Recently, I got to sit down with Jorge Castro, one of the project leads of Universal Blue, its Linux spins Bazzite, Bluefin and Aurora, and its mission to make Linux easier to use for everyone.
Learn More About Universal Blue
Follow Jorge
Jorge has previously worked with Canonical and VMware. Today, he works with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) managing developer/executive relationships and stewarding projects like Kubernetes and deploying servers at scale.
Referenced
- My original question post to Universal Blue’s tinkerer’s guide. Also available via the original GitHub discussion
- Fedora 41’s Release Announcement by Matthew Miller
- Kyle Gospodnetich is the creator of Bazzite and a maintainer of Microsoft’s Linux projects.
- The CNCF’s webpage listing all active members.
- The vague ostree/rpm-ostree documentation page that debunks the inaccurate claims of customization of immutable/cloud native images.
- Gardiner, as in the YouTuber Gardiner Bryant.
- Digital Foundry’s video on Bazzite
- Jorge was stuck in the back of a British bus with Richard Brown, former chairman of openSUSE’s Board and the lead behind openSUSE Aeon (formerly MicroOS).
- Proton Mail Bridge has shipped stale QT libraries for a long time.
- Proton VPN’s plans on taking over the Proton VPN Flatpak (Onion Link)
- Proton VPN has less than 4 people working on their Linux app (Onion Link).
- How snaps are sandboxed and its permission variants. Richard Brown has previously mentioned that snap sandboxing is broken on openSUSE because AppArmor still has not patched Canonical’s customizations (see this video at 7:29). One of the other distros that supports proper snap sandboxing is Arch Linux.
- Popey refers to Alan Pope, the original advocate for snaps.
- Inkscape’s heated discussion to convince upstream to takeover the Flatpak
- Jorge’s discussion on the Universal Blue Discourse about the struggle of convincing Chromium to adopt sandboxing more friendly to Flatpaks
- Add Water, a GUI installer and maintainance program for Rafael Mardojai’s Firefox GNOME Theme
- The Arkenfox user.js and its lead Thorin Oakenpants. One of Oakenpants’ many discussions about the effectiveness of Firefox Containers and Total Cookie Protection.
- Christian Hergert is a maintainer for GNOME Builder and the author of the terminal Ptyxis (called Terminal on Universal Blue). Ptyxis recently became the default terminal of Fedora Workstation.
- Marco Ceppi is one of Canonical’s engineers.
- Ken VanDine is an engineering manager at Canonical for Ubuntu Desktop and the creator of Ubuntu Core Desktop. If there’s a desktop snap package, he probably maintains it.
- Adrian Vovk’s blog post about GNOME OS. Adrian has been part of GNOME’s team for years and the creator of carbonOS.
- szydell’s import of System76’s drivers to Fedora’s Copr.
- Alpaca, a GTK frontend for the ollama, which itself is an interface for llama.cpp.
- Apple’s mediocre sales of iPhones prior to announcing Apple Intelligence.
- The Windows package managers Winget and Chocolatey
- Rufus and its ability to bypass Windows To-Go and Windows 11 requirements.
- Cassidy James Blaede is a partner manager at the Endless OS Foundation. He was previously a UX designer at System76 and a co-founder of elementary OS.
- Timothée Ravier is one of Red Hat’s engineers and a big contributor to KDE, Fedora Atomic Desktops, Fedora CoreOS, and Flatpaks.
- Jorge mentioned Matt from the Linux Cast’s (YouTube and Odysee) video about organizing his dotfiles (YouTube and Odysee) and his upcoming review of Bluefin (YouTube and Odysee)
Errata
- Ultramarine does not have any image based ISOs.
- I misspoke and said the .io domain belonged to Mauritania. It actually belongs to Mauritius.
Track Listing
- Intro: Khaim - Maybe
- Outro: Khaim - Neon Lamp
Bonus Content:
Patrons and YouTube Members get access to the preshow/setup and Jorge showing off his decades of Linux and cloud computing merch.