Back on Track - Weekly Report #8

The three months since our last weekly update have been jam-packed with infrastructure changes, Terra fixes, tons of Helium work, and our first conference appearance. So let's review in this 10-week report.

Back on Track - Weekly Report #8
Photo by Emre / Unsplash

Baby's First Conference

Jaiden Riordan and Owen Zimmerman presented at Minnebar in Minneapolis this weekend! Thanks to everyone who came out!

When life gives you an empty table and 10 minutes, you make an impromptu booth, here's Owen sitting at it.

The Great (Kubernetes) Migration

An exerpt from Full Sail: Migrating our Infrastructure to Kubernetes

Deploying and maintaining software on servers is a pain. Seriously. We have a large stack of both internal and external services that we use to aid in development and operate internally. The issue is: our infra is too decentralized and too centralized simultaneously.

Since the acquisition of Ultramarine Linux, we have a fleet of services running different services, but everything ran on one single Proxmox VE node in Los Angeles. The issue is we have to deploy every single service manually (and that node being a single-point-of-failure.) We deploy an LXC container for each service, deploy Tailscale on it, and then use it as a mesh that connects them, all by hand.

This convoluted process got us thinking; is there a way to combine our compute power and deploy services on all of them at the same time, while also ensuring high-availability? The answer is Kubernetes.

You can read Cappy's full writeup here.

We are still working on migrating our cluster to an ARM Platform, but that work has mostly been completed at the time of writing.

Moving on up (Movin on up) to Thirty Eight

This reference would've worked better with thirty five, you win some, you lose some.

Mado has been hard at work on Terra, and our Fedora 38 repository is almost here! This is our first Fedora version change, so please have patience while we wrap it up.

At the time of writing, our mass rebuild has begun, and we're currently working out some kinks.

Additionally, the team is hard at work on Ultramarine Linux 38! We hope to have a release out alongside Terra. We'll write another blog post when they're ready.

Disky Business

ISO builds for tauOS have been revamped! Our alpha images now include our in house apps, and we've fixed many bugs with the process. We don't recommend using these ISOs yet, unless you know what you're doing, they're still missing features and not complete.

Accelerating Past Fermion

For the past few weeks, we've had two terminal apps for tauOS. While you could argue that Fermion is for beginners and Accelerator is for advanced users, it still doesn't make sense for us to make multiple terminal apps. Because of this, we have decided to retire Fermion in favour of Acclerator. You can try it out with this Flatpakref.

Waiter! There's a Kotlin in my Helium

Lains has spent the past weeks working on quality assurance for Helium, the experience should be much better now!

Alyxia Sother, a new team member, has been hard at work on Helium support in Kotlin with gtk-kn. We're excited to release the Kotlin developer experience alongside Vala and Rust in the near future.


Hey, it's Jaiden. It's been a while since I've written one of these, and I never want to have this long of a break from weekly updates ever again. Our community is incredibly important to us, and it disappoints me that we left you in the dark for so long.

Additionally, we're trying a new format for the titles of these updates, please let us know what you think on our Discord server!

Thanks for All the Fish