If I understand it correctly, Bluefin was just the first downstream uBlue variant like Aurora that had the various goodies built into the images. Bluefin effectively being the Gnome version of Aurora. I think it was simpler to tie the Aurora builds into the existing Bluefin pipeline for generating images and packages.

I highly recommend Aurora (dx) if it sounds like it fits the bill for what you’re looking for. After starting out with Kinoite and rebasing on Aurora-dx, the latter just feels like Kinoite with all of the desired additional packages already baked in, and some great additional shell scripts for convenience.

Rebasing sounded intimidating but it was literally just a simple shell command and a reboot. One additional command if you want to hang onto the previous image the way you had it. Rpm-ostree is pretty magical.

Three and a half years ago

Wow, I’m jealous you live somewhere that you can downgrade to 2.5Gb/s!

If you go that Banana Pi route, just be aware that the process of getting mainline OpenWrt on the thing is a little unusual, but not difficult at all. Just requires a cheap serial adapter and spare micro sd card.

There device has onboard NAND, NOR, and EMMC, as well as the card reader. Not all can be used simultaneously, so there are dip switches that set what is booted/visible.

Official install method is basically as follows:

-Hook up serial adapter to the send/receive/ground pins on the board, open serial terminal in something like PuTTY

-Set dip switches, boot the sd-card

-In serial terminal select option to install to NAND

-Power off, change dip switches, boot to NAND

-In serial terminal select option to install to eMMC

-Power off, change dip switches

-You’re done, now booting mainline on eMMC

Basically just putting the image on the NAND memory temporarily so it can be put back on eMMC since eMMC and sd-card can’t be used at the same time.

The Banana Pi forums are a good resource in addition to the OpenWRT docs.

My only gripe at this point is that the mainline configuration by default only sets up a 100mb partition on the eMMC to install packages to. Some folks have had success resizing that partition but I wasn’t having any luck there, so I may just compile it myself and set it larger. That change should be persistent through system upgrades after it’s done once.

Anyway, if you or someone reading this goes that route, I hope this helps!

Check out the Banana Pi BPI-R3. It’s getting mainline OpenWRT support with the 2023 release (RC builds available now). Amazing performance to price ratio. The only thing on your list that might be an issue is the 5Gb SFP. It has two SFP cages but I believe they max out at 2.5Gb. Also recommended to get the bundle with case and antennas included. Amazing price for what you get.

So it’s not a total loss then?