This image is being deprecated after F37, if you're using it images will continue to be made but not receive feature updates

Check out Bluefin, that replaces this image and it's much better, see you there!

Ubuntu

A familiar(ish) Ubuntu desktop for Fedora Silverblue. Currently you'll need to have Fedora Silverblue installed to rebase to this image (see below). We will provide ISOs as soon as the custom image feature lands in the Fedora installer.

This is an interpretation of "What if we could rebuild Ubuntu from the ground up built on cloud-native technology?" The goal is to provide an Ubuntu experience using the most amount of automation possible. The endstate is a system as reliable as a Chromebook with near-zero maintainance, but with the power of Ubuntu and Fedora fused together.

"Let's see what's out there." - Jean-Luc Picard

Usage

Warning This is an experimental feature and should not be used in production, try it in a VM for a while! If you are rebasing and not doing a clean install do a touch ~/.config/ublue/firstboot-done to keep your flatpak configuration untouched, otherwise we're going to mangle it (for science).

1. Download and install Fedora Silverblue

2. After you reboot you should pin the working deployment so you can safely rollback.

3. Open a terminal and rebase the OS to this image:

   sudo rpm-ostree rebase ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/ubuntu:latest

4. Reboot the system and you're done!

5. To revert back:

   sudo rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/37/x86_64/silverblue

Check the Silverblue documentation for instructions on how to use rpm-ostree. We build date tags as well, so if you want to rebase to a particular day's release:

sudo rpm-ostree rebase ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/ubuntu:20221217 

The latest tag will automatically point to the latest build.

Features

This image heavily utilizes cloud-native concepts.

System updates are image-based and automatic. Applications are logically seperated from the system by using Flatpaks, and the CLI experience is contained within OCI containers:

• Ubuntu-like GNOME layout
  • Includes the following GNOME Extensions
  • Dash to Dock - for a more Unity-like dock
  • Appindicator - for tray-like icons in the top right corner
  • GSConnect - Integrate your mobile device with your desktop
  • GNOME Variable Refresh Rate patches included via the GNOME VRR COPR
  • Blur my Shell - for dat bling
• GNOME Software with Flathub
  • Use a familiar software center UI to install graphical software
• Built-in Ubuntu user space
  • Official Ubuntu LTS cloud image
    • Ctrl-Alt-u - will launch an Ubuntu image inside a terminal via Distrobox, your home directory will be transparently mounted
    • A BlackBox terminal is used just for this configuration
    • Use this container for your typical CLI needs or to install software that is not available via Flatpak or Fedora
    • Refer to the Distrobox documentation for more information on using and configuring custom images
  • GNOME Terminal
    • Ctrl-Alt-t - will launch a host-level GNOME Terminal if you need to do host-level things in Fedora (you shouldn't need to do much).
• Cloud Native Tools
  • kind - Run a Kubernetes cluster on your machine. Do a kind create cluster on the host to get started!
  • kubectl - Administer Kubernetes Clusters
  • Podman-Docker - Automatically aliases the docker command to podman
  • virt-manager - for virtual machine management
• Quality of Life Improvements
  • webapp-manager for Progressive Web App (PWA) management
    • Uses the included Firefox, no other browser download needed
    • Thanks to Linux Mint for a great tool!
  • systemd shutdown timers adjusted to 15 seconds
  • udev rules for game controllers included out of the box
  • Tailscale for VPN
  • Just task runner for post-install automation tasks
  • input-remapper for remapping input devices
• Built on top of the the uBlue main image
  • System designed for automatic staging of updates
  • If you've never used an image-based Linux before just use your computer normally
  • Don't overthink it, just shut your computer off when you're not using it

Future Features

These are currently unimplemented ideas that we plan on adding:

• Provide a :lts tag derived from CentOS Stream for a more enterprise-like cadence
• Firecracker - help wanted with this!
• Inclusion of more Ubuntu artwork

Applications

• Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Extension Manager, Libreoffice, DejaDup, FontDownloader, Flatseal, and the Celluloid Media Player
• Core GNOME Applications installed from Flathub
  • GNOME Calculator, Calendar, Characters, Connections, Contacts, Evince, Firmware, Logs, Maps, NautilusPreviewer, TextEditor, Weather, baobab, clocks, eog, and font-viewer
• All applications installed per user instead of system wide, similar to openSUSE MicroOS. Thanks for the inspiration Team Green!

Verification

These images are signed with sisgstore's cosign. You can verify the signature by downloading the cosign.pub key from this repo and running the following command:

cosign verify --key cosign.pub ghcr.io/ublue-os/ubuntu

Frequently Asked Questions

What about codecs?

It's unlikely you'll need extra codecs, Flathub provides everything you need. You might need to force enable hardware acceleration in Firefox directly.

How do I get my GNOME back to normal Fedora defaults?

We set the default dconf keys in /etc/dconf/db/local, removing those keys and updating the database will take you back to the fedora default:

sudo rm -f /etc/dconf/db/local
sudo dconf update

If you prefer a vanilla GNOME installation check out silverblue-main or silverblue-nvidia for a more upstream experience.

Should I trust you?

This is all hosted, built, and pushed on GitHub. As far as if I'm a trustable fellow, here's my bio. If you've made it this far then hopefully you've come to the conclusion on how easy it would be to build all of this on your own trusted machinery. :smile: