 Hey there and welcome to the foot or a podcast. This is episode number 30 we're going to be talking about fedora silver blue and immutable desktops and why Our guests are currently upset at me for saying it's an immutable desktop. I There I'm Eric the IT guy Hendricks. I'm really excited to be with you It's another Tuesday afternoon and it is like 20 degrees cooler here than it has been So I'm really excited about today's episode and joining me is is one of my favorite co-host mr Joseph welcome to welcome to the foot or a podcast Thanks so much Eric. Thanks for having me. Yeah, this will be great And I'm happy to say that we are one minor tweak away from having the beautiful Animation to kick off the show. So we've got some music with it. We've got an animation. There's just one more tweak We're waiting on so I'm really really looking forward to that Now I'm all about not talking meta about the podcast on the podcast So why don't we dive into our topic today? Joseph? You want to tell us what we're what we're going to discuss and then we'll bring in our guests? So we can't talk about it without ruffling a few feathers, but this is a very exciting episode because it's all about Immutable distros mutable distributions now that's something that's been getting talked about a lot Not just because of there being a few distros out there But because there are a lot of different approaches to immutability There is a debate going on on what does it mean? Is that the best term and and really there's a lot of depth to this topic almost on a distro by distro Level so a part of today is going to talk about not just immutability at a high level but try to tackle some misconceptions and and See if we can change the language a little bit So I'll let our guests chime in with how we should be pivoting going forward and try to clear things up There's already a flame war going on in the chat. So why don't we bring in our guests and we'll we'll get this episode kicked off So we've got not one but two guests today, so I'd like to introduce George and Timothy George, why don't you go first and introduce yourself tell us what you do for a living if you'd like What do you do for what do you do for fedora and what do you do for fun? Yeah, so I'm George Castro. I Started this project when I was actually on sabbatical I currently work for the cloud native computing foundation the cncf.io and I don't do anything from fedora other than consumments and Try to you know get get some of the feedback back in fedora. I've been using fedora Full time for maybe four years now and it was kind of time for me to start playing and What I do for fun currently right now working on universal blue and getting ready for cube con so Raising the kiddo upstairs and doing the best trying to be the best person I could be I guess Awesome as a fellow tech dad Really excited. Hopefully it won't be too long before they're on the show with you Yeah, he's gonna be my maintainer that way I could just retire perfect That's one way to recruit to get contributors you raise them young and then they contribute for a long time That's a stability there. I think Love it. Love it. Timothy. Welcome to the fedora podcast. Same questions. What do you do for a living? What do you do for fedora and what do you do for fun? Hey, thanks for having me. I'm I'm currently I'm a chorus engineer at Red Hat working on Red Hat Chorus as part of OpenShift and in Fedora I work on a lot of different things mainly on Fedora Chorus and also I'm maintaining Fedora Silver Blue and Fedora Kenoite as part of the kiddie-seek awesome and for fun I Dance Lindy hop which is a swing dance from the 20s on the US very old dance, but which is back in popularity right now You know, I've hosted a lot of podcasts that's on a lot of different networks and that was probably a first Do I dare challenge you to after the show dance for us on on live stream? I May try I'm not sure how much is going to work with the camera I see my dance moves All right, so I wanted to start out this episode zoomed way out so before we before we Adjust all of our terminology. Why don't we start with a very basic question of What is the goal of an immutable desktop and then we'll kind of talk about why that's that's fallen into? Disrepute maybe so what what's the goal? Why why would I want an immutable desktop? Okay, mine is gonna be the most controversial. So all of you have to go first alright All right, Timothy. He he threw the gauntlet back to you. So what is the goal of an immutable desktop? Why why would we want one? So I I think for me the main thing is that it makes it really hard to break my system It makes it super reliable Which is why I've completely fell into this. I I'm gonna be like diving a little bit of history like I I came from March Linux I was a huge arch Linux fan. I was tweaking everything to my liking. I was building my custom packages everything was fully custom but every time I had to change the things that are I had to Plan ahead to take time because if I made a mistake if I made a mistake during upgrades and I had to to make sure I'd get time to fix things etc was Our permission with immutable distribution with silver poo is tonight. I just don't have that fear anymore if Whatever happens in the next update is there's a bug There's a problem is that I just roll back to the previous version and I keep on with my life until I have time to Even like even for me a developer like sometimes it's not the right time and I just want to go back and I can give my perspective as is more of an end user where my first exposure to the term immutable actually comes from Chrome OS Where I was I was a big fan. I was an early adopter For those who know I got the Samsung series 5 Chromebook, which is like literally one of the two first Chromebooks you could buy And at the time I was attracted to just the whole living in the browser piece But as I learned more about what immutable meant I was attracted to not just the stability but security aspect as well So just knowing that things are very locked down and that it's a lot of the system important system components They're read-only so I even if I wanted to mess something up I'd I'd really have to know what I was doing before I could mess something up and Especially once I transitioned to using Linux It makes