The BlueBuild project creates accessible tools for you to create, configure & build custom images of atomic Fedora distributions.
A custom image in this context is a customized version of an image-based Linux distribution that can be switched to by the user of such a distribution without reinstalling. So about making your own distro, maybe, but not really. When making custom images, you’re building on top of an existing distribution. You’re most likely using its package manager and repositories and just adding your own flair with package set changes and configuration files. It’s more like a more reliable version of maintaining/sharing your dotfiles, but from the perspective of the operating system.
Someone might get turned off from so-called ‘immutable’ Linux distributions due to fears of the taking away them ability to tinker and change the system as you please. The term comes from the usage of immutable root filesystems in these distributions, but in reality most ‘immutable’ Linux distributions are still pretty change-able. So while BlueBuild is a tool that helps you tinker with these sorts of distributions, it’s not giving you back some freedom that was taken away.
Here’s some terms that can be used to better describe these sorts of distributions:
Atomic: instead of new and updated packages being swapped on the running system live, they’re queued up to be used after the next boot.
Image-based: instead of each computer updating each of its system packages individually, the system updates are bundled (usually daily) as images that are pulled onto the user computers and queued up to be used after the next boot.
What’s up with the logo? It’s our mascot, a blue-billed duck with a wrench! A good pun, and cute too! The writer of this FAQ is definitely not at all biased!
The logo (along with all the other BlueBuild branding) was designed by @xynydev and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
This is just the Universal Blue template, but split out into it’s own thing, right?
I was messing around with my own Fedora Silverblue build based on the older template, but it was a lot more annoying messing with the build pipeline and having to rebase onto new commits and stuff than it was to just set up everything I wanted in Arch and call it a day.
Not really it’s own thing persay, more so just revised instructions for the new template and reworked CI.
If you’re rebasing on new commits then you set it up wrong. Consult the new instructions, there a lot more clear.
I’ve already scrapped the whole thing already anyway. It’s an interesting concept, but it just didn’t work for me. It makes sense if I was distributing a specific build to loads of machines, but for my own PC, its completely overkill.
I had to rebase at the time because they completely reworked the bling stuff and scrapped Yafti, so my previously working builds were failing from that point onward, and I just thought it better to return to Arch.