Documentation
FAQ
If you have a question that's not answered here, open a discussion on the margine-image repo.
▸Why immutable / atomic? What's wrong with apt?
Nothing's wrong with apt. The trade-off is different. A traditional distro lets you change anything and trusts you to keep track; an immutable distro trades some flexibility for reliable upgrades, easy rollback, and identical-everywhere behaviour. Margine's pitch is that most desktop users don't need the flexibility and do need the reliability.
▸What is Margine actually based on?
Bluefin DX (Universal Blue's developer-oriented Bluefin variant), which is itself based on Fedora Silverblue 44. We replace the stock kernel with a MOK-signed CachyOS kernel and add a curated set of Flatpaks, GNOME defaults, and validators on top.
▸Can I still use dnf / dnf install?
Not directly — /usr is read-only. But rpm-ostree install <pkg> does the same thing, just by rebuilding the OS image with the new package layered on. Use it when you really need an OS-level package (kernel module, system service). For applications, prefer Flatpak.
▸Is Margine Gaming a separate OS?
No. The separate Gaming image was retired on June 6, 2026. Margine now ships one OS image, and the gaming stack is an opt-in layer installed with ujust margine-gaming. ujust margine-gaming-remove rolls it back.
▸Can I change the CPU scheduler at runtime?
Yes — Margine ships six sched_ext BPF schedulers in the base image, switchable live from the Margine CPU Scheduler launcher in Activities or with ujust margine-scheduler lavd. What each one is for, how persistence works, and how to benchmark the difference: CPU schedulers.
▸Where are the ISOs?
Internet Archive. Each release has a dated identifier margine-live-iso-YYYYMMDD, with a Torrent magnet + direct HTTP mirrors + SHA256SUMS. Linked from the Install section on the home page.
▸How often do you ship updates?
The image is rebuilt on every push to main (typically several times a week), plus a weekly nightly cron. Each build only becomes :stable if it passes a QEMU smoke-boot. Users on the latest stable get a daily background update (via uupd, which stages it for the next reboot).
▸What happens to my data on a fresh install?
The installer (Anaconda) wipes the target disk by default — this is a clean install. /home, dotfiles, documents, browser profiles: backup them first. Anaconda also offers manual partitioning if you want to preserve an existing /home on a separate partition.