it even harder right where obviously I try to sell the terminal So I think it's very unlikely. I'll mess something up, but if I knew a little more I could do more damage than I wanted and so the the benefit of immutability to me is knowing that from a security standpoint Things should be very stable. It should just be harder. It should be harder for anyone to get into my system Now to what degree that's a misconception depending on what I'm using. I hope to learn a little bit I think I'm on the right track with Keenolite, but that's my take So my my first experience with with silver blue was was very negative and not Because of anything wrong with the project or with with the spin It was my expectations were not where they needed to be so I I went in and I installed it It's like, okay, this is supposed to make upgrades. It's supposed to make my life easier And so I went to go and start installing packages. It's just like This doesn't work. Oh wait, no, maybe it's me But when I when I think about this this whole immutability topic the thing that comes to mind is what we've carried around in our pockets for years is the ability to to do upgrades in place to For the operating system to be encapsulated away from all the apps So you have the apps that download on their own they update in place It's easy to fall back to an older version Maybe maybe not on a cell phone, but when we get to say desktop scale or in my line of work We talk a lot about the the edge of of your it network So we talk about systems that may not get and a stable internet connection so when they have that ability to connect to the internet they download slowly the The updated code and until that code has been completely downloaded and validated It stays on a running known good condition. So when I think about this whole topic, that's that's where my brain goes Now George, I had to cut you short in the pre-show because we were talking about this before we went live So I really really want to know what are your thoughts on this topic? Not the technology specifically, but what what is the goal in this space? I'll tell you exactly why I started this I was growing frustrated with the lack of the Linux desktop to keep up with literally everything else right like out of Like that youtuber broke his desktop that famous guy what three years ago two years ago and the major distros have really Done nothing about it other than pretend that the Linux desktop is reliable right and instead people flame The operator for make a mistake and I think I think it's absurd that I can spend $5,000 on a thalia and it's not as reliable as a $200 chromebook. So I wanted to really fix this problem. It was It doesn't make sense to me like just doesn't compute and fedora was the furthest long But I did run into the same issues that you were having with silver blue And I had to wait until the oci pattern was made available So I can bring the known good cloud patterns that we know do work In scalability and usability and all that kind of stuff. So for me, this is more about We know we have a thing that can get us there Right and it's more about getting good base images and teaching people That this is the way forward and the way to go And like I said, this is going to be controversial. There are a lot of parts of the traditional desktop linux model that are really unsustainable and They're just not going to work. Um, but a lot of people don't want to hear that so Here I am I go here coming from it and that's definitely a complaint that I've heard as well from like Some security minded spaces where you hear linux compared to chrome or s or even mac os and immutability is one of those One of those things So I'm I'm here for it. You know, I'll be in your corner I'm done. I'm picking up what you're putting down Now that's that's really great. I I love that perspective and I love your passion to fix this issue Because when people ask a lot of times I tell them that my my primary operating system is ipad os Because no matter where I'm at I can pull out my ipad. I can pull out my keyboard and I know it's going to work I don't have to worry about did I download the the latest packages and this is coming from a recovering arch user So I mean I I feel that pain. I know what that looks like so Let's dive into it. I think we strung the audience along So what what is the issue around immutability? There's there's a talk of like atomic in the chat and that kind of thing So what are the terms that play here and what are the differences and why is immutable not really what we're striving for? I can start. I think the main thing is As much as we would like it to be immutable. It's it's not like You can still modify a lot of things on the system The only thing that is really only is the actual system files the files from that's usually the application the binaries The icons etc But everything else is mutable like on a regular system So when we call the entire system immutable we make it sound like You can't do anything with it We're essentially the whole point of what we're doing is to enable you to control How it is changed how it evolves how it is updated like and do it on your own pace instead of being being driven We like being overwhelmed by it like you you control you're in control of your operating system. And so The immutable term in a sense it feels backward for us at this point George you get more to add there. Yeah, I feel it like takes away from the actual features of the operating system Because everyone is kind of obsessed around the immutability and that's just really stamping out a final image at the end And they forget the composability part, which is the important Thing that we do which is declaring what you want the system to look like And then having a thing that builds it for you and then when you make changes You know, it like generates a new image. So every day you're getting like a fresh built from scratch. Oh, wow so it's not like a People conflated with fossils of snapshots. Sometimes we should probably talk about but You know, the the entire point is that composability because that gives us the ability To share using the same common patterns with like get up you lose just get ops You know For your operating system And and by just reusing those patterns it gives us that stuff It's like you get a