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Review: Bluefin 41
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
I'd like to state, right at the beginning of my concluding thoughts, that Bluefin offered a functional desktop distribution. While the performance wasn't good in VirtualBox, the distribution was able to work well on my laptop. The distribution installed properly, was able to get on-line, play media files, and fetch software from multiple large repositories of software. On the whole, it was a pretty functional experience, similar to running Fedora Workstation with third-party repositories enabled.
I had two main issues with Bluefin during my trial. The first was that Bluefin doesn't offer a live desktop experience for testing hardware compatibility. This becomes a greater problem when we find Anaconda doesn't have its usual network module, which makes it hard to confirm whether Bluefin will work with our network card without completing a full install. Most distributions offer a live desktop experience or some way to set up a network during the install process and it concerned me Bluefin makes users take a leap of faith when installing. Especially since Bluefin also makes users pick an ISO file best suited to their hardware, which brings me to my second issue....
Bluefin consistently does the opposite of what it advertises on its website. The project's website states: "We remove choice paralysis for users by presenting one well curated Flathub store, Homebrew, and minimize the use of system packaging." The project then begins by asking users to select their CPU architecture and video card brand, without any trace of humour or appreciation of the irony that to even download the distribution we need to make more choices than some other distributions offer.
The distribution then reveals it has seven package managers (DNF, Flatpak, System Update, GNOME Software, Warehouse, Brew, and ujust) of various degrees of usefulness and functionality, plus BoxBuddy. That's a total of eight tools for fetching and maintaining software on a distribution which claims to remove choice and streamline software management! The distribution's website also claims to automate updates, but Brew, Flatpak, and the base system all required manual interaction to perform updates. Every time I checked one of these software managers there were updates waiting for me, demonstrating updates were not being fetched automatically as they became available.
Basically, it looks like the developers took Fedora Silverblue, piled multiple additional driver options and software managers on top of it, and then released the result with the mission statement of streamlining package management. The Bluefin website says this distribution seeks to act more like a consumer device than traditional desktop distributions, but it does the opposite, adding on more options and tools for us to navigate and manage. I would have had a more streamlined experience just sticking with upstream's Silverblue edition. It's not a good sign which a project is further away from its goal than the distribution upon which it is based.