The BlueBuild project creates accessible tools for you to create, configure & build custom images of atomic Fedora distributions.

A custom image in this context is a customized version of an image-based Linux distribution that can be switched to by the user of such a distribution without reinstalling. So about making your own distro, maybe, but not really. When making custom images, you’re building on top of an existing distribution. You’re most likely using its package manager and repositories and just adding your own flair with package set changes and configuration files. It’s more like a more reliable version of maintaining/sharing your dotfiles, but from the perspective of the operating system.

Someone might get turned off from so-called ‘immutable’ Linux distributions due to fears of the taking away them ability to tinker and change the system as you please. The term comes from the usage of immutable root filesystems in these distributions, but in reality most ‘immutable’ Linux distributions are still pretty change-able. So while BlueBuild is a tool that helps you tinker with these sorts of distributions, it’s not giving you back some freedom that was taken away.

Here’s some terms that can be used to better describe these sorts of distributions:

Atomic: instead of new and updated packages being swapped on the running system live, they’re queued up to be used after the next boot.

Image-based: instead of each computer updating each of its system packages individually, the system updates are bundled (usually daily) as images that are pulled onto the user computers and queued up to be used after the next boot.

What’s up with the logo? It’s our mascot, a blue-billed duck with a wrench! A good pun, and cute too! The writer of this FAQ is definitely not at all biased!

The logo (along with all the other BlueBuild branding) was designed by @xynydev and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.