new super car and you want to talk about the engine and the performance and everyone's like But the seatbelts are uncomfortable And you're just like, what are we talking about the seatbelts? So You know, just that the fact that you can layer things now And you can get that customization But if someone if you share a config with someone that solves a problem that you have you can integrate that into your system You know and then kind of stamp out a final image Instead of the old days you would just copy and paste a script from a forum Right, you would say You know, you blew is basically one of those operating system fixer scripts, right? Remember these used to come out and it would be like fix your Fix your os right adds the codex and all that stuff that you want And then people run it and then sometimes it runs all the way or sometimes the packages used to get updated There's always some there's always something right and you can't guarantee That anyone can run that script and get the same result Right and these kind of systems kind of remove that problem entirely Because either the image either finishes and builds correctly Or it errors out and then the bad image never gets to the device Which is So awesome Because you can you can actually save yourself from a lot of bugs There's been issues in fedora where we've been able to hold the package back You know with that rpm os tree override command and you know our images were able to save regressions from the flat pack regression There was a recent regression in podman that we were able to mitigate by just holding back the version Because our community was able to kind of work on the composability part And get that to what the community wanted it to be and then it gets stamped out at the end and I think a lot of people They get bent around the axle about being able to modify the final product right it's like when When your relatives ask you to modify a pdf and you tell them you don't modify pds You modify the form and then you print out a new pdf So that you don't have to deal with editing pds because that's awful Right, but people do it Um, so that's that's kind of where I'm coming from. I think I hope that answers that question I think so if If if I'm understanding correctly You're telling me I don't have to go out and write a pile of ansible playbooks to manage my rpm based desktop It's even better other than there's some limitations there You could take those existing ansible playbooks and we need to enforce this pattern more So far, I think jim cambell is the only one really like that was actively doing research in the area Is you can use your ansible playbooks? inside the container file And ideally stamp out an image. However, there's limitations timothy. I don't know if you know Yeah, this is some modules that don't work This is yeah, definitely. We're part of working progress where we So there's to give you a bit more context. There's the shift right now All of the distribution we're speaking about here silver blue kinwide and in the family chorus and friends They they are based on rpm history and oyster right now and we progressively shifting to container images. So the oci standard format and so it's still an in progress transition But the main idea is that you would be able using this format to essentially Take out the base image the image that we produce has fedora the the base desktops And then you would have your own custom changes Which is what unisos universal blue is doing right now They take our images and they tweak things install packages. They remove ones. They had proprietary drivers for example that we cannot Sheep or lego reasons in fedora et cetera and all those things and so This here you could do the same thing because it's an insoluble paybook For example, you could run your insoluble paybook to tweak your customization Your system set up your settings and you get then a new container image that you would deploy on your systems So there was an article that I read I think last week that the evil skeleton Put out called misconceptions about immutable distributions And it it sounds very similar to what george what you're getting at where a lot of the benefit of Supposed immutability is for saying is actually from the maintainer and development side Where there's efficiencies going on there in those processes helping things be More consistent more stable. So I now I understand your analogy of like fix sitting on seatbelts It's like it's almost like folks who are on the end user side We're consuming immutable distros. We're trying to get almost like our The bang for the buck of immutability like what I've I got to do something with this immutability aspect And it's like no, no, that's not for you necessarily to worry about so much That's us so that we can deliver a better distro to you. So the benefit is indirect which which I think evil skeleton also mentions Does that kind of sum up a lot of of your feeling where it's primarily a benefit to developers that then You know, you feel as an end user because the distro comes up more more stable or more consistent Yeah, because you could do what you want Right if it's a container file and yeah, we talked about ansible, but anything you can put in a container file slash docker file We use those terms interchangeably Bash python doesn't matter as long as the the build finishes at the end, you know, you just You drag entire files. Well, try obviously you can drag entire file systems in there because that's what we're booting Uh, but yeah, you can you can basically Figure out how to build it and as long as it gets on the image And that kind of allows One of the things I think is interesting is that get ops aspect is it lets people like me who are kind of sre Like ops background and then you have your distribution work, right? It's like this new layer. That's on top that allows us to You know, we make new desktops all the time Sometimes people want to try a new version canone with different You know default options So we work with castity james blade to make a separate canone image That was like his little vision or whatever and bazzite is just kino white with a bunch of gaming stuff added Right, so you're kind of constantly building on previous blocks of the thing that came before you but you can like Choose what you want and what