My distro of choice is Debian (I like their philosophy and it works great on my laptop) but I have an nVidia card in my desktop PC, and driver management was kind of annoying. Decided to try Kubuntu, which worked ok, but I didn’t really love, and then I didn’t update for a bit too long and had some repo issues trying to install updates. I didn’t bother digging into what the fix would be, since I had been considering Bazzite for a while, as it has been talked about a lot for gaming.
Knowing literally nothing other than “Bazzite works out of the box with nVidia” I figured I’d give it a go. First off, I was surprised at the size of the image, and how long the install took. I did some reading about atomic distros and began to understand why things were set up that way. Seems pretty cool! I still don’t love that as soon as I logged in on my fresh install, Steam opened up and asked for a log in, but that is what I signed up for with Bazzite, I guess. The nVidia drivers out of the box worked fantastic, as advertised, and I love a good KDE desktop, so it’s not all bad.
Initially I was frustrated that some things weren’t working in the flatpak versions of the app (couldn’t get to my 3d printer using the .local address from the browser because flatpak has a bug with mDNS) and layering a package with rpm-ostree seems like overkill and not a good experience. Then I watched some videos on distrobox.
I can just distrobox create --image debian:latest debian-box and then use apt install for whatever packages I want, export them and use them as if they were natively installed on Bazzite??? And this works on any distro??? I have been using Linux exclusively for a few years (and on and off for more years), but I have been totally out of the loop with distrobox and atomic distros. This feels like the same level of magic I felt when I first dual booted Ubuntu back in the Windows Vista days. This seems like it will fix 99% of the issues I run into on Linux.
I know distrobox isn’t exclusive to atomic distros, but I wouldn’t have discovered it if not for Bazzite.
Anyway, none of this is really new info, but I just wanted to nerd out about it for a bit with people who will know what I’m talking about.
@YesIAmHoomanNoCat @AldinTheMage they can exist for you only, it depends, is your device an unsupported or Linux-aggressive one? I have a Gigabyte laptop that is very aggressive towards Linux but is pretty much supported, and I don’t have any shame to say that I use Cachy, Generally Linux since I bought it (the Laptop), I know this because I bought to my brother a sibling Laptop, same brand, and last year it did a very stupid thing, it activated secure boot with no way to disable it
@YesIAmHoomanNoCat @AldinTheMage a quick google search revealed that this was common & someone posted about it on Gigabyte Support forum & the reply was that “your laptop doesn’t support Linux”, also another result gave a relatively simple solution, but the damage was done, I lost my brother to the dark side, & I don’t think there sells in tunisia a Linux-friendly device (yes not even a SteamDeck)
I mean thanks for your research but it’s not applicable.
I have a custom desktop with a MSi board and the proclaimed ‘just works’ distro is lacking.
I’m just grumpy and tired if having to troubleshoot everyone of my linux installs :(