finally Margine OS ! My super fast and atomic linux distro ⚡️
After months of work I'm finally releasing Margine OS, my own atomic Linux distro, and the short version is that it's fast.
It's built on Bluefin DX, so Fedora bootc underneath, which means it keeps everything that already makes Bluefin nice to live with: it's atomic, every codec is in place, updates happen quietly in the background, and you can always roll back if something breaks. What I changed is mostly in service of speed. Instead of the stock Fedora kernel it runs the CachyOS kernel with the BORE scheduler, re-signed with my own key so it still boots cleanly under Secure Boot, and the installer walks you through enrolling that key so you never have to turn Secure Boot off.
Around that there are a few things I'd always wished for. You can switch the sched_ext CPU schedulers live from a small GUI (scx_lavd when I'm gaming, plain BORE the rest of the time). There's a little tool I wrote, Wayland Scroll Factor, for the touchpad scroll and pinch speed that GNOME stubbornly won't expose, which matters a lot since the Framework 13 touchpad is unusably fast without it. GNOME comes set up for tiling out of the box with o-tiling, a fork of System76's Pop Shell, plus Hyprland-style keybindings, and gaming is one command away with a native Steam/Proton stack, Bazzite-style. The whole image is built, tested and signed on CI, and the ISOs are distributed torrent-first through the Internet Archive.
I benchmarked the kernel honestly on the same laptop, a Framework 13 with a Ryzen 5 7640U, swapping only the ostree deployment between Margine OS and stock Bluefin DX: roughly 1.8x faster context-switch latency, +54% thread throughput, and 43 to 55% lower median scheduling latency, with a small cost at the worst-case tail, which is the expected BORE trade-off and honestly a sign the numbers aren't cherry-picked. The full method and raw data are on the site.
It's a personal, opinionated project with a single maintainer, so feedback and criticism are genuinely welcome. There's also an experimental NVIDIA variant I can't test myself, since I have no NVIDIA hardware, so if you run NVIDIA and feel like helping validate it, that would mean a lot.
Site and download: https://margine.the-empty.place/ Docs and the full benchmark: https://margine.the-empty.place/docs
What's up with the downvotes? I swear people on Lemmy can be so friendly and so intensely grumpy at the same time. Anyways, happy for you and you exercising your freedom. I'll give it a look out of curiosity.
The writing style of the whole post description is pretty much what Claude emits. The downvotes are probably people recognizing that this is a bot - not someone’s passion project as it’s being marketed.
Lemmy is full of these. A brand new account announcing a new project and every comment they make (if they respond) is AI slop.
There’s no evidence that any of the code nor any of the interactions the “author” has with anyone involve a human.
Ah that makes more sense then.
Yah, just to expand on what you said a little:
I'd love to be able to give people þe benefit of a doubt, but þe LLM bot vibes are pretty strong on þis one.
I understand why it might look suspicious. I created this account mainly to share Margine, since I’ve never really used social platforms to talk about my projects before. That’s why the profile is so new and empty. I’m a real person, though. English isn’t my first language, and I sometimes use AI to polish my wording, which probably explains some of the LLM vibes.
Just reply in your broken english. Everyone understands. It’s actually sad to lose that side of language.
I think nowadays it might be best to use your personal account as new account can be suspected as bots.
Þank you for letting us know. It's getting rough around here wiþ all þe LLM posts; some of us are getting twitchy.
My first guess is that people are reacting to this post due to it being marginally similar to the vibe-coded, closed source ads that are appearing in communities like [email protected]
Makes sense, I've gathered that the majority of Lemmy is very angry about anything AI, or I guess anything maybe AI related.
You'd be angry at cocks too if your throat hurt from being deepthroated all the time, even if the current cock might be delicious
Well now I know too much about your fetishes.
Gaud dayum. I laughed so hard , I peed a little.
Hahahaha
Aim for their sore throat I guess, I heard it helps and they seem like they may be into it.
The threadiverse is basically an extension of the Linux community so that's probably why 🤣
I mean people are pretty tired of yet another distro, but at least this person has some ideas. It looks to be more than just theming on a major base distro. Idk about the rest but I enjoy people exercising their freedom, it's not called FOSS for no reason.
