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1. OS Scope & Vision
I really like the Fedora for making the most reliable Linux distribution I ever used, but I find it lacking in terms of user experience in some areas.
Not to say that Fedora Silverblue is bad, I actually like their FOSS & vanilla/upstream vision that they are pursuing.
It's just that I want something better now, rather than waiting for upstream to improve (which is not bad either, great things usually take some time).
At 1st, I modified the Fedora Silverblue directly on booted system through various RPM package installs, fiddling with various configs & some other things to achieve what I want.
However, I noticed that the reliability of the system would later decline. I would also forgot some of the modifications that I did.
I looked for the solution.
I noticed the Universal Blue project, which made base images that pretty much fitted into my scope!
However, I still wanted more.
I looked for even better solution. And I found it!
Solution was using BlueBuild (formerly Universal Blue's startingpoint) for making my own custom images!
BlueBuild allows me to build my own vision of how Fedora Silverblue should look like without affecting the reliability of the system.
If some update fails, it fails in the GitHub cloud, not on the booted system!
Now let's talk about my vision.
I intend Gidro-OS to be easy to use for every user, no matter if it's the regular or advanced user.
Desktop experience should be usefully-minimal, nothing more, nothing less.
System & user layer must be cleanly separated in every aspect in order to provide reliable & enjoyable experience.
Of course, there will be some personal touch to the image, mostly in terms of design & looks, but not much.
For my outlined vision, Fedora Silverblue with Gnome DE fits much better than Fedora Kinoite with KDE or others.
I intend to avoid Windows-like clones in terms of layout, because I find that kind of user experience subpar compared to Gnome workflow.
Note that minimal & usefully-minimal experience is an important distinction, since I want to provide great experience out-of-the-box, without need of the user to manually select & install essential applications, while letting him optionally choose the less important ones in 1st-time setup.
My intended "usefully-minimal experience" is highlighted in section below.
Fedora UX issues:
- Shipping inferior Fedora flatpak remote instead of Flathub as default
- No needed proprietary drivers & codecs by default due to FOSS politics
- No easy configuration of OS as administrator instead of writing potentially unknown commands manually
(OpenSUSE's solution is using their Yast GUI tool) - Lack of some downstream high quality packages which improve hardware enablement
- etc.
Borrowing some configuration from Universal Blue solves those issues.
However, due to Fedora Silverblue using vanila Gnome DE, I find that there are other issues too that are related to Gnome, which I solved or intend to solve.
Gnome DE issues:
- Gnome Software being unreliable & slow
- Gnome lacking some bling, to make the already great design stand-out more (like blur or more extended icon pack)
- Gnome lacking some useful & frequently used functionality, which can be easily implemented through extensions
- Gnome not shipping some useful & frequently used settings by default
- etc.
I also implemented other modifications which are not solved either way.
Other issues:
- Still wanting the additional hardware enablement as much as possible
- Still wanting to implement more useful shortcut commands as much as possible, while not affecting the system reliability
- Lack of some useful tweaks for performance & app compatibility, while still remaining secure
- Lack of some higher quality default user applications, which would cover frequent usecases much better
- etc.
However, note that I won't go far in doing additional hardware & software enablement if it means that I'll need to dedicate more time to it.
Gidro-OS is mostly updated in the same day when latest version of official Fedora Silverblue releases.
Exception to this can be when some used Gnome extension is not updated to be compatible with the latest Gnome release, depending on its importance.
- If it's some crucial extension, latest Fedora version for Gidro-OS will be on hold until it's fixed.
- If those are less important extensions, then they might be dropped in order to update Gidro-OS to latest Fedora version.
Note that Fedora officially supports releases for 2 Fedora update cycles. This means that even If I delay the Fedora version by -1 from the latest version for some time, it will be still supported by Fedora with updates. For example, Fedora 40 is supported up to the day when Fedora 42 gets released.
Another exception can be a very bad Gnome/Fedora release, which very negatively affects the user experience. In this case, Gidro-OS will be pinned to -1 Fedora version compared to the latest. However, this is something that never happened since my experience of using Fedora (since Fedora 36).
ISO is updated & uploaded every 1st day of the month.
If there is some regression & important fix for the ISO, ISO will be updated & uploaded outside of the above mentioned schedule.