Nate Drake decides to take this Thai Fedora-based distro for a spin and finds it fast, simple and surprisingly customisable.
Ultramarine is remarkable in that it’s the only Linux distro we’ve encountered to come out of Thailand. The aim, according to the project wiki, is to be “a spiritual successor to Korora Linux, with the goal of making an operating system that ‘just works’.”
Korora was a remix of Fedora Linux and discontinued in 2017. True to its word, though, the current version of Ultramarine (code name Bears) is based on Fedora 39.
The OS is available with a number of desktop environments. The Flagship edition, which is the focus of this review, uses Budgie, and in the developers’ own words, includes their “latest and greatest software”. It weighs in at around 2GB. Other versions are available with Gnome and KDE, as well as a Pantheon edition, which uses the default desktop of Elementary OS. Crucially, there’s also now an ARM edition of Ultramarine, which can be flashed on to a Raspberry Pi.
Whichever version you choose, Ultramarine has undergone a revised build process that no longer relies on Red Hat’s Live Image Creator. The team has used its own in-house builder, Katsu. Due to being written in Rust, it is not only lightning fast but allows better customisation of images, like those for Chromebooks.
Currently, installation images for Chromebook are available but only for more recent models. The team plans to use Katsu to bring Ultramarine to other Chromebook models in the near future.
The OS also now ships with a new default desktop background, created by the ever brilliant Aikoyori. There are five other wallpapers if you find the bundled treetop theme isn’t to your taste. If you choose the Flagship edition, as we did, you’ll also see the default typeface is now Inter instead of the previous Cantarell.
Ultramarine 39 has also now been updated to use the Nemo file manager instead of Nautilus. While we don’t agree with the developers’ assessment that Nemo is necessarily more powerful, it definitely matches the look and feel of the Flagship edition.
The OS also comes with a new in-house tool called Stellar, which autom