You're not wrong. Just not sure why you replied to me when saying it.
At a glance I thought it said migraine os and I had to click in for details
I thought margarine OS and I couldn't believe it didn't default BTRFS
I can't believe it's not BTRFS!
This could be the name of my next project... 🤔
I mean honestly, pretty neat!
Had I any other machine than a Steam Deck right now, I'd give it a whirl... unfortunately, that thing is all I got right now, really don't want to chance losing all my shit, as I don't have a sufficient backup external drive either.
Your server is down already 🫤
Yeah, unfortunate timing. There was a brief power outage in my area due to the extreme heat, so my little server in my house hosting the site was down for a couple of hours. It’s back online now. Sorry about that!
Right, transformers can overheat too. And some powerplants might have to reduce load. Really, it should be easier, legally, to slapp some solar panels on the roof, which also keep the house cooler.
pffft atomic, my distro is quantum.
I don't think anything that uses GNOME can be called "blazing fast", although I may be conflating fast and lightweight a bit
It’s not the GNOME desktop that makes it “fast”; it’s the CachyOS kernel, which is at the core of this project. GNOME was chosen to provide a complete and stable desktop environment.
Bro Homm3 HD Edition? Have some diginity and use VCMI
you're absolutely right, but I simply can't find it on steam 😅
Thats because homm3 complete is only on GoG :)
If you’re doing campaigns or the “serious” multiplayer I think vcmi is still a non starter.
It was a couple of years ago at least. Of course hota has dropped two new towns since then so that may have changed…
is it possible to rebase from bazzite to margine?
A direct rebase from Bazzite GNOME to Margine should technically be possible, since both use the Fedora Atomic/bootc model, but I haven’t tested that specific path yet, so I can’t currently call it officially supported.
The safest route would be:
Bazzite GNOME → Bluefin DX stable → Margine
Rebasing between images that use the same desktop environment is generally supported, while switching from Bazzite KDE to Margine’s GNOME desktop is not recommended. Before rebasing, I would also remove any layered RPM packages or overrides that could conflict with the new image. Once you are on Margine, if gaming is important to you, I recommend installing the native gaming layer:
ujust margine-gaming-nativesystemctl rebootThis installs the native RPM versions of Steam, Lutris, and RetroArch, which generally provide better Proton/Wine compatibility, anti-cheat support, VR integration, and driver matching than the Flatpak-based gaming layer.
Also, if Secure Boot is enabled, make sure to complete the Margine MOK enrollment after the rebase. The full procedure is documented here: https://margine.the-empty.place/docs/install-iso
sweet. i run bazzite gnomr on my gaming rig and it currently has some issues and your distro seems perfect to me.
im gonna try it today!
let me know ! 😀
worked almost flawless. also my gnome issues from bazzite are fixed now. thanks! i forgot to mention that the commands for the rebase dont work if you copy it 1:1. i had to remove the slashes and copy it in a single line instead of the multilines on the website. seems to be an issue with the formating i think. docker://
ghcr.io… the spaces after the docker:// get copied too and thats causing the issue.
is it possible to install sunshine like im bazzite with ujust setup sunshine?
Not with that exact command, no. ujust setup-sunshine is a Bazzite recipe, and Margine is built on Bluefin DX rather than Bazzite, so it does not ship it.
You can still run Sunshine. Try with the Flatpak:
flatpak install flathub dev.lizardbyte.app.Sunshine.Heads up that, unlike Bazzite's recipe, the Flatpak does not auto-wire the system bits (uinput/udev for virtual input, capture permissions, the firewall ports), so you may need to set a couple of those up by hand. Alternatively you can layer the native RPM from LizardByte with rpm-ostree.
Maybe, in the future, I can set up a sunshine layer for margine with a dedicated ujust command...
i installed it following a guide from the bluefin forum i thinky there it was installed via rpm-ostree, which was amazing because it used all my previous settings. the revase itself also was quite ez, but i changed first to bluefin, then to bluefin-dx and lastly to margine.
the only thing that didnt work was the margine-gaming suite. i got an error where it couldnt find the flatpak for steam. the margine-gaming-native worked and it also recognized all game-installs from bazzite that way.
