And if you don't mind me also asking, what features are described by the term "cloud-native"?
This project uses this upcoming feature in Fedora: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/OstreeNativeContainer... and switches to its consumption model entirely.
On stock Fedora you're pulling from a distribution-hosted ostree endpoint to do updates. With Bluefin (and other universal-blue.org images) you're pulling from a container registry (in this case ghcr.io, but you can push your builds to any registry or host your own).
We ingest Fedora daily and then add codecs, a bunch of hardware enablement support via udev rules, add a few pain-in-the-ass-otherwise things like the obs virtual cam, xbox controller support, etc. Then that image is pushed to ghcr.io and the local package manager uses that.
We also enable Flathub out of the box and Distrobox: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox - then ship a few preconfigured boxes for you to play with: Ubuntu, Fedora, and Wolfi.
Then we have another image that you can rebase to by typing `just devmode` in a terminal which adds vscode with devcontainers, devpod, devbox, kvm/qemu, incus/lxc/lxd, some nice monospace fonts, cockpit, kind, docker, and a bunch of associated cluster tools.
And since we build everything in CI there's no local package conflicts like in upstream Fedora when the main repo and rpmfusion repos are conflicting, your PC only ever gets successfully built images.
Does that mean every system update will download a complete image file or is there some mechanism to only download the diffs?
I'm not affiliated with either distribution. Both distributions provide different out-of-the-box experiences. Fedora Silverblue tries to be a general purpose desktop OS while BlueFin has a focus on software development. You can still adapt both of them for the same purposes, but BlueFin might be a nicer starting point if you actually are a developer.
The biggest difference to classic read-write Linux distributions is that you have an immutable base system which includes software that you might find useful or useless. In addition, you can install software as Flatpaks into your home directory. It is also possible to change the software that is part of the immutable base system, but it is typically something you want to avoid.
> what features are described by the term "cloud-native"?
I suppose it refers to the container management software that is included in the immutable base system.
