Main

A common main image for all other uBlue images, with minimal (but important) adjustments to Fedora. 💙

1. Features
2. Tips and Tricks
3. How to Install
4. Verification
5. Configuring Automatic Updates
6. Making your own

What is this?

For context, please familiarize yourself with image-based desktops. These are Fedora OStree images that have been modified with the following quality of life features:

Features

• Starts with a Fedora image,
• Adds the following packages to the base image:
• Hardware acceleration and codecs,
• distrobox for terminal CLI and user package installation
• A selection of udev rules and service units,
• libratbag, to configure supported mice via piper,
• Various other tools: check out the complete list of packages.
• Sets automatic staging of updates for the system.
• Sets flatpaks to update twice a day.
• Everything else (desktop, artwork, etc) remains stock so you can use this as a good starting image.

Note

Universal Blue *-main images previously included a selection of pre-built kernel drivers (kmods) (xpadneo, xpad-noone, xone, openrazer, v4l2loopback, wl). Starting with the Fedora 39 release, these are no longer included as they proved too opinionated, causing issues for downstream image builders using alternative kernels, etc.

Downstream images are still encouraged to include these drivers in their builds. See Universal Blue akmods.

Tips and Tricks

Unlike traditional Linux distributions, the base image is intended to be used "out-of-the-box" as it is. Packages are installed via Flatpak whenever possible (except for IDEs in some cases, more below). Should that not be possible, you can use distrobox to have images of mutable distributions where you can install applications normally.

Want an application that is only available on Arch Linux and one that is only on Ubuntu? Well, now can have both!

Distrobox is very powerful; for example, you can use it to host your entire development environment completely separate from your host system. Or use it to run a container for your virtual machines.

ublue-os/base-main is also very well suited for servers, and users are expected to make full use of podman to host containers running "typical" server software i.e. nginx, caddy and others.

How to Install

Follow these instructions.

File an issue if you find a problem.

Verification

These images are signed with sigstore'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/silverblue-main

If you're forking this repo you should read the docs on keeping secrets in github. You need to generate a new key-pair with cosign. The public key can be in your public repo (your users need it to check the signatures), and you can paste the private key in Settings -> Secrets -> Actions.

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