I’ve been using Universal Blue heavily for a week now and it’s a keeper. UBlue is an immutable operating system based on Fedora where you install nearly all of your software as either flatpaks or as packages running in containers. Those containers can be based on any of a dozen different distributions. You can install Fedora packages to your base OS similar to a traditional distribution but the philosophy behind UBlue encourages keeping your base install light and clean. Amongst other things, having a small, light and immutable base system greatly reduces your vector for malware.

Despite all the weird and wonderful stuff I’ve installed and run on my UBlue system this past week (work apps, personal dev tools, Steam games, general software), I’ve only added two packages to the base OS for convenience: alacritty and zsh. Most desktop apps I’ve installed are just flatpaks and everything else is either running in an Ubuntu LTS or openSUSE Tumbleweed container. All apps, no matter how they are installed, have access to your home directory and can be launched directly from your desktop.

The whole set up suits me perfectly but I probably wouldn’t recommend UBlue to someone who doesn’t like tinkering a bit. The containerization adds some cognitive overhead and requires some fiddling sometimes to make things just so but it’s kind of a miracle it all works as well as it does. That has got me thinking how far Linux in general has come in recent years.

People have been saying next year will be “the year of Linux on the desktop” for, literally, decades but, although more popular than its ever been, Linux still only has a tiny 3% of the desktop market share. I can’t see how that will change other than very slowly but it might only take one killer app or feature or something like a really popular Chromebook or something to give it a sizable boost. Linux has never been more ready it.