bluefin co-maintainer here. espanso is a hard one, we have an open issue on getting it to work because it’d be something awesome to include. We might end up needing to package it but haven’t had a chance to look deeper into the issue.

I’m not a security expert but I do know that the Homebrew is working with openssf on security: https://openssf.org/blog/2023/11/06/alpha-omega-grant-to-help-homebrew-reach-slsa-build-level-2/

Boxkit predates wolfi so it’s still alpine, I’ll probably replace it at some point but most of the forks of boxkit are because people want the premade github actions and they end up replacing it with whatever distro they want anyway. The wolfi connection is because I know the people who work there (including a ublue maintainer) and we have similar goals/ideas on how linux distros should be put together. My ideal dream is a wolfi userspace systemd-sysext on top of fedora base, then we can have our cake and eat it too!

We’re not security experts but lots of us work in the field and that gives us access to peer review from experts when we set things up. We sign every artifact with sigstore so users can verify that the code used in github is what’s on their image, that sort of thing. And most of our practices utilize CNCF governance templates that lots of other projects use.

Been there and done that. It’s better to just not have the host OS break in the first place.

My Ubuntu installs are extremely reliable, both on desktops and servers.

Probably because you’re an experienced user, not everyone has the same skillset.

mozillavpn

I would just overlay this, that’s what it’s there for, there’s no need to do a full new image for VPN stuff.

We use quadlets to manage those containers: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.unit.5.html

As others in the thread have pointed out just having systemd manage them is the way to go, it’s a nice combo!

What package is it?

If you kept a basic minimal Ubuntu host it would be trivial to maintain.

That’s not true for most people.

I just don’t see the point. You want new users to understand containers.

You don’t need to understand containers unless you’re using the system for development – which in Linux land means containers.