A desktop background from Project Bluefin showing a blue feathered dinosaur atop a mountain peak with the full moon in the background

I’m getting grumpier as I get older, so I wanted to post a very positive computing experience today.

I’ve been a full time Windows user for a few years now, ever since Ubuntu MATE tried to murder my beloved Thinkpad X230 (this may be a story for another post). Windows actually suits my needs very well as, these days, I’m more of a consumer than a producer of computery things. The software compatibility is peerless, games run well, Office 365 dumps all over Libreoffice and Onedrive is the cheapest cloud storage money can buy. My server machines stayed on Debian and Ubuntu, but the Linux Desktop was gone.

I never intended to abandon Windows, but Windows has abandoned me. Support is closing for Windows 10, and Microsoft have decided that they are not going to allow me to install Windows 11 on my X230. That’s a real shame as it is a genuinely lovely device (I’m typing on it right now) and it is perfectly capable of running modern operating systems, websites and other software.

My plan had been to switch to ChromeOS as it is a fully supported device. I quite like ChromeOS as a “consumer” operating system even if I have my reservations about Google. Again, though, the support period is about to expire so it is not a good option.

This drove me back into the world of Desktop Linux. I’ll admit: it was a last resort; from afar, I haven’t enjoyed the direction the Linux Desktop has taken. I don’t want to elaborate too much, but I think there have been dubious design decisions made by strong personalities and engineering problems which have surpassed the talent.

Argh, I’m getting grumpy again. I’ll shut up about problems.

…in a minute…

So I installed Ubuntu 25.04. I installed Ubuntu because I had known it (and often loved it) since the days of Warty Warthog and I installed 25.04 because it was freshly minted. Actually, I installed the 25.04 Nightly which was out a few days before the final release, so I accept that I wasn’t giving it a fair crack of the whip. But I knew immediately I wasn’t going to be able to live with it. Within the space of 2 hours, the installer broke, the desktop crashed, the graphical package manager broke and sent me to a non-existent equivalent, apt broke (albeit it looked lovely - nice work with that!) and my Snap packages decided to download at 12kb/sec over my fibre broadband connection. I could have cried with frustration: how, Canonical, could you have sunk so low?

I asked my computer chums for suggestions of an alternative, and my very lovely friend Alan Pope suggested I try Project Bluefin. I had been aware of it as I’d heard - the clearly passionate - Jorge Castro evangelise for it on a couple of podcasts. Indeed, I’d tried installing it on a VM a few months ago, but the installer didn’t work.

Jorge’s pitch was that Bluefin would give a Chromebook-like experience for the Linux desktop. The base system would be immutable (I think he argues it is composable, but I’d contest it isn’t composable for ordinary mortals) and the user-space tools would be layered on top. The base system would update, transparently, in the background and new versions could be available on every reboot. There would be no need to wrangle with package managers - for the “plumbing”, at least - and the desktop experience would be curated by Jorge and the team. Sounds intriguing!

In practice, what is delivered is a mildly customised GNOME desktop atop a Fedora base. A lot of the issues I was having from Ubuntu 25.04 were coming from GNOME, and many of them were echoed here. There has been some polish, and it does help, but the rough edges mean I couldn’t wholeheartedly recommend this as a Windows or ChromeOS alternative. Nevertheless, unlike my Ubuntu experience, the good clearly outweighs the bad.

You see, for me, as the user, having Fedora at the base of things has become a mere implementation detail. I have no direct interaction with it - all of that is taken care of by the Bluefin team. They could swap out Fedora for Arch or Debian or BSD and I would probably never know. I never have to sniff an RPM. My graphical applications come from Flathub. Installing command line applications “directly” is a wee bit frowned upon, but it is achieved using Brew. They’ve set it up nicely so it feels native but it isn’t tied to the base layer.

I don’t think Jorge really wants me to install Brew packages though. His pitch - as far as I can understand it - is to install most command-line apps in containers. There’s a nice graphical app where I can set up a cheeky little Ubuntu container, install stuff via apt, and have it run transparently on my filesystem. It feels like the old days when I used to debootstrap versions of Ubuntu and Debian on top of each other and do all the plumbing, manually, in a chroot. Bluefin’s implementation does this automatically, and it feels a bit like magic.

These abstraction layers mean that I’d have to work hard to break the base system. I’m protected from stupidity and conflicts. It feels great. It feels like I can experiment and not worry too much about consequences.

It feels like Linux as it used to be.