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.
I’d definitely suggest CachyOS if you’re looking for speed and none of the downsides of Bazzite and other immutable OSes.
But only if you’re looking for a bleeding edge, gaming-focused Linux OS. There are plenty of options in the Linux ecosystem and really all are valid unless they are significantly out-of-date.
The problem with CachyOS is that it’s arch-based, which is fine, but I wouldn’t recommend it for people who aren’t willing to deal with arch problems and be familiar (or willing to learn) using the CLI. I normally just point people to either mint or bazzite depending on how many games they play.
I agree, just was trying to recommend something that may be marginally more performant. Mint and Bazzite are solid options. I can’t wait until COSMIC matures and I can safely recommend PopOS.