Well, actually, Btrfs with zstd:1 compression is the default!

This could be the name of my next project… 🤔

bluefin

Well, yes and no.

It’s true that the project originally started around my own hardware and personal needs. However, that mainly influenced choices such as the preinstalled Flatpaks, GNOME extensions, and default configuration. The work required to rebuild the image around the CachyOS kernel, automate the build process, sign the resulting packages, run smoke tests, and provide tools for switching CPU schedulers is not specific to my hardware. Other users can benefit from it as well. That is precisely why, after initially building it for myself, I worked on making the process reproducible and suitable for public distribution. The image can run on different Intel and AMD systems, and I have also created an NVIDIA image so that the project can be tested on hardware other than my own. Your point about the signing keys is fair: they are currently personal keys rather than keys managed by an established organization. This is still a small independent project, so it doesn’t have the same governance or trust model as a large distribution. However, the entire build process is public, and users can inspect it or rebuild the image themselves.

As for whether it qualifies as a “distribution,” I agree that simply publishing an ISO as a torrent on the Internet Archive would not be enough. But that’s not what defines the project. The project includes automated image and package builds, kernel integration, signing, testing, Secure Boot support, custom tools, and reproducible GitHub Actions workflows. Whether someone prefers to call it a distribution, a Universal Blue derivative, or a custom Fedora image is partly a matter of terminology, but it is certainly more than a manually modified ISO uploaded as a torrent. You can inspect the build history and the amount of automation involved here: https://github.com/daniel-g-carrasco/margine-image/actions

Good question. The whole thing is built and managed as a bootc/OCI image on CI, and I documented every step (Containerfile, the kernel build and signing, the curated deltas, the build/test/release flow) in the handbook: https://margine.the-empty.place/handbook

Full source is on GitHub too: https://github.com/daniel-g-carrasco/margine-image

Yeah, unfortunate timing. There was a brief power outage in my area due to the extreme heat, so my little server in my house hosting the site was down for a couple of hours. It’s back online now. Sorry about that!

I understand why it might look suspicious. I created this account mainly to share Margine, since I’ve never really used social platforms to talk about my projects before. That’s why the profile is so new and empty. I’m a real person, though. English isn’t my first language, and I sometimes use AI to polish my wording, which probably explains some of the LLM vibes.

It’s not the GNOME desktop that makes it “fast”; it’s the CachyOS kernel, which is at the core of this project. GNOME was chosen to provide a complete and stable desktop environment.

Well, you can call it a custom image if you feel “downstream image” isn’t the right term, but Margine is a downstream image in the same way that Bluefin and Bazzite are. Of course, I’m not claiming to have created a new Linux distribution from scratch.