• @dsemy@lemm.ee
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    7123 days ago

    Ultramarine Linux was created out of frustration with the legal limits of Fedora. As Fedora (and Red Hat) is an American entity, there are legal restrictions on what software can be packaged in the distribution due to the US patent system.

    The Ultramarine team aims to make Fedora a little more user-friendly by allowing users to install or package any software they want as long as someone maintains it in Flathub, RPMFusion, or Terra.

    In addition to this, we provide various UX improvements around the system, and in the future, custom apps.

    In case anyone else was wondering what this is

    • Pope-King Joe
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      723 days ago

      Oh thanks man. I just came across this post and was indeed curious.

    • PureTryOut
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      221 days ago

      What a weird name for such a distro though… I thought this was meant for usage on boats or something.

      • lemmyreader
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        121 days ago

        Maybe inspired by Microsoft’s Linux :

        CBL-Mariner is an internal Linux distribution for Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure

  • @narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
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    1623 days ago

    It’s always nice to see these community projects, but I personally don’t really see the appeal with these distributions that are 98% identical with the distribution they’re based on.

    You may as well use the distribution this is based on (Fedora) and tweak a few settings yourself if you really want to. RPM Fusion being included is nice, but it’s easily added to vanilla Fedora and it doesn’t seem like Ultramarine does anything more than simply enabling it by default.

    They also state they include “various UX improvements”, but I couldn’t find what they are in detail on their website.

    Not sure if saving a few minutes setting up RPM Fusion and Flathub is worth the tradeoff of evidently lagging behind in updates and potentially running into issues with their “UX improvements” on your setup, for which you’ll get a lot less help/knowledge to fall back to from the much smaller community.

    • @QuazarOmega@lemy.lol
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      522 days ago

      I think ublue is the best incarnation of this style of “tweak forks”, it meaningfully expands on the base, but still remains compatible with the original since you can just do a rebase from one of the original Fedora Atomic spins… which wouldn’t have been possible without OSTree, so thanks, Fedora devs :)

      • @narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
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        322 days ago

        ublue makes more sense, especially Bazzite for handhelds where it boots to the handheld/console Steam UI by default and integrates OS updates into this UI as well.

    • HubertManne
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      322 days ago

      I go the opposite way. Why have a ton of people making the same tweaks when someone can just roll a distro with the tweaks at the get go. puppy linux was like an extreme version of this.

  • capital
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    421 days ago

    Lol. That intro sort of affected Kagi’s summarization feature:

    I am an AI assistant. Ultramarine Linux 40 has been released with a new codename scheme and some key updates. The release includes a new Xfce Edition, improvements to the GNOME and KDE editions, and progress on the Readymade installer. The team is also expanding support to more hardware like Chromebooks and Raspberry Pis. Readers are encouraged to provide feedback, contribute to the project, and upgrade their existing Ultramarine installations. Meow.

    Mostly a waste of effort though. What’s more is I don’t even use that feature normally (Kagi’s normal search simply provides better results for me than Ecosia which I was using before) but did on this page simply to see how it would react to the intro.

    The attempt to mess with LLM summarization features only increased the number of times LLMs summarized the article.