UPDATE 01:

Quick note for everyone following Margine: please report problems as GitHub issues from now on, so they all stay in one searchable place:

https://github.com/daniel-g-carrasco/margine-image/issues/new/choose

There is a short guided form for the ISO version, install method, Secure Boot state and logs. On an installed Margine system, you can also run ujust margine-report in a terminal. It collects all the useful information into one file.

Questions and general discussion are still welcome here. This is just for bugs.

Thanks!

After months of work, I’m finally releasing Margine OS, my own atomic Linux distro. The short version is that it’s fast.

It’s built on Bluefin DX, with Fedora bootc underneath, which means it keeps everything that already makes Bluefin good to use: 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 focused on 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 normally with Secure Boot enabled. 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 had always wanted. You can switch sched_ext CPU schedulers live from a small GUI, with scx_lavd when gaming and plain BORE the rest of the time.

There is also a small tool I wrote, Wayland Scroll Factor, for adjusting touchpad scroll and pinch speed, which GNOME still does not expose. This matters a lot on the Framework 13, where touchpad scrolling is unusably fast without it.

GNOME comes configured for tiling out of the box with o-tiling, a fork of System76’s Pop Shell, together with Hyprland-style keybindings. Gaming is one command away with a native Steam and Proton stack, inspired by Bazzite.

The whole image is built, tested and signed through CI, and the ISOs are distributed torrent-first through the Internet Archive.

I benchmarked the kernel on the same laptop, a Framework 13 with a Ryzen 5 7640U, changing only the ostree deployment between Margine OS and stock Bluefin DX.

The results were roughly 1.8x faster context-switch latency, 54% higher thread throughput, and 43 to 55% lower median scheduling latency, with a small cost at the worst-case tail. This is the expected BORE trade-off. The full method and raw data are available on the site.

It’s a personal, opinionated project with a single maintainer, so feedback and criticism are welcome.

There is also an experimental NVIDIA variant that I cannot test myself, since I do not have NVIDIA hardware. If you use NVIDIA and want to help test it, that would be very useful.

Site and download: https://margine.the-empty.place/

Docs and full benchmark: https://margine.the-empty.place/docs

  • Zephyr@sh.itjust.works
    566·
    13 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·
      13 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
        1915·
        13 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
          24·
          13 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·
            13 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·
            12 days ago

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

          • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
            813·
            13 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.

    • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      13 days ago

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

      • Zephyr@sh.itjust.works
        82·
        13 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.