you don't want which is really nice because that's the pattern That's the pattern that we got from cloud, right? Like when you're when you're building your app containers and stuff like that You start with from You know centos five or whatever What's the latest version six? Sorry, um, you know, and then you say okay now copy my note app into the container, you know And then you do that thing it's that pattern Linux went through this 10 years ago. It's just the desktop is going through now I think that is something maybe we should I'm definitely being louder about it You know, it's the the pattern is kind of proven itself. I feel Because a lot of people that are Contributing to universal blue have an ops background and they don't have a distro background So it kind of it's like, oh, this is neat. This is that this is how I manage my clusters at work and it's it is Like Yeah, I think that could be a good opportunity to transition into so what are the Ideal the preferred terms that we have in george Maybe you can start with that since you've already mentioned cloud and operations go for you know fedora invented it So I say you name it call it atomic But have it cover a bunch of things that are major transitions because you have to you kind of have to format your machine to do this Right. So like the user has to make a I am transitioning from one thing to the other So I say anything that you feel needs to be in a transition put under the atomic brand because we need there's uk Uh, you that uk i kernel thing is coming Compose a fast like I don't know how any of that fits right and then you could sit like X sessions are going away as soon as possible in the atomic brand like basically Acknowledge that it's a different set of criteria than what fedora workstation is And then you just future aligned to everything because you're going to get people that want to opt in Like I don't want to argue about X sessions. I want to get rid of that thing as soon as possible and get my software fixed That's what I want to do You know and and I feel like there's fedora has this Opportunity because it is very unique in that composability You know, one of the areas I could see really working this in is I'm trying to build out a homeland because I also work for red hat and I work as a red hat enterprise linux a technical marker So I spend a lot of time talking to sys admins showing off new features Uh, so being able to spin something up quickly to give a presentation and tear it back down Is really important and so one of the things that I could see this working out is I usually have a bastion host something that only has like a single port open to the internet and only from certain IP addresses so that I can get back into my network no matter where I'm at And right now that's just a fedora workstation that very closely mirrors the the tower I have over here off camera And my thought is I need to replace that as quickly as possible with say silver blue That way I can define what that thing looks like because my hope is at some point If my home network goes down if the house loses power I want certain systems to spin up somewhere else like digital ocean And having that identical system because it uses the exact same the exact same file That way I can get in I'll have all my tools. I'll have my ssh keys. All those things are ready No matter whether it's in my home lab or spun up somewhere else And I I really think this is the way to go Especially when you think about its scale if if I were maintaining a lab or a classroom This is the way to do it Not going in and managing 20 Low end systems all by hand. No one image set it on a server somewhere Deploy it every day and you've got a clean ready to go system wherever you're at I mean this this really I mean I was already sold on the idea But this conversation really has me wanting to to jump into the terminal and and start building this I I really underestimated silver blue a few years ago And just it's one of those things I've never gotten back to but this this conversation is really driving this need to I think so little about upgrades on my devices on my mobile devices Why not my desktop? Why do why am I still in a place where I have to Baby sit my desktop my servers are managed by ansible my mobile devices are managed by automatic updates overnight Why do I still baby set a desktop? I don't need to I have other things to do Can you believe this is controversial I still don't understand I got the new framework not the new new framework I got the framework 13 the intel one because I was starting a new job I put I put my image on I was I was done in three minutes Like as fast as it could basically be the disc that was it all my machines run off the same image. So You're always on You're always on the right stuff. It's It's fantastic and then This is something that should be in the atomic definition It includes a container runtime and I think we're not being explicit enough to saying that the linux desktop A container runtime is now a critical component of the linux desktop I know people will think that's controversial, but it does allow you to run anything from everywhere. So Any distro any package Like I could kind of you know, like there is no I'm kind of into this post distro thing where like I left fedora handle my host I left fedora handle my host and if I feel like having a fedora user space that day I have one and if not I use Ubuntu if not I use homebrew Whatever the default fedora one will be like toolbox and fedora, right a fedora container I'm not Like no surprises there, right? But like because everything is is built around oci You could just swap that out, you know, if you like alpine Use alpine. It's it kind of gives people a lot of a lot of a lot of that flexibility. I think You know, especially if they have an older package that doesn't really it doesn't come in a flat pack or You know, or it might be troublesome or it's an older package that's just continued and you need a feature Just toss it in an older container and then go to town at least is isolated a little bit So I did have a question because we mentioned atomic a few times here So I don't want to go over and I think you guys I think everyone out here can correct me wrong regarding the history of the term but as I understand it a lot of The