I deeply love the story of Grendel. He’s left an invisible imprint on me since I was a young boy fishing issues from my father’s oversized trunk that squatted tempestuously in our living room. Thank you for this summary! I learned a few things I hadn’t known.

For those who grew up with Grendel and now work in tech, like me, I did a talk on mindfulness and conflict in the workplace using the leitmotif of Grendel. Matt Wagner was kind enough to allow me to use his art for the talk.

Hey there, for a very simple start there’s the compose.yaml file at the bottom of my comment here.

The Intel discrete cards are fantastic value for money. There’s plenty of folks on the internet who can attest to this. Intel’s support story in general (so not just graphics cards) on Linux has been nothing less than sterling. If you’re using any Linux kernel you can expect Intel stuff to just work. It’s been this way for at least a decade.

WebOS powers TVs now and, from the article, Amazon intends this replacement to cover their Fire tablet line. WebOS ticks all their boxes, especially since apps in Amazon’s new flavor are intended to be delivered as React Native web apps.

I’m devastated they didn’t choose to pick up webOS for this.

Hmm, well Fedora on its own (so no Silverblue) is very much your classic way of shipping a distro. That tends to mean that, over time, “cruft” accumulates as you upgrade your system, uninstall/reinstall packages, etc. They leave bits of themselves behind that can cause unwanted behavior.

Fedora Silverblue, that Bluefin is based on, treats the entire system layer as “immutable”. Basically, it ensures consistency so that upgrades and package upgrades don’t leave the system in an inconsistent state.

What Bluefin adds on top of this is a set of opinionated, pre-configured layers suited for getting particular groups of tasks done. Those layers are also immutable and tested as a whole, which makes shipping those layers at velocity easy (faster upgrades, less wonky behavior on upgrade) and easy to swap between, so you can go from gaming to developer mode without worrying about an accumulation of cruft.

Is that helpful at all? There’s also this announcement blog post, which I found very helpful in understanding the value proposition.

Because it uses OCI images, it auto-updates like a Chromebook, and you can switch between modes, like say a gaming mode that’s a full SteamOS replacement, to a mode that gives you an entire development environment without needing to install and configure these layers or stacks of capabilities yourself.

That’s very powerful. For cloud native developers like myself who are used to working with container images as the deliverable artifact, this makes that workflow very easy. Podman is included. You can create entire development environments at will that are totally “pure”: no side effects because everything you need is in the container. That’s a Dev Container.

I use Logseq ;-)

In the spirit of answering a question of genuine interest, it’s because tabs are much easier to process out on desktop, whether to read-it-later archives like Pocket or Omnivore or to project folders or tasks. I’d just sync them up and call it a day but I lost my moment when my tabs crept up over one hundred. There’s a lot of good research there, whether for work or home programming projects.