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.

  • TheMadCodger@piefed.socialEnglish
    19·
    22 hours ago

    If you’re not primarily a gamer, Bazzite has a sister Kinoite Aurora (or Bluefin if you want Gnome, but you said you like KDE), which is the same underlying OS, but not preconfigured for gaming. I use Bluefin on my laptop and Bazzite on my steam deck, and yeah I love not having to think about it.

    Also, have you read about rebasing?

    edit: Kinoite and Silverblue are Fedora’s default atomic distros. Aurora and Bluefin are the equivalents that are preconfigured out of the box for ease of use and related to Bazzite.

    • AldinTheMage@ttrpg.networkOPEnglish
      1·
      3 hours ago

      I have heard of rebasing but I haven’t dug into it. Sounds really cool!

      I do use my PC for gaming, but Bazzite did come with a lot of other “gaming” software that I don’t use, so it’s good to know there is a lighter weight alternative that otherwise has the same benefits.

      • TheMadCodger@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        29 minutes ago

        I’m no expert, but I think of it as two layers: your layer on top (where you keep things important to you) and the system layer on the bottom (what makes the computer actually run). Most people don’t care about that bottom layer, so may as well make it immutable.

        Rebasing is like lifting up your top layer and pivoting it onto a new bottom layer of a similar “os”. Updating is the same thing, it just pivots to an updated version of the same os. In either case, if something goes wrong, you reboot and choose the previous version and it pivots your top layer back.

        It’s been a while since I installed Bazzite but I remember it having an on boarding where you selected what you needed and it installed it for you. I skipped most of it. And I know Bluefin has a command you can run to install basic gaming programs. So you have options.

    • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      Is there anything aurora/bluefin gives that bazzite does not or is it just that bazzite adds the proton stuff? Reason is I like being game ready but I don’t mostly game with my laptop.

      • TheMadCodger@piefed.socialEnglish
        3·
        10 hours ago

        Bazzite is more aggressive with kernal updates and comes with a ton of gaming options and packages preconfigured. Bluefin is a designed more for productivity, but you can still game on it. It’s just not it’s main focus.

        But as long as you stay within the same DE, you can rebase from one to another.

      • sga@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        11 hours ago

        latter. afaik they just add steam (proton is then packaged by steam) (though you can additional download a external wine(or proton)) and some stuff for obs i think