Today I nuked my laptop’s Fedora Workstation installation and installed Bluefin in its place. So far, I am thrilled with the result. Bluefin is an atomic distro based on Fedora. It basically is Fedora, but set up in a way that you (1) can’t screw up the operating system, (2) can roll back any update that screws something up, and (3) never have to manually update it again.

All updates are downloaded in the background and applied when you shut down or reboot. This is great for me, because I tend to waste time updating Fedora every day; I just can’t help myself. It will also make upgrading to the next Fedora version (which comes out next month) as simple as doing a reboot.

Bluefin does not come with a package manager, which takes some getting used to. instead (with rare exceptions for setting up developer tools) you install all software via flatpak or homebrew. Bluefin comes with the proprietary drivers and codecs that you need. Software development (if that’s your thing) should be done in containers.

I set up everything that I had in my Fedora setup in about 20 minutes. (It would have been even faster if I wasn’t downloading on wifi.) I’m sure I will hit some bumps in the road, but right now I am very impressed and can’t wait to not think about software updates anymore.