I’ve been using Linux since 1997. Years ago, I reached the point where I was certain there was nothing that could surprise me anymore. Fast forward to this past weekend when Jorge Castro reached out to me and proved me wrong.
Jorge used to work with Ubuntu but is now working on a new project, called Universal Blue. Without going into the technical details of what this distribution does (because most average users don’t really care what happens “under the hood,” they only care that things work), let’s see if I can describe what Universal Blue is. Understand, this is really new stuff we’re talking about… and it’s cool.
Imagine you’ve installed an operating system and you poke around and decide it’s not the right desktop for you. Maybe you installed a version which ships with the GNOME desktop. With Universal Blue, what you can do is “rebase” the operating system such that it now is based on KDE Plasma.
I’m sure that list will continue to grow.
According to the Git documentation: “With the rebase command, you can take all the changes that were committed on one branch and replay them on a different branch. For this example, you would check out the experiment branch, and then rebase it onto the master branch…”
Technically speaking, a Linux distribution isn’t actually “based” on a desktop environment but it’s an easy way to explain it.
Over the weekend, I did some basic testing with this. I started out using the default Universal Blue release. After installing that, I used the rpm-ostree rebase command and rebased the OS with the Bluefin version.
April 17, 2023
Written by Jack Wallen
