Recently switched to bluefin from workstation, I was initially a bit held back by all of the GNOME customisations, but they’re pretty straightforward to revert back to default. While I like the idea of automatic updates it would be nice if it integrated with GNOME software to make it easier to control. Otherwise if you’re looking for an immutable/atomic desktop and want it to pretty much work out of the box I would highly recommend
Have you tried Silverblue? If Bluefin’s Gnome customisation isn’t for you I expect Silverblue would be much closer to Workstation
Yeah I use silverblue on another computer and previously on this one, but the killer feature of bluefin is that NVIDIA drivers and codecs are built right into the image (as with the other ublue images) meaning that you don’t need to layer them and risk a bad upgrade. I’m planning on bringing the other computer over as well even though it’s AMD, at least I’ll get ROCm and the codecs.
Use the universal blue silverblue-nvidia image to get silverblue with Nvidia built in
You can turn off all the extentions etc and make it a default Gnome desktop, but the documentation could be a better, since it’s all on the forums.
Oh, it’s actually in the announcement post https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/introduction-to-bluefin/41
Their instructions aren’t quite right, I did find that I had to change the icon theme back to adwaita myself using GNOME tweaks.
Tried Aurora in a VM, and while it ran like shit (probably a VM issue, not Aurora’s), I was shocked that it reported updates, and by the next boot, it had already updated everything.
I run Bazzite on a laptop, so they’re similar, but Aurora really felt clean, polished, and ready for general use.
The automatic updates are really good it would be better if they integrated with GNOME software, but it is still a distro I would recommend to people who want something that “just works”. Atomic really is the future of linux
Bluefin is essentially Aurora with Gnome, and Bazzite has a Gnome version, so if that’s more your cup of tea, it’s out there!