I’m back just to say that I’ve added a new
ujust margine-sunshinecommand to install Sunshine in the same way you can on Bazzite 🎉It will be included in the next update
thanks. i wont have time to try it the next few days but im looking forward to it.
i must say that i enjoy your distro more than bazzite.
@daniel_g_carrasco is it based on something
bluefin
How do you manage the complete package?
Good question. The whole thing is built and managed as a bootc/OCI image on CI, and I documented every step (Containerfile, the kernel build and signing, the curated deltas, the build/test/release flow) in the handbook: https://margine.the-empty.place/handbook
Full source is on GitHub too: https://github.com/daniel-g-carrasco/margine-image
Thanks I'll check it out!
"...resigned with my own key..."
That's a "no" from me, dawg. This isnt a distro, this a later revision you could easily just target and run. I don't think you know exactly what constitutes an entire distribution.
Then what is? And which authorities endorses that view? Or..., is it perhaps possible to arrive at that definition by (logical) necessity? If no such authorities exist and if it doesn't follow by necessity, then how is your definition anything but arbitrary?
Well, first off it’s all completely based around this one persons hardware and needs, using personal keys instead of those in the care of an organization.
There’s nothing wrong with making your own cool Linux is stitched together from the pieces you need.
It’s just something short of a distribution.
The op isn’t even doing the “distribution” component, their isos are just torrents hosted by the internet archive.
Which isn’t an insult, it’s a laudable achievement to put together an os, it just might fall short of a distribution.
Think about it like this: if you swapped the engine and drivetrain of a Silverado into an old jeep and replaced the body panels with those of a bronco carefully bent and shaped to fit the new geometry did you make a new model of car? No, of course not. It’s cool, and I want to see and drive it, but you didn’t make The Homer, you made a custom car.
If you started a business modifying other people’s jeeps with ls engine and blazer body swaps then do you have a new model of car? The many shops that do this in real life would like you to think so, but their creations remain legally registered as jeeps and no one except the dorkiest of owners refer to them as Homers.
Well, yes and no.
It’s true that the project originally started around my own hardware and personal needs. However, that mainly influenced choices such as the preinstalled Flatpaks, GNOME extensions, and default configuration. The work required to rebuild the image around the CachyOS kernel, automate the build process, sign the resulting packages, run smoke tests, and provide tools for switching CPU schedulers is not specific to my hardware. Other users can benefit from it as well. That is precisely why, after initially building it for myself, I worked on making the process reproducible and suitable for public distribution. The image can run on different Intel and AMD systems, and I have also created an NVIDIA image so that the project can be tested on hardware other than my own. Your point about the signing keys is fair: they are currently personal keys rather than keys managed by an established organization. This is still a small independent project, so it doesn't have the same governance or trust model as a large distribution. However, the entire build process is public, and users can inspect it or rebuild the image themselves.
As for whether it qualifies as a “distribution,” I agree that simply publishing an ISO as a torrent on the Internet Archive would not be enough. But that's not what defines the project. The project includes automated image and package builds, kernel integration, signing, testing, Secure Boot support, custom tools, and reproducible GitHub Actions workflows. Whether someone prefers to call it a distribution, a Universal Blue derivative, or a custom Fedora image is partly a matter of terminology, but it is certainly more than a manually modified ISO uploaded as a torrent. You can inspect the build history and the amount of automation involved here: https://github.com/daniel-g-carrasco/margine-image/actions
You’d have to pull out a lot of stuff to make a system that wouldn’t run on x86 64.
I think what you’ve done is cool and I was not trying to denigrate or minimize your work.
My intent was to help someone who seems like they don’t have 25 years of newsgroup discussion about what constitutes a distribution and why under their belt understand why it was perfectly reasonable and defensible to get all “woah there buddy” about it.
Well, you can call it a custom image if you feel “downstream image” isn’t the right term, but Margine is a downstream image in the same way that Bluefin and Bazzite are. Of course, I’m not claiming to have created a new Linux distribution from scratch.