rise of what is now silver blue and and similar variants started off as project atomic So silver blue was originally project atomic That went through a rebranding that landed on silver blue then other the other Fedora spins that we have they thought we would like to have An immutable variant or an atomic variant we should start saying And so they got their own branch and now Which is what Timothy where I'd like you to share Why is it that we're interested in coming back to the atomic not only as a term to describe the the technical aspect but also as a brand for These these issues that have have this what I have rpm fusion than rpm fusion rpm os tree in common Yeah, definitely the Atomic brand the project that makes been there for a while and it's been shut down And we're not kind of trying to revive it in this revive the brand the the idea is that Like we now we know that at the beginning I also was on full-on immutable immutable immutable But now we know that it's it's not a right word to use to describe those projects and it's confusing to a lot of people so we want to use something else and This we're trying to revive the atomic brand and refocus all of the re regroup of those projects all of those desktop variants in fedora that are using api mystery as a base technology to To be regrouped under the atomic umbrella. So this is a change in progress. It's going to be submitted to The fedora console for approval But hopefully soon they'll be saying fedora atomic desktops instead of saying immutable Variants and we would be rebranding regrouping all of those. So right now we have fedora silver blue fedora akinite So silver blue is the gnome desktop right here. I'd be the key desktop we have serious era with this way environment and With fedora that nine they will be fedora onyx with the budgie desktop and so Some of those I've already already planning to rename themselves to be more explicit. So be like fedora budgie atomic or fedora sway atomic instead of keeping their own names. And so this is Yeah, a change in progress to move away from this mutable term that nobody really likes anymore essentially and to something that we could that we can both Embrace and use as as a regrouping mechanisms and Secret or secret projects, of course is to make this a default in fedora. So that we drop the atomic term at some point To call fedora. Yeah. Yeah, and just go Yes So we've got we've got fedora silver blue, which is this atomic approach to desktops with the gnome desktop at its core We've got kina whites, which is kde same same atomic build, but it's kde under the at the core and then cericia's I've probably just butchered that That's that's one of the tiling desktop managers if I remember correctly sway. Thank you. And then onyx We just mentioned is coming Just a few weeks a few weeks from data for recording Few may be a little little short-sighted, but soon soon We'll have budgie. In fact, we we talked about fedora budgie About a month ago on this show. So if you missed it go check that episode But the other thing we've talked about a little bit is is this universal blue this this term has come up a few times so for Wow, I speak for a living So universal blue, why don't you explain to us what that is and and And what some of the project goals are for for universal blue or you blue is it's been called a few times Yeah, so I was using fedora for a long time actually Josh burkus reminded me about the project and I ran into calling walters at a at a cube con There's this whole kubernetes story here in the background, but you don't have to deal with that right now um And as I started to dog food it I found the pain points of things That were annoying to me and things like that and once I realized How the oci container thing was going someone not me on the fedora discussion forums Posted hey, you know, I'm having a problem getting the automatic oce the oci thing working And I didn't know that it was live and landed in the distro So I went that weekend with some friends and we kind of hacked something together And then we looked up all the videos on youtube things everyone hates about silver blue or whatever And then it we fixed the top five things their codex didn't work because if you over if you add rpm fusion Tim if they don't do timothy's extra step to unversion them Like you tell people it's more reliable they add rpm fusion and it's like the same error They get a normal fedora so I wanted to fix that and I knew fedora couldn't fix that so we we You know, we kind of find our place there And then we just we fixed that we had a distro box because everybody just kept wanting distro box In the default images we keep the fedora flat packs. We don't try to do editorialized decisions We do try to add hardware enablement in our main images And then we have two images basite and bluefin which are kind of More opinionated. They're like george's george's vision of the desktop or whatever Um and in there I use like the flat have flat packs instead I should docker docker alongside podman and we I make a lot more editorial Decisions around that based on the things that I feel Well, it started off with me and then a bunch of us, you know got together and it's like All right, what are the top 10 things we can fix in fedora that we can actually just like you would write a script for Uh, so codex finding the thumb nailer programs for each desktop is hard. There isn't one There isn't one binary. So some of them use a different one. So we had to figure that out Um, and then the big one was invidia drivers Hmm Because we build that in ci and the the user's computer never has to build the invidia driver Um, and despite Some of the issues that we do have with it. Sometimes I still think it's one of the most reliable I mean, you don't have to build them the kernel module at all. It just comes on the image Um, which is my question for timothy. Can we make it so uh, we can get KRs in the container file working so we don't have to do that as an extra step I brought this laundry list of stuff for you to do if you want to Oh, I was wondering if they're yeah, because ideally what you want to do is be able to like work up You know denialist novo and all that kind of stuff right now the user has to do that extra Step after they boot So, you know And that's all we're gonna