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Comment by evolve2k | Hacker News Reader

What’s the motivation for the creators of this? And who’s backing it? Doesn’t feel like a weekend hobby project but rather a strategic open source play of some sort.

Maybe something Nvidia related?

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Hi, I'm the original creator of this project. I'm happy to say the motivation is purely organic, we've no backing and have never received donations of any kind, project is totally out of pocket.

Originally I wanted something akin to SteamOS that allowed packages to be installed and maintained through updates, and knew Fedora could offer that after using Silverblue for about a year, and it just kept evolving and growing from there.

We just launched HDR in testing, and are working on custom kernel signing so we can move that to stable without breaking secure boot support.

If you want to support us for the time being, all I can ask is that you give it a try and report any bugs you may find to us. The more users the better!

Hi, it's probably not your focus, but since you have Nvidia specific flavors, it would be great if browsers had hardware video decoding working. Either Firefox or chromium/brave. I did a fair bit of distrohopping and yet to find a distro doing that easily for nvidia native drivers.

This should be working on AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. At most you may need to make minor configuration changes which we document in our wiki.

That was my hope but it doesn't work on bazzite-gnome-nvidia. I believe I tried bazzite-nvidia as well but it's been a while. Mind pointing me to a relevant doc? - it's not googleable.

https://universal-blue.org/images/nvidia/#video-playback

When you say "we" do you mean other members of the Fedora community? Do any of you work at RedHat? Just wondering how you got a complex project like this up and running.

"We" is myself and two others that call ourselves maintainers, and the group at Universal Blue who brought us into their circle and shared knowledge. My personal repo at https://GitHub.com/KyleGospo/Bazzite is a time capsule of the project at it's beginning when it was only me.

Universal blue has a ton of different people contributing to it, but there's no corporate backing there either.

Thanks for the info. Looks really interesting.

That explains why the name seems so off brand for Universal Blue.

Do you know of NixOS and jovian NixOS? Did you consider either of those?

I may compare them in detail in the future, any thoughts on how they compare?

Similar premise, but not as technically reproducible. You can create and manage your own custom images using the blue-os build systems, it's dead simple. Basically you're just writing a Dockerfile. Most of the filesystem is read-only like NixOS, but it acts like a traditional Linux system with FHS support.

It's that last part that made me switch to it from NixOS. I was tired of random things not working because of Nix's opinions on how things should work. I run Bluefin Linux with Fleek and get all the benefits I liked about Nix with none of the nonsense.

Thanks for the detailed response. I'll have to take a look.

I'm not well versed in NixOS, but the team over at Jovian are all very helpful and are running a great project.

No problem, thanks for the response! You have a very impressive project as well. Even if I don't switch there is a ton of generally useful things to learn from.

It’s a variant of Universal Blue (https://universal-blue.org)

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