What does "cloud-native" mean in this context, if anything? When I hear the term, I think of things like CoreOS, whereas this looks rather desktop-focused.
It's worth noting that the submitter didn't use the actual title, and TFA doesn't characterize Bluefin as a "cloud-native Linux", but a distribution made by "cloud-native nerds" that integrates tools generally associated with cloud development (kind, flux, helm, kubectl).
Most here seem to understand it pretty wrong. I think it's basically about the OS being built in the cloud every day, with your computer just ingesting the diffs. This is opposed to traditional distributions, where after the initial installation packages installed are all pulled & updated individually on your host system.
I read this article and ended up with the exact same question. Does it mean that it wants to imitate Chromebooks, where the most important app you use is the browser, and all of your apps are in the cloud rather than on the desktop?
No, the OS itself is a read-only container image booted on bare metal (via OSTree) and includes the tools usually used to build container images (used for kubernetes etc), as well as pushing desktop applications via Flatpak.
Cloud-native just means container-first in this context. Nothing is locally installed and the desktop gui itself runs as a container.
I guess it makes you feel better as a user to be part of the hyper converged buzzword bingo. But seriously it seems to be both web and container (web) focussed. They should maybe rather say what they are not and what the limitations of their approach is ( I guess isolation comes at some costs)