Linux@lemmy.mlbydaniel_g_carrasco@lemmy.world
2 hours

finally Margine OS ! My super fast and atomic linux distro ⚡️

English
Margine OS: CPU scheduler GUI, branding, Files, Heroes III, and fastfetch

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

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    • als@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      59 minutes

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

      • daniel_g_carrasco@lemmy.world
        2 minutes

        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.

    • Zephyr@sh.itjust.works
      2 hours

      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
        53 minutes

        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
          37 minutes

          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.

        • Zephyr@sh.itjust.works
          1 hour

          Makes sense, I’ve gathered that the majority of Lemmy is very angry about anything AI, or I guess anything maybe AI related.

          • Helix 🧬@feddit.orgEnglish
            28 minutes

            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

      • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
        1 hour

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

        • Zephyr@sh.itjust.works
          1 hour

          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.

          • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
            1 hour

            You’re not wrong. Just not sure why you replied to me when saying it.

    • just_another_person@lemmy.world
      2 hours

      “…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.

      • daniel_g_carrasco@lemmy.world
        8 minutes

        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.

      • EchoDelta_9@programming.dev
        1 hour

        This isnt a distro

        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?