Fedora Onyx Approved as Immutable Fedora Linux 39 Spin with Budgie Desktop

An immutable system is never modified after it's been deployed as components are only replaced, not changed.
Fedora Onyx

Fedora Onyx, an upcoming variant of the Fedora Linux operating system focused on offering an immutable system featuring the Budgie desktop environment, has been approved for the upcoming Fedora Linux 39 release.

At the end of April 2023, Budgie Desktop developer and Solus maintainer Joshua Strobl proposed an official immutable / emerging variant of Fedora Linux with the Budgie desktop environment, complementing the Fedora Budgie Spin that was introduced with the Fedora Linux 38 release.

Fedora Onyx aims to offer Fedora Linux users yet another immutable/atomic desktop operating system in the style of Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, and Fedora Sericea, leveraging technologies like rpm-ostree, Podman, toolbx, and Flatpak. An immutable system is never modified after it’s been deployed.

“By actively building on and leveraging technologies adopted by similar immutable variants from Fedora (Kinoite, Sericea, and Silverblue), Fedora Onyx may help to strengthen those variants by putting more contributors behind building and maturing our shared technologies,” said Joshua Strobl in the proposal.

The proposal has been recently approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) and Fedora Onyx is now set to see the light of day as part of the upcoming Fedora Linux 39 release, due out in mid-October 2023.

The good news for those wishing to use the Budgie desktop environment on top of their immutable Fedora Linux system is that when Fedora Onyx will be out existing users with ostree installations will be able to seamlessly rebase their systems to Fedora Onyx in the same way they would do using any other official variant.

Of course, Fedora Onyx should also be available as a downloadable ISO image, but we don’t know yet what architectures will be supported at the moment of the release.

Let’s hope that until Fedora Linux 39 hits the public beta channel I will be able to take Fedora Onyx for a quick test drive to give you guys a proper first look and talk more about its benefits over other Fedora Linux spins.

As for Fedora Linux 39, it will offer many other exciting new features like fedora-autofirstboot for all desktop variants to run a predetermined set of tasks during the first boot after installation, such as installing codecs or cleaning up installer packages, and DNF5 as the new default packaging tool.

Fedora Linux 39 will also support the automatic enablement of persistent overlays when flashing Fedora Linux live media to USB sticks and enable DNF/RPM Copy on Write for all variants to reduce the amount of I/O and offsets CPU cost of package decompression.

Last updated 10 months ago

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