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Introductory Guide

Aurora​

A familiar KDE desktop for people who love Fedora Kinoite. Aurora is a maintenance-free, reliable and fast operating system for everyone, stable like a Chromebook. It combines the power of Fedora and the beauty of a KDE desktop in a single, reliable and sleek package.

Aurora

  • Developers, check out Aurora-DX for developer focused images!

"The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise." - Maya Angelou

Features​

This image heavily utilizes cloud-native concepts.

System updates are image-based and automatic. Applications are logically separated from the system by using Flatpaks for graphical applications and brew for command line applications. Workloads for development are containerized.

For Users​

  • Ptyxis terminal for container-focused workflows
  • Tailscale - included for VPN along with wireguard-tools
  • KDE Discover with Flathub:
    • Use a familiar software center UI to install graphical software
    • Warehouse included for flatpak management
  • Quality of Life Features
    • Starship terminal prompt enabled by default
    • Docker & Podman Developer Edition Images contain both Docker and Podman runtimes to support your containerized needs.
    • Input Leap built in
    • Solaar - included for Logitech mouse management along with libratbagd
    • rclone and restic included
    • zsh and fish included (optional)
  • Built on top of the the Universal Blue main image
    • Extra udev rules for game controllers and other devices included out of the box
    • All multimedia codecs included
    • 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

Applications​

  • Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, DejaDup, FontDownloader, Flatseal, and the Haruna Media Player.
  • Core KDE Applications installed:
    • Kcalc, kalendar, Okular, Dolphin File Manger, Kate, kWeather, Filelight, and KDE Partition Manager.

How is this different from Fedora Kinoite?​

Other than the visual differences, and codecs, there are some other key differences between Bluefin and Fedora Kinoite from a usage perspective:

  • Aurora takes a greenfield approach to Linux applications by defaulting to Flathub and brew by default
  • Aurora doesn't recommend using Toolbx - it instead focuses on devcontainers for declarative containerized development. You can use Podman or Docker to run and bootstrap your containers.
  • Aurora tries to remove the need for the user to use rpm-ostree or bootc directly
  • Aurora focuses on automation of OS services and upgrades instead of user interaction. Upgrades are automatic and silent, so you never have to think about it again.

Starship is not for me, how do I disable it?​

You can remove or comment the line below in /etc/bashrc to restore the default prompt.

eval "$(starship init bash)"