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Stargazer 5 - Year in review

· 14 min read
Juha Uotila
Juha Uotila
Lord of the Coneheads
Niklas Haiden
Niklas Haiden
Creator and co-maintainer of Aurora

Hello Stargazers, today we look back at the year 2025 for Aurora and also check in to year 2026. This article will contain most of the same material as the Bluefin Year End Wrapup with some Aurora-specific updates added.

This article is going to be on the longer side, so grab your favorite drink and let's get on with it!

History of Aurora​

A small history lesson for those who are new to Aurora.

Aurora as part of Bluefin​

Going back to the year 2024 and the month of April, Aurora got officially accepted as part of the Universal Blue Project. Legend M2 reworked the Bluefin repository to accommodate both Bluefin and Aurora and build them from the same code. Both products being built out of the same repository made sense at the time since they shared lots of similarities in configuration, preinstalled applications and other stuff.

This is where the visual identity, vision and idea for idea started to form. Over the course of the next few months, we spent time building out the identity for Aurora, including launching the first iteration of the website where you could discover and download the OS.

The split​

Fast forward to December 2024 and this is the time where the "split" happened. Jorge cloned the Bluefin repository and spun it off into its own repository. Maintaining both Aurora and Bluefin in the same repository was not really feasible anymore since the two were diverging and the effort to make sure one didn't break when something changed was getting out of hand. So Aurora got its own repository. This was also around the time when people from the community, notably inffy, ledif and renner started "showing up" and contributing to both Aurora and Universal-Blue. All 3 of them quickly became super awesome people to work with on maintaining Aurora and other parts of Universal Blue. I want to give a special shoutout to all 3 of them because without them, Aurora would not be maintainable and in its healthy, flourishing and best form it's ever been. Thank you so much.

Chandeleer joining​

In early 2025 we found our Art Director and Artist Chandeleer. Launching with his first wallpaper in May 2025, he went on to create a whole universe of characters and accompanying art for Aurora, the Coneheads. Out of basically nothing, he has been rocking the wallpaper game ever since and we can't be more grateful for having such a talented artist like him. Chandeleer has been rocking it with his wallpapers since May and you can find them all shipped on your Aurora installation, free to choose, with a new one every month. On a side note, you can check out all of the characters and wallpapers in our new Art Gallery over on our website.

Please support Chandeleer on his Ko-Fi Page so he can make even more art.

In the summer of 2025, Aurora got a small but vital and important brand refresh by two awesome artists from the community, Delphic Melody and zandrro. They took the old logo which was AI generated (crucify me, but sadly I'm not an artist) and turned it into a human-made and the most awesome version ever. Also a huge thank you to both of them for their contributions.

Aurora gets its own mascot, Scope​

As part of the art that was created by Chandeleer, Aurora got its own identity and mascot, Scope. Representing a telescope in a living form (always working with the stargazer theme!), he is probably one of the cutest and best one's I've seen yet. He has since appeared in every wallpaper since the first one.

2025 in General​

For 2025, most of our work has been on the "backend" doing lots of refactoring and cleanup on the images. We considered Aurora mostly "feature complete" and didn't ship too many user-facing changes.

Architecture Overview​

As mentioned, we are currently refactoring how our images are made. We have been working with our Bluefin friends to streamline our builds. At some point, we noticed that we are mostly 1:1 in features, so why spend time duplicating every feature in both codebases.

Aurora and Bluefin are combinations of a set of configuration OCI containers which are then shipped on different images. Originally, the Aurora repository had everything we needed and was a result of organic growth.

We want to share as much of the general code with Bluefin and Bazzite as possible. We share many things and we wanted a cleaner way to do this. So the new architecture looks like this:

OCI Containers​

We refactored a large amount of our packaging to ship as OCI containers instead of rpms. This moves us away from classic distribution packaging and towards a more cloud native approach.

  • get-aurora-dev/common - Aurora specific things live here
  • projectbluefin/common - Most of the opinions on distro experience is here
    • ujust, MOTD, service units, CLI configuration, application choices, etc. Most things that have to do with the workload should live in this repo
    • We share this with Bluefin, so we can have the shared things in one central repo
  • ublue-os/artwork - Art assets repository, shared with Aurora and Bazzite
  • ublue-os/brew and associated ublue-os/homebrew-tap
    • these provide Homebrew itself and our selection of custom brew packages. Thanks to those of you who have been helping homebrew be better on Linux, it's amazing!

These containers have the advantage of making consumption by other bootc projects trivial and are (mostly) distribution agnostic. Custom images now have a granular option to pick and choose the components they want to ship instead of dealing with one monolithic experience. The common repository is structured to be extensible; check out our Containerfile to get a flavor of how things are shipped. This allows the team to keep configuration centralized while providing customization points for downstream projects.

A Streamlined, Maintainable Set of Images​

Decoupling the images this way allows us a more streamlined development experience. It has already enabled us to delete a bunch of duplicated code and makes maintenance easier for the team, while allowing a simpler path for people to contribute and reconcile parity issues between the images. Maintaining Aurora happens in the common OCI layers and not as much in the image repositories.

This also gave us the opportunity to clean up a bunch of old justfiles and scripts that have not been looked at for years. We have been taking a less-is-more approach by shipping less customizations as ujust recipes.

Thanks for your patience with this transition. It did take longer than expected but we took our time because we're focusing on long-term maintenance.

