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.
I…I don’t understand. Why would you use Bazzite for software development and not gaming when user is not a gamer but just likes KDE?
you can literally put KDE on anything. Bazzite isn’t friendly to installing anything that isn’t a flatpak or whatever.
Just use a different distro. you don’t need Bazzite. Switch them to like Fedora KDE or something.
And to people in this thread trying to push a camel through a pin hole…why? you’re talking about setting up VMs and Distroboxs or just using flatpaks on Bazzite when the most painless solution is to just switch distros.
You picked the wrong distro, just switch them to something more appropriate for what they want to do.
I’m a software developer first and a gamer second. Being a “gaming” distro does not detract from anything else, really. It just means that getting proper GPU acceleration is easy, and you’re likely to want that for development too. That was actually why I chose Bazzite. I was tired of wrestling with CUDA and ROCm.
It’s not “gaming” vs “developing”. That’s a false dichotomy.
The real choice is immutable vs traditional. And I’ll admit, immutable distros have a big learning curve. But it forces you to learn techniques that will make your life easier no matter where you go. The time I spent wrestling with dependencies on Debian or Ubuntu or OpenSuse just because I didn’t know about Distrobox…
Unless your needs are very narrow and unchanging, you’re likely to run into something that’s a giant pain in the ass no matter which distro you choose. I used to use Ubuntu LTSR so I could install a few big things in easy mode, but it made everything else harder because it was so outdated. Switched to OpenSuse Tumbleweed and everything was modern but those few vendors don’t support it so I had to wrestle with dependencies.
The answer to this problem is Distrobox. It’s the answer on Ubuntu, it’s the answer on OpenSuse, and it’s the answer on Bazzite. I’m never going back to dependency hell because I can just run everything the environment it is specifically designed for.
If you’re wondering “should I use distro X, Y, or Z”, the answer is simply “yes”. :D
Yeah, I don’t understand OP’s post, in good part because it’s really not saying anything, just mentioning some vague “problems!”, what are those problems, that distrobox can’t handle?
This is me and i second all of this
He fell for the memes.
To give some context to this.
Bazzite is an immutable distro. Fedora calls them atomic. It means many many things are only really updatable online, and you arent allowed to make manual changes to them. Hence immutable.
Bazzite is a very bad choice if you want the same kind of use you’d get out of a windows or mint machine, or any other non atomic distro.
The shitty news here is if you want a machine you’re doing software dev on you’re going to need to figure out the nvidia driver shit, which is a pain in the ass but if you’re a software developer you should be able to do it.
The dev-focused atomic Fedora variants solve all Nvidia issues for you, there’s no reason why you should trouble yourself with it.
Or just go with a arch derivative that packages Nvidia driver like endeavorOS
Just installed endeavorOS from Ubuntu Studio (new Linux user as of about 3 months ago). Do you know if there’s a way to add the packages after install? I thought I selected the nvidia install, but it was using integrated graphics so maybe not, so I did some manual installs with nvidia-inst like --prime. It seems to be using driver 580 now instead of nouveau.
I was hoping another distro might fix an issue in Studio with DaVinci Resolve not showing video, but the same issue persists in endeavourOS (keeps saying gpu is low on memory). Running from terminal DRI_PRIME=1 to set it on performance mode doesn’t help so I’m wondering if it’s a full on Resolve issue. I’d rather not reinstall endeavourOS and lose everything I’ve done if it’s possible the OS can do some nvidia magic after install.
Yeah, I found out the hard way as a new user. Maybe it would be better to move to Fedora and set up everything myself. Bazzite might be perfect for consoles, but for desktop use it limits you a lot, even for normal usage, not just for software development.
For example? Because I’ve read this repeated a lot by people who don’t understand immutable distros. Of course you can’t “dnf install clang”, but you can use distrobox for that, ends up fairly similar.
It only limits you if you expect things to work exactly the same as with any other distro. If you spend some time reading up on how it expects you to solve different tasks, it doesn’t limit you for 99+% of scenarios.