do, you know, they're product eyes silver blue and in kina white Let let me get my notebook. So like I Visually stood out to to the container stuff. Uh, yeah, I just wanted to say like I'm I really love the universal blue project because It's fixing essentially the stuff that we cannot fix like we have to get a constraints in fedora They are what they are. We have to live with them and that's that what it is at the same time. We're also Trying to be upstream first Full open source and all of those and so sometimes this clashes with the fact that you have an NP track Yeah cards in your new machine. And so that's that's life But so we stick by our principles and at the same time the universal blue projects it just Let us fix all of this stuff that we cannot fix in fedora. So I really like uh, the this work here. It's it's awesome For the carogues, I don't know. I would have to look it up very mystery if that's possible It's lucky that that it's doable. It just needs to be Plumbed in into the to the code Yeah, and and your I want to point out that we wouldn't exist without your ci test repo because fedora itself does not publish oci images of all those desktops You yes doing it Do you want to tell that that quick little story because it's it's pretty cool Yeah, we started so Right now we're still in fedora. I'm building only the os3 ones and and so the classic os3 ones That's what you use if you install server booking right by default If you go to universal blue you're switching to the container net it once so to the oci ones Right now in fedora, we don't build the oci ones But it's it's coming. We're working on it for fedora 40. So hopefully we'll get there And so it will be fully built by fedora. So In the meantime because we kind of need to get things started I I made a project on on gitlab we get up ci to get those images started And this is what most of you blue uses to to get the the images. It's still fedora. It's still 99% fedora It's just built somewhere else nice I love to see it from a from like a higher level standpoint The fact that it seems well correct me if i'm wrong, but a lot of the work that's happening With the atomic spin specifically is enabling a project like you blue I just get to be excited to think that fedora can be more of a platform because there are a few other fedora basis Result there and of course look i'm the fedora marketing guy. I'm always going to say Maybe try fedora fresh, you know, I'll say that but To see that other other projects are considering, you know, they have a niche that they're wanting to fulfill And fedora is the base that they want to use for for whatever they want to do We see that with the boon too where where sometimes the change that they're going to make to a boon too Sometimes it's a little more under the hood but sometimes it's more related to the desktop environment or adding something else or for what have you there we go It's uh, it's just a slight difference that is it's not necessarily a neg on On a boon too and what it is originally but just hey, we like using it We want to do something else and heck if customization isn't at the heart of Linux I don't know what what is so uh, it's it's it's cool and exciting to see it develop and it's not just Even though we do have a lot of spins. It's not just fedora and our spins But now people are taking extra steps and going in different directions When we can it it is nice to see things fall under the fedora a project umbrella But and we do want to like like enable and support that type of thing But the the power of the open source community and the desires and interests Can can easily go way outside that so i'm excited and I also think it's really cool Just all the stuff that's happening on top of fedora. It's it's great Yeah, exactly like the the cool thing with you So blue is like it's it's really fedora inside of it It's it's not like you making a new distribution based on another one No, it's like you're using fedora. Then you sure you had a twix on top, etc But it's it's fedora inside of it and and so you're not Maintaining and then to a new distribution rebuilding all the packages. No, you don't do that You just you use fedora as the core and then you had just like your tiny custom layer of changes on top of it And it's just just much more maintainable And so you you can do all sorts of burners that you like a lot of people come to us In fedora land and say I want to make this special Use case burn for special labs something etc etc That's great for like fedora itself. We only so many people we cannot just Do all in all specific burns for everybody And this here like enables us to make like the cool thing And then you go out and you build your own special burns on your own You don't need to ask us anything and at the same time it's manageable It's it's sustainable instead of being a completely new distribution. That's just not sustainable That's a good verification things I want to add to that because people say you say it's not a distro But they think it's like marketing it totally is marketing, you know I've been around the block is you can throw away the you blew customization and rebase back to a stock fedora image like you can't That's not a distro That's something else and you could do it atomically now We're starting to find out that the stuff in dot files that programs are Conflicting over which those issues should be fixed anyway Irregardless of whether you're swapping out the system image or not, but I also think it Offers fedora a new opportunity and I brought numbers for you. We have over 2 million image polls. That's not a Indication of users, but we know that there's been at least 2 million successful upgrades. That's pretty cool over 50 percent of our images Are kde slash kina white? right Like and they have always dominated which is very interesting to me because it is We don't really say there's a default. It's like a grid and we just like list them out Right, so people I feel Neil's gonna be happy in the chat. Yeah, I'm just waiting for it Yeah, I know that there's there it is we use kde who love kina white We know that the steam deck device is basically you know a kde thing So I think there's a different opportunity here when you look at what's a distro. What isn't a distro Fedora has this unique position where you