Stargazer 6 - Beta time
Hello Stargazers!
The 6 month release cycle for Fedora is once again near us and Fedora has released Fedora 44 Beta.
Aurora is also starting its beta cycle and today our beta stream is once again active. Images for Nvidia are not yet available, as there are still things that need to be fixed on Nvidia's side related to the nvidia-container-toolkit. We will make an edit to this post and in GitHub discussions when they are available.
Testing the beta
You can easily participate in the testing effort by rebasing to the beta image. First we recommend that you pin your current Aurora deployment so in case anything goes wrong you still have a working system you can select in the bootloader.
sudo ostree admin pin 0
After that you are free to rebase to the beta image, for example:
sudo bootc switch --enforce-container-sigpolicy ghcr.io/ublue-os/aurora:beta
If you want the dx version, just replace aurora:beta with aurora-dx:beta
NOTE: Docker is not yet available in DX images.
Changes coming with Fedora 44 images
There are few changes that we are implementing with Fedora 44 based images.
Konsole becomes the default
We will (finally) switch our default terminal from Ptyxis to Konsole. Many have previously questioned why we have used a GTK based terminal app as our default, and the main reason has been the distrobox/container integration of Ptyxis. Konsole will get support for distroboxes in the upcoming KDE Gear 26.04 Release; this container support is therefore not yet available. If you still want to keep using Ptyxis, you can install it from Bazaar.
Distroshelf switched to Kontainer
Distroshelf will be switched to Kontainer for new installs.
Discover finally removed
Bazaar will be the only software store with no ifs, ands, or buts. We will be removing Discover from the images in addition to the ujust scripts that allowed the changing of the app stores. These scripts were buggy, brittle and represented a maintenance headache, so we decided to remove them.
For those still wanting Discover, creating a custom image that includes it is a viable path forward.
Starship
Starship will also be removed from the image as it is available to install easily from brew. This aligns with our long-term goal to make the images leaner by removing packages that can easily be found from Homebrew or Flathub.
brew install starship
AppImages
One change coming with Fedora 44 is the removal of Fuse2. This means that many older AppImages will not work anymore. There is a newer format for AppImages, but unfortunately many packages have not (yet) updated to it.
Fw-fanctrl
The Framework-specific fw-fanctrl command-line tool has been included in our images for quite a while. Unfortunately, the package has been broken for some time now and it's not really needed (many of our users probably never touched the fan profiles), so it will also be removed. Furthermore, it has also caused small issues on other laptops.
Openrazer kernel module and daemon
OpenRazer (kernel module and daemon) is another package that we have bundled for a pretty long time. But as we want to keep our images tidy and maintainable, we have decided to remove these tools from Aurora. The official (Windows only currently) tool, Synapse, seems to be moving to a web browser-based solution, which would also help Linux users. The solution is currently in beta and already supports some Razer devices.
ISOs
As Fedora 44 brings some changes to Plasma and installation experience, we have built BETA ISO with these new changes so we can test these changes before Fedora 44 officially launches.
One of the biggest changes would be the introduction of Plasma-setup which allows us to drop the user creation step from the Anaconda Installer. Plasma-setup would take care of these during the first boot, just like GNOME has done for years.
You can find information about beta ISOs in our documentation's ISO Testing page. We hope some of you have time to test these ISOs. They have been tested internally but more testing never hurts!
General build system enhancements
We have slightly improved our build pipeline; such as implementing package caches and other changes which made iterative local builds faster.
New base image
In the beginning of the year, we changed our base image. Previously we used our own https://github.com/ublue-os/main images. We decided that it would be easier to just get the base image directly from the upstream source, which are maintained by Timothée Ravier over on Fedora's GitLab. Currently these are not "Fedora official" images, but they serve us well until the new Silverblue/Kinoite base images are released. Big Thanks to Timothée and the other countless Fedora contributors! We would be nothing without them 🙂.
SBOMs & Release changelogs
We've implemented SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) into our build pipeline. This was part of a bigger endeavour of moving away from the legacy-rechunk implementation, which handled our GitHub release changelogs.
Important notice related to Fedora 45
This is a pre-notice related to a bigger change we are planning for Aurora when Fedora 45 releases in Fall later this year. Unfortunately we have decided to drop support for ZFS on the :stable image stream. This is not an easy decision, but we arrived at it due to release cadence issues: there have been several instances where we were forced to delay our stable image releases. Fedora's kernel moves pretty aggressively and once a new kernel release is out it will always require support from ZFS too, which may take a while.
Even as our stable branch follows gated CoreOS kernel, which usually is ~4 weeks behind the Fedora kernel (once a brand new kernel branch is out), it is still too fast-paced for out-of-tree modules like ZFS.
Lastly, ZFS has a reputation of being a "server filesystem" which doesn't really follow the desktop ethos we bring with Aurora.
Testers Wanted
With the new Beta Images we have also changed the way they are rechunked. If you are running a custom image then this is something you should also implement in yours. The previous rechunker did a few things it probably shouldn't have done in regards to the handling of users and groups and we are paying the price for it now. We have implemented a workaround for this issue which has been implemented and tested in Zirconium already. If you see any weird issues that could stem from a weird setup from this please let us know by opening issues about it on GitHub. Special thanks to @tulilirockz and @hecknt as always!
With all that said, we hope some of you have time to test the new beta images. It's probably one of the biggest updates we have ever made to Aurora. Next up is the official release that should happen somewhere near end of April or start of May.
Until next time and don't forget to gaze at the stars!
The Aurora team