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Please read everything, as it contains useful info, which would introduce you to Gidro-OS & container-based Linux in general.

Thanks.

My reason for making the customized image

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!

Vision

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 average or advanced user.
Desktop experience should be usefully-minimal, nothing more, nothing less.
System & user layer must be cleanly separated in order to provide reliable & enjoyable experience.
Of course, there will be some personal touch to the image, mostly in terms of design & looks.

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.

Issues which I intend to solve

Fedora UX issues:

• Shipping inferior Fedora flatpak remote instead of Flathub as default
• No needed proprietary drivers & codecs by default due to FOSS politics
• Disabled RPMFusion repo by default due to reason above
• No auto-updates by default for user apps & system
• 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.

Universal Blue solves those issues with base images.

However, due to Fedora Silverblue using vanila Gnome DE, I find that there are other issues too that are related to Gnome.

Gnome DE issues:

• Gnome Software being unreliable & utterly 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 by either Universal Blue base image or Gnome DE.

Other issues:

• Still wanting the additional hardware enablement as much as possible
• Still wanting to implement more useful shortcut commands as much as possible
• Lack of some useful tweaks for performance & app compatibility, while still remaining secure
• Lack of some higher quality default apps, which would cover frequent usecases much better
• etc.