Ultramarine Linux

Ultramarine Linux is a Fedora-based Linux distribution designed to be easy to use for everyone, from beginners to tech enthusiasts. It provides sane-defaults such that "it just works" and minimal configurations are required before users can start using the system.

It comes with 4 editions, namely the Flagship Edition, the GNOME Edition, the Pantheon Edition, and the KDE Plasma Edition. It also comes with several tweaks preapplied to make initial setup and daily usage seamless.

The Ultramarine Linux distribution is created and maintained by the Ultramarine Project, which is led by Cappy Ishihara started in 2021, and later acquired by Fyra Labs.

Editions

CuteFish

Before the release of Ultramarine 37, the CuteFish Edition was provided but later deprecated due to CuteFish DE's lack of development and (consequently) its buggy behaviour and broken dependencies. It was then removed and replaced by the KDE Plasma Edition.

Flagship

The Flagship Edition provides an elegant and simple interface with Budgie DE. The Budgie version used was packaged in the Ultramarine repository until Ultramarine 37, but it will switch to the one in the Fedora official repositories by Ultramarine 38.

GNOME

The GNOME Edition provides an intuitive layout with GNOME.

KDE Plasma

The KDE Plasma Edition is provided since the release of Ultramarine 37 and it comes with Latte dock. Its layout is heavily inspired by Pop!_OS. However, Latte dock was removed in Ultramarine 38 due to negative feedback and its buggy behaviour and replaced by the default KDE Plasma theme.

Pantheon

The Pantheon Edition provides the default desktop of Elementary OS, Pantheon DE. The version in Terra was used since Ultramarine 37 as it was removed from the Fedora 37 repositories.

Philosophy

Ultramarine Project, the team behind the development of Ultramarine Linux and its side projects, has the goal of making Ultramarine Linux an operating system that "just works", meaning customizations and tweaks don't have to be applied manually and things should work out of the box.

In addition to user experience, the infrastructure of the Project is also designed to be developer-friendly. One notable example is Terra, which allows much easier creation and maintenance of RPM packages with the help of automatic updates when compared with Fedora.

Features

Ultramarine Linux comes with a few repositories preinstalled, including RPM Fusion, Flathub and Terra. It also has its own repository with its sources hosted on GitHub and powered by Andaman. The packages were hosted separately with their own git repository on a self-hosted GitLab instance and later GitHub, packaged using umpkg.

It uses the Anaconda installer, but it is said that there will be a custom installer. A welcome program for a better out-of-the-box experience is also planned and it is a work in progress.[1]

History

The Acquisition of the Ultramarine Project

Fyra Labs acquired the Ultramarine Project on 12 October, 2022 as agreed by both sides which brought numerous advantages to the development of Ultramarine since both sides had been lacking manpower. After the acquisition, the team started work on numerous projects which greatly changed the infrastructure and shaped the development of Ultramarine 37, making it arguably the biggest release.

The development of umpkg and Andaman

Main Article: Andaman

Ultramarine had been using Koji for its own repository just like Fedora itself, but it made package maintenance difficult to do with its sheer complexity, which led to the creation of umpkg by the Ultramarine Project. It reduces burden on packaging software and uploading them to the Koji server. However, the sophisticated part (Koji itself) was still there, so a packaging tool was proposed. After the acquisition, the team started to work on Andaman (aka. anda), which was originally intended to be a package manager, but later rewritten as a package build toolchain.