Dreaming of Project Bluefin (Fedora Silverblue) on Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Gen 1

Project Bluefin Angry Dino Polaroid

Honestly, immediately from the first day of installing and using Project Bluefin on my Khadas Mind —my daily driver— I'm dreaming of having the same Linux experience as well as Developer Experience (DX) on my Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Gen 1 ARM64 laptop.

What's Bluefin? Great you asked!

Bluefin is a custom image of Fedora Silverblue. The best of both worlds: the reliability and ease of use of a Chromebook, with the power of a GNOME desktop.

Bluefin is built with Universal Blue, a community toolkit designed to reboot the Linux desktop. Built for the love of the game. Welcome to indie Cloud Native.

src: projectbluefin.io

Bluefin Developer Experience (bluefin-dx) is a dedicated developer image with bundled tools. Unlike traditional Linux systems, the operating system and developer environment are explicitly and purposely separated.
src: universal-blue.discourse.group

Today my hopes where massively fueled, when listening and watching Jorge Castro taking about Project Bluefin, and the benefits that come from running containerized Linux on desktops —incl. Arm— on the Arm Developers Program's YouTube channel.

Good times ahead 🤘

I'm currently trying to figure out the best way to help get the armrest working for Bluefin. At least and in any case I'm ready for alpha/beta testing... 💪

UPDATE 2024-02-10

Decided to take matters in my own hands by evaluating building ublue-os/main and ublue-os/bluefin for arm64 (aarch64)—ultimately targeting the x13s for now.

Hope this will lead to something worth sharing w/ the community… 🤞

So far I forked the repos…

…and monkey-patched the build gh action build-ublue in branch aarch64-x13s.

As a gh action runner w/ support for arm I'm using BuildJet.

Though, I'm currently learning experiencing —the.hard.way.— that the image buildjet-4vcpu-ubuntu-2204-arm is indeed not on par w/ the "standard" ubuntu-22.04, as clearly stated by BuildJet:

ARM Support and Package Compatibility
While GitHub Actions does not support ARM, BuildJet strives to include as many packages as possible. However, achieving full compatibility on the scale of the Ubuntu 22.04 is challenging. We are actively working to improve the ARM image, but for the time being, we recommend manually installing specific dependencies as needed.

But I must say, so far I really like the streamlined —and for now still free—experience of using BuildJet! 👍

One has to start somewhere, right? 🤘

Resources

TO BE CONTINUED…