Ultramarine Linux: Fedora Made Easy and Beautiful for Everyone

I’ve often said that a beautiful desktop environment can make or break a distribution. Sure, there are plenty of people who don’t care what their desktops look like, as long as they perform well and help improve workflows.

I stare at a desktop for hours on end and would much rather see something pleasing before my eyes than something drab. Fortunately, there are plenty of Linux desktop environments out there that are capable of besting both macOS and Windows in the elegance department.

But for a Linux distribution to really be useful, it has to also be easy to use. Of the hundreds of available distributions, there are a select few that I would deem worthy for those new to Linux. For the longest time, I refused to add Fedora to that list. However, over the past few years, there have been spins (both official and unofficial) that elevate Fedora to new heights of user-friendliness.

One such distribution is called Ultramarine Linux. This Fedora-based operating system is designed to provide an easy-to-use experience for those who are new to Linux, while also offering more advanced features to tempt power users away from their current desktop.

Ultramarine Linux differs from standard Fedora in several ways:

• It includes several tweaks and customizations to the desktop to enhance the experience.
• Added repositories for expanded software titles.
• Automated installation of third-party repositories.
• Polished editions of popular desktop environments.
• Adds performance enhancements like the System76 CPU scheduler.
• Custom wallpapers and desktop layouts.
• Multiple desktop environments to choose from (KDE Plasma, GNOME, Budgie, etc.)
• Addition tools, such as the Starship prompt and Pop Launcher.

Although you won’t find a massive trove of pre-installed applications, you do get apps like LibreOffice, Firefox, and Rhythmbox. Thanks to the extra repositories and the addition of Flatpak support baked into the app store, there’s a wealth of applications to be installed from within the GUI.

Ultramarine is the distribution that introduced me to the Starship prompt and I’m all for it. If you’re unfamiliar with Starship, it’s a prompt written in Rust that offers cross-shell compatibility, improved speed and performance, a minimal (but customizable) design, rich information display, features like dynamic syntax checking, and easy configuration. The thing I like about the Starship prompt is that it has a very clean interface that anyone could use (Figure 1).

Who Is Ultramarine Right For?

It’s important to remember that Ultramarine is based on Fedora, which is a great distribution for power users, partially because it’s considered a “bleeding edge distribution,” but also because of the frequent updates and the developer-centric focus.

While Ultramarine still enjoys those aspects, its primary focus is on usability and the developers go to great lengths to deliver on that. How? Consider this:

• It includes the essential software you need and the means to easily install more.
• Includes all of the multimedia codecs you need.
• Offers an array of user-friendly desktops from which to choose.
• Includes flatpak support.
• Uses practical default settings, so you won’t have to spend much time (if any) tweaking the desktop.
• Simple updates.

This is one of the best things about Ultramarine Linux… it’s good for anyone. If you’ve never experienced Linux before, Ultramarine is a great place to start (just make sure you choose a version with a user-friendly desktop, such as KDE Plasma or Budgie). If you’ve used Linux a bit and would like to learn more, Ultramarine is an outstanding choice because it’ll get you up and running and doesn’t prevent you from getting into more advanced features (such as SELinux). If you’re an advanced user or developer, Ultramarine is still Fedora, which makes for a great dev platform or admin OS.

The Budgie Take

I opted to go with the Budgie desktop version of Ultramarine, partially because I’m a big fan and it’s really easy to customize. Out of the box, the Ultramarine take on Budgie is beautiful, but too dark and typical for me. Not a problem. |After about two minutes, I had the bottom panel changed to a dock, the dark mode off, and the desktop icons removed. That was all it took to get the desktop better suited for my taste.

I’ve been a fan of Budgie for some time now and the Ultramarine take does not disappoint. The only issue I have is the inability to change the theme of the window title bars. Given my distaste for dark themes, I’d love to be able to change that without editing CSS files, which is not something I would recommend for new users. There are other ways of achieving this, none of which are simple. For an easier experience with theming, I would suggest going with the official Ubuntu Budgie distribution.

Performance

If you’ve ever used Fedora Linux, then you know how well it performs. For the past five or so years, Fedora performance has caught up with most major Linux distributions and can even perform as well as some lightweight distributions.

Applications install and open quickly, animations and scrolling are smooth as silk, and it feels absolutely rock solid.

However, I did experience one issue with Ultramarine. When I opened the Software app, it informed me that the latest version (41) was available. According to the official Ultramarine website, the latest version is 40. When I attempt to run the upgrade, it fails every time. It acts as if the updates are downloading, gets to around 26%, and craps out.

I don’t know if this is an anomaly, but it’s also preventing the update of regular applications. I’ve installed Ultramarine on several occasions and never experienced this issue, so I’m guessing it’s either a one-off or it’s a problem with the upgrade servers. Either way, I’ll continue attempting the upgrade (both via GUI and terminal) and hope it finally lands on its feet.

Other than that one glitch, Ultramarine was an absolute treat to use and I would imagine users of all types would find this distribution a great option for migrating away from macOS or Windows.

If I’ve piqued your interest, download an ISO of Ultramarine Linux and install it as a virtual machine or on a spare desktop to give it a go. You won’t regret it.

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