have something like kina white and you have a upstream Right, and then there's not this The lines are kind of blurred right you can kind of I would love to see kde and fedora kind of figure out this Because before there was like distro work and then there's like user work now. We're we're entirely that kind of uncharted territory And I think a distribution has to be the one to do that like kde and Fedora can make kina white and things around kina white including including bazae to To be a new it's it's a new kind of adaptation of the distro model and I think that is what That's what I really want to be talking about. I think With fedora because bazae we have it working on the steam deck Right, and that's because of the help of these patches that we get from nobara and then there's chimera os. There's a whole another adjacent Gamer community that are enabling Us to get and all these packages and stuff all the coppers are all available for all fedora users You can slap together Your own thing and I just think it's very cool that we can get the model allows us to Have a device where valve paid red hat to work on kernel stuff They do it properly so it goes upstream And then your community distro fedora and then a bunch of nerds like us put it together And can get a newer version of the kernel to that hardware device faster than valve can That's kind of cool You know and it feels like and every The rogue ally these new devices are coming out and fedora like we can now this model allows us to Slurp in all that stuff, but we still need the distributions to Gather all the patches those need to be upstream We we automate coppers so much that it's kind of becoming a bad habit that we have all these right like but you know like I feel like this is like where the the discussion about the distribution's role in all of this is Is crucial and I know i'm over talking but I feel like that was like an important thing that we wanted to say is like Fedora is the only one that you know like the only one that has this Um, you know, it feels like we've been on this expedition to figure out what's cool and things like that and I think the numbers show And you know, I think the numbers show that you could you could see When kde people talk about these systems like they're they really have bought into it and i'm Hell yeah Yeah, the more you're talking the more I understand how like wow We really are fixating on the fact that I can't touch system vials And there does seem to be a bigger conversation here about how we change what distributions are Like you're saying You know, we're not locked into you know, oh, you can't commit today you're wearing your distribution hat not your upstream hat like That's not how we You know, so I I think it is interesting and that's that's why I think the atomic concept as a name could help because it kind of Moves everyone past the thing right and then just we we you know fedora should actually you know, hey, let's Policies or I'm not I'm not saying you shouldn't follow policies But like, you know, there are certain things that don't make sense In in this kind in the atomic model that make total sense in workstation And it'd be great if the conversations were around that kind of adaptability And things and we should be bringing in cloud folks open shift folks kubernetes folks who have Now we have a place to contribute which is also great because i'm trying to align I'm trying to align those folks to get excited about the linux desktop because they're all mac people And that really frustrates me. That's the problem So two uh two quick questions First off, where can people go to get universal blue? So you can get a universal dash blue dot org and then I'll be rebranding slash relaunching bluefin for cube con with new artwork and He's gonna have a mission and all this kind of stuff. I've shown some fedora people getting Trying to get that marketing uh going on and then uh, we have a discord and then I joined There's a new sig actually timothy. We should talk about the sig so that we get people to show up Yeah, definitely, uh hijacking your questionnaire. Sorry Oh, you're fine We we're making we starting a new state So we're starting the atomic rebranding at the same time we starting the fedora atomic desktop sig And so sig it's it's a term that means special interest group Essentially is just a way to regroup us folks into the same room virtual room And have meetings from time to time to talk about things and make things happen And so the goal of this sig has to make fedora atomic desktops the default in fedora So we're looking at so first change of the sig is the renaming but then we're looking at doing things like fixing bootloader updates Moving to oci containers as a default fixing the way we have did some flatbacks across major versions, etc out of those things Looking potentially at removing faro fox from the base image, which is a very common request All right, and we're doing this like in the gathering passion We gather people from all the people all the other things all the other desktops and like Which is the cool thing here is that we're all working on the same base on the same tech And the desktop here is just a small part of it like with the you're using you don't kill you or whatever The whole stack it's still the same for everybody. And so we're fixing the bits in the stack here That's awesome. So, yeah, if you're interested go check out the the atomic desktop sig special interest group and then my second question was this is all open source and upstream so We're what what help is needed? Where can people go and start contributing? So Yeah, the cool thing is that so we call ourselves fedora to make we like we have like special names, etc But we're fedora. So like everything you do in fedora. It's already helping us So essentially all the we're packaging all the we're testing running fedora All the work you could do in all the things or only work you would do upstream We benefit from it. So and yeah, as we follow upstream usually closely We you get it very very quickly. So If you get involved in the federal projects, you're already getting involved if you want to get involved specifically into into atomic Desktop then yeah reaching out to the thing look joining our magic channels and looking at our issue tracker would be Good places to get started Awesome. So we are getting close to the top of the hour. So uh, joseph Why don't you kick us off with uh, we'll go around the horn here and get some closing thoughts and uh, and we'll wrap up for the day cool, so uh Yeah, to be honest my closing thought is uh, we need a part two because they did have a lot of other questions I could go on for hours. