Atomic Image [LWN.net]

Atomic Image

Posted May 13, 2026 17:16 UTC (Wed) by spmfox (subscriber, #125241)
Parent article: Friction in Fedora over AI developer desktop initiative

Isn't this exactly the type of thing a bootc image could solve?

Bazzite already proved this, and I'm doing something similar myself using Fedora + bootc + ZFS.

Just publish a image with all this non-free stuff added in top of vanilla Fedora. I use Fedora version n-1 to get around the Kernel being updated frequently. It works great.

I don't understand why any ideals need to be compromised or policies need to be rewritten when we literally have the tools and the pipelines to make this happen and it's never been easier.

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Atomic Image

Posted May 13, 2026 18:57 UTC (Wed) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457) [Link] (1 responses)

That's more or less what the idea is, but the reason this is getting so heated is that to some folks at least, doing that as part of "Fedora" (as opposed to doing it downstream from Fedora under a different name) *is* compromising ideals and rewriting policies. Since one of the Fedora foundations is Freedom - https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/#_freedom - and we have historically been dead against official "Fedora" things containing non-free stuff.

It *is* allowable under current policies for something to call itself a "Fedora Remix" and include non-free stuff. I don't think it's entirely clear that the letter of any laws/policies/ideals would be violated by the existence of a "Fedora initiative" whose actual output was a "Fedora remix" with non-free stuff in it. But it's clearly something that some folks are not happy with and consider as being outside the historic expectations.

Atomic Image

Posted May 14, 2026 2:29 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Sometimes it helps to make exceptional and temporary concessions / "tactical retreats".

I mean: exceptionally let IBM put an official "Fedora" sticker on all the AI stuff they love, while making sure at the more technical level (that marketing can't understand) that this is all still built "downstream" as a remix and does not fundamentally change the maintenance effort or anything technical.

In other words: be pragmatic and don't fight the AI religion with anti-AI religion.

After a while, usage metrics and user feedback will eventually allow decisions actually data-driven.

Atomic Image

Posted May 13, 2026 18:57 UTC (Wed) by ffmancera (subscriber, #177137) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, you are completely right.. but then they won't have the shiny AI thing.

Although it is not supposed to be about AI despite the word being in the title. :/

If only OpenCL worked well

Posted May 13, 2026 19:54 UTC (Wed) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188) [Link]

OpenCL and Vulkan are the cross-platform, portable solutions. Sadly, they don’t offer alternatives to Nvidia’s heavily optimized libraries.

Atomic Image

Posted May 14, 2026 13:41 UTC (Thu) by fw (subscriber, #26023) [Link]

Generating the images locally also has the advantage that they are customized to what you actually need. Generic images supporting different GPUs/GPU vendors will be very, very large.