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.
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.