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
Good question. The whole thing is built and managed as a bootc/OCI image on CI, and I documented every step (Containerfile, the kernel build and signing, the curated deltas, the build/test/release flow) in the handbook: https://margine.the-empty.place/handbook
Full source is on GitHub too: https://github.com/daniel-g-carrasco/margine-image