Discord Server​

As Aurora and our sister projects Bluefin and Bazzite have grown, we have seen a huge uptick of users in our combined Universal Blue Discord server and things started to feel a little crowded. After discussing with our Bazzite friends, we decided a reorganization was in order and we now we have our own Aurora Discord Server. The original server has been rebranded as the Bazzite server, but all of the Universal Blue development channels will still remain the place for collaboration across all of the Universal Blue projects.

So if you are interested chatting about Linux and specifically Aurora stuff, please join us @ https://discord.getaurora.dev

Looking Forward In 2026​

Release Channels​

Our images will still be based on Fedora, but we are looking into a CoreOS-inspired workflow for "releases". For what this could look like, check out Bluefin's post for an in depth discussion. Our current thinking is that the :stable stream would stay as it is, but we will add a :testing and :next stream, similar to CoreOS.

Changes and Rationale​

At first this looks like a rename, so let's go over the changes:

  • aurora:next - all changes will land here first. We make no stability guarantees. It will build daily. This will not replace aurora:latest because we will for sure break things in here. This will build at least daily and every time a change lands
  • aurora:testing - When changes in :next have been tested by at least one person they queue up to land in testing. We anticipate things to sit in here for a week or two at a minimum unless we need to fix a regression. This builds daily.
  • aurora:stable - This is effectively the current version of Fedora, except all changes going into this will have at least be vetted by the previous branches.

We do NOT have this promotion process today. This is the goal. If you are on aurora:latest we will point you to aurora:stable-daily so that you are still getting daily builds. We purposely are not moving you to next because that will be volatile. Both the next and testing branches will be opt in.

So that is the plan. But we don't currently have any set date when (and if) this would be happening. Unfortunately we are a small team and we cannot commit to specific dates at the moment. Currently, we are targeting around the F44 release cycle or after.

What about the LTS?​

Do you remember the Aurora LTS version from way back? Well unfortunately that never happened because of technical hurdles. And once again, our resources were very limited and the current team at that time didn't have the time or "need" to actually create and maintain LTS version of Aurora.

Recently, friend of the project James has been tinkering with the idea and has a working version of Aurora LTS based on CentOS, just like Bluefin LTS. We won't make any promises how this will pan out in the end, but hopefully we can at some point release it to live next to the current Fedora based images.

Bazaar Takes Over With F44​

With Fedora 44 coming up in Spring 2026 there will be a change regarding our application stores. We have allowed the use of Discover as a replacement but starting with F44, it is time to let it go and make Bazaar the only Flatpak store on Aurora.

Bazaar has seen great amount of development and we have a great relationship with the development team. Now that Aurora is using the Flatpak version of Bazaar (which is the only official version), we will get improvements and bugfixes immediately after they are released on Flathub instead of manually needing to sync and maintain our own rpm versions.

Developer Experience​

In 2026 we will be also looking into incorporating aurora-dx features without the need for a separate image and give you more flexibility moving forward:

  • Our plan is to add containerd to the image, which will also bring in Docker so everything works out of the box, there will not be a need to do the adduser mumbo jumbo; we'll take care of that for you.
  • How we'll accomplish this transition is still a bit up in the air, so consider this one a slow burn.

Curated Experiences​

We are putting in effort to have less stuff baked into the images and instead provide curated experiences through Bazaar for Flatpaks and Bold Brew for command-line apps. Shout out to Vito Castellano for continuing to improve the Linux brew experience with Bold Brew!

image

The first category of curated experiences is our ide offerings, which provides a selection of VSCode, Codium, and Jetbrains toolbox for graphical IDEs, as well as nvim, helix, and micro for you CLI nerds.

The experimental-ide selection includes the individual JetBrains products if you prefer to install those one-by-one, as well as Antigravity and Cursor. These will be promoted to the production tap as we get more feedback. We've also started to add [Swift tools] into the list so that we can tap into this exciting open source community!

Thanks to the new Flatpak support in Brewfiles we can ship all sorts of combinations now!

And finally, thanks to our custom tap we are investigating on how to bring aurora-cli to MacOS, so that you can have these same convenience tools on multiple operating systems. James has a prototype that you can check out.

AI/Machine Learning Tools​

Our AI Toolset continues to expand. I'd like to highlight goose as a tool that I have been really digging into lately. Its donation to the Agentic AI Foundation makes this a great choice for your local LLM/CLI needs.

We've also added Codex, Copilot CLI, Gemini, LM Studio, Mistral Vibe and Qwen Code to the list. Please continue to send us feedback on the tools you use.

Thanks Docker!

You'll find the new Docker model plugin included too. Huge shoutout to the folks at Docker for working with us!

Other Goodies​

And here's the stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else in this report!

  • Powerwash is here! - ujust powerwash is now in alpha and ready for testing - use this command if you want to blow away the data on your PC for donation. This wraps the bootc install reset --experimental command for convenience behind some confirmation dialogs. Be careful with this one! Check the bootc documentation for more info

Metrics​

On to the numbers! First off let's look at our critical upstreams. This level of growth confirms our decision to trust in systems that prioritize application developers.

Aurora metrics can be found from LFX Insights which we started using this year. Here is our contributor metrics and some charts. We have also crossed the 2k weekly users milestone.

aurora

contributors issues commits

Also don't forget to check out Bluefin and Bazzite too!

Development Roadmap(ish)​

Here's some important dates (these are preliminary)

  • January 2026 - Transition to the common OCI containers is complete
  • April 2026 - Upgraded to Fedora 44 base
  • Spring 2026 - Aurora LTS (tentatively, no promises!)

See you in 2026​

This ended up longer than anticipated, thank you for joining us in 2025, and we look forward to working with you in 2026! And lastly if you've made it this far and still want more backstory, make sure you check out this interview with Michael Tunnell: