I recently set up Bazzite on my friend’s system after switching from Linux Mint due to some Nvidia driver issues. Although the hardware problems are not there anymore, the distro is now facing problems installing certain programs for software development that they had no problem installing in the previous distro. I think there are issues related to the immutability of the distro, though I am not sure since I am new to Linux too. Additionally, my friend is worried about higher storage consumption and slower performance in certain applications.
I realise the distro is primarily meant for gamers and my friend is not much of a gamer themselves, however they told me they appreciate its friendlier KDE interface so I wish to avoid switching from this distro again if possible. However I fear that they may encounter more errors in the future and that I may not be available to help them out whenever needed, so I am in a bit of a conundrum.
Thus I intend to ask here if it is possible to arrange something for easing development related tasks e.g. VM, distrobox etc. or whether it is easier to simply switch to some other compatible distro.
Actual professional software developer here with 10 years of experience. I work on linux for linux targets.
You wanna play around? Use whatever you want with the latest and greatest packages and tweaks, you will encounter issues, learn how to solve them, that is for fun.
You wanna work? Use a serious distro with proven stability, I use debian for example. Yes installing nvidia drivers is a touch less user friendly than on bazzite, but when I update I don’t have surprises and when I boot up in the morning i don’t have to wonder if today will be debugging and coding for my product or for the damn tool i am using to develop it.
If you want to do both at the same time without knowing which side any given task will fall under use NixOS
I like the idea of NixOS and Guix System, but to recommend them to someone new to Linux is crazy.
To be clear this was not a recommendation lol I completely agree with you
Or have a pc for work with the most stable and boring distro possible, and a pc for the rest with a real os, like arch. Or if only means for one pc dualboot.
So no, i disagree. NixOS is not stable nor proven in my book, it certainly is a good idea though. If it still is around in 5 or so years i’ll consider giving it a shot.
It’s like 20 years old, with stable releases for over 10 years. How old does something have to be for you lol?
10 years old, first stable release in 2013. It needs to have a significant userbase for 5 to 10 years for me to consider using. Again, I am not here for the adventure, a computer is a tool, I have work and family.
There are dozens of us!
(Deb stable is all I work on. Everything else is what I play around on.)
So what I hear you saying is: install PikaOS, a Debian-based gaming distro.
(h/j 😉)
The point is there are much more of us, than gamers on bazzite or enthusiasts on NixOS. The tons of institutional debian and rhel users offset the gamers and experimenters. I want to work, not be the offloaded qa of someone else. So i will not use fedora for work for example. I will also not run a non mainstream distro, for the same reason.
Oh well aware, just making a joke since you mostly see people comment that they run arch or bazzite or nix or whatever while around and about on here. The reality is just as you say, there are many, many, many folks on Debian stable.
Hard disagree.
Installing Debian on Nvidia means you are maintaining Nvidia yourself, and you are just holding your hands together hoping the 3rd party repo’s don’t fall out out of sync and you don’t have to troubleshoot some Nvidia conflict yourself. This is the whole reason I left that ecosystem behind, it was a huge waste of my time…
…Maybe you got lucky and just didn’t run into any Nvidia bugs? But that was not my experience.
(And to be clear this is different if you’re using it headless or something).
Dear sir/madam, NVIDIA 550 is available in the Debian stable repo itself so no need for third party repos and therefore no significant risk of breakage. If that driver works well enough you’re good. Ubuntu LTS has NVIDIA 580 in its official repo. I’m running in on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS as I write. Then of course if you’re on Debian and NVIDIA 550 does not work for you, you could grab the official driver installer from NVIDIA which would very likely work fine on Debian stable, and it won’t break on its own via Debian updates since Debian stable doesn’t ship major version changes of its packages between releases. You’d likely have to uninstall, then reinstall every few years when you upgrade to the next stable Debian release, but that’s best practice for anything that was installed outside of Debian’s repo.
There’s always a possibility for unintended fuckups but these methods are fairly safe and stable. Using 3rd party repos is significantly more risky to break things one of those days as you innocently
apt upgrade.As another software guy, I second this advice. Resolving a driver issue on Debian Stable or a Debian-based distro (for example) is typically much easier and would cause many fewer problems down the road than going to a less predictable OS to solve a driver problem. The underlying OS contains so much more software than a driver that the likelihood of introducing problems when changing the OS is way higher. I used to solve hardware issues by changing OS back in the 2000s when I didn’t know any better. Once I learned enough to keep a stable base OS and modify just the bits that need modifying, I stopped reinstalling. My main machine was last reinstalled in 2014. It’s been running Ubuntu LTS since then. Its hardware platform has been changed multiple times.