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just quick. I mean there are questions like, you know Uh, what how similar are The the atomic variants. I'm seeing I'm changing how similar are the atomic variants to Their traditional counterparts. How does it work behind the scenes? Questions on why are we letting chromebooks eat our lunch? Uh questions on the differences between Um, the other which I don't know. I mean, I guess it's on on the other dishes how they want to approach the term but you know nixos ar I know it's not micro os now, but opens users implementation how those things are different And the pros and cons of different use cases for it. So yeah, my I just would love to have a part two dive deeper and and uh Just keep on talking about it because I do think like everyone is saying I think there is a trend in within fedora that this is the direction for the distro in the long term And so that's it's baby steps right under like the weeks that we're talking about these things But when we can imagine how things can change In the future that's when we start doing something more exciting than just You know, maybe my lesson is Joseph there's more to be excited about than just that you can't mess up your system George you can still mess it up. We just may it's just a little hard. Okay. Oh, well, yeah We get the basic I'll avoid the terminal that Yeah, you can still blow away your root partition. Just reminder. I had someone do that. They like No George close it closing. Yeah, I'm gonna close up. But first my call for help Our biggest problem right now universal blue is our installer the OCI support in anaconda is like brand new And trying to get that to work is beyond most of our skills. So if you have skills around laurax especially and anaconda anaconda is like 24 years old. It can drink so You know, like we've been struggling with that We've been trying to get we we're finally getting in contact with the right people on the coro s teams to do that But if you have that expertise to help us out right now our installation experience is not very good Actually, when people give up, we just have them install Silver blue or kinawai and then rebase to one of our images But like we we want to make that nice and clean so people can switch Swip back and forth. And then the last thing I want to tell people is try it like, you know There's there's no golden rule of what the linux desktop is supposed to be so You know, um, 3% usage After 30 years, I'm ready to try something new, you know, so And and we know the model works. It's worked in cloud. It's worked in mobile You know, and it's just a pattern using the common tools is great. Sorry about the bug Thanks for listening All right, Timothy Yeah, as as George said try it I give it a try as it's uh, you you'll get hooked and uh And yeah, if it doesn't work, then try your blue first before giving up Like to start with fedora because like, you know Start with upstream, but if for whatever result was a book, you have a native jacquard or something Go ahead and and try your blue. You'll you'll see it. It's likely fixing The issues you you will have And yeah, I'm really glad to be You have been here on the show. It's it's great to success Awesome. Well, thank you both for joining us and joseph. Thanks for for hopping on and asking asking some questions Um, so as we wrap up today, uh, really really really big shout out to uh, everyone in the chat It's it's been scrolling by like crazy. So you've probably seen me off staring at the wall. It looks like get excited people Chat has been going nuts, uh at peak. I think we had 32 people watching live So that is awesome. Thank you all so so much for joining us and helping make the uh, the fedora podcast success Um, we are Usually live every other tuesday Um, so we've got a great list of topics coming up. We've got episodes planned from now through the end of the year and So I won't spoil all the topics, but uh, actually, I just saw a question go by about twitch We're currently live only on youtube, but there is a uh, there is a proposal floating around To start a fedora twitch channel. So if you'd be interested in that, please put that in the comments below Also, if you have any questions about today's topic or if you want to get involved, please Comment as well. There's a group of us that watch the comments almost daily Uh, so if you have any questions, we'll be sure to get those routed to either george or timothy Thank you all very much for showing up. Thank you for being a part of the fedora podcast part of the fedora community It is an amazing piece of technology or series of pieces of technologies, but Truth be told the the the real power of fedora is the community. So really appreciate each and every one of you That said Don't tell joseph because he works in fedora marketing and he'll kill me if I say this but I want to tell you anyway I can't say who I've been sworn to secrecy and I can't say what but watch the fedora youtube channel over the next 48 to Whatever three days is 72 hours Over the next few days. We're going to be scheduling a special event a special fedora podcast episode I can't say who I can't say what but I can say that there's going to be an extra episode next week Don't tell joseph. I was sworn to secrecy But And if you haven't please subscribe to the channel and hit that notification icon that way when we do have special episodes You will get notified and in fact, you'll get notified when we go About 30 minutes before we go live. Sometimes that notification reminds me that oh, yeah, I'm supposed to prep for a show but Awesome to have all of you in the audience george timothy. Thank you both for being our guest My co-host today was joseph and I am eric the it guy hindricks and until next week Have an awesome awesome time. Thank you all for being a part of the fedora podcast. We'll see you soon Thank you Thanks joseph. Nice day. Are you gonna tell us now? No