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

  • Zephyr@sh.itjust.works
    57·
    9 days ago

    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.

    • i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca
      70·
      9 days ago

      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.

      • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
        19·
        9 days ago

        Yah, just to expand on what you said a little:

        daniel_g_carrasco, daniel_g_carrasco@lemmy.world  

Instance: lemmy.world  
Note:  
Joined: 23 hours ago  
Attitude:  
Posts: 1  
Comments: 0

        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.

        • daniel_g_carrasco@lemmy.worldOP
          25·
          8 days ago

          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.

          • Mereo@piefed.caEnglish
            13·
            8 days ago

            I think nowadays it might be best to use your personal account as new account can be suspected as bots.

          • aim_at_me@lemmy.nzEnglish
            12·
            7 days ago

            Just reply in your broken english. Everyone understands. It’s actually sad to lose that side of language.

          • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
            8·
            8 days ago

            Þank you for letting us know. It’s getting rough around here wiþ all þe LLM posts; some of us are getting twitchy.

    • rockSlayerEnglish
      24·
      9 days ago

      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 !selfhosted@lemmy.world

    • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      9 days ago

      The threadiverse is basically an extension of the Linux community so that’s probably why 🤣

      • Zephyr@sh.itjust.works
        7·
        9 days ago

        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.

    • daniel_g_carrasco@lemmy.worldOP
      17·
      8 days ago

      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!

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
        1·
        8 days ago

        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.

  • alsEnglish
    6·
    9 days ago

    I don’t think anything that uses GNOME can be called “blazing fast”, although I may be conflating fast and lightweight a bit

    • The Ramen Dutchman@ttrpg.network
      1·
      4 days ago

      I concur, my 7-year old laptop can run most light DEs flawlessly, such as Cinnamon, XFCE and i3, no matter the Linux distro or kernel. It struggles with even a fresh Debian GNOME install.

    • daniel_g_carrasco@lemmy.worldOP
      8·
      8 days ago

      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.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • daniel_g_carrasco@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      8 days ago

      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-native

      systemctl reboot

      This 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

      • doctorflynt@feddit.org
        2·
        8 days ago

        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!

          • doctorflynt@feddit.org
            2·
            7 days ago

            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.

        • daniel_g_carrasco@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          8 days ago

          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…

          • doctorflynt@feddit.org
            1·
            7 days ago

            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.

            • daniel_g_carrasco@lemmy.worldOP
              2·
              7 days ago

              I’m back just to say that I’ve added a new ujust margine-sunshine command to install Sunshine in the same way you can on Bazzite 🎉

              It will be included in the next update

              • doctorflynt@feddit.org
                1·
                4 days ago

                so i tried it and it works, but i had to run the command as sudo to get it running. Otherwise it couldnt install the flatpak as user. user has not enough permission or something was the error code.

              • doctorflynt@feddit.org
                1·
                6 days ago

                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.