Bazzite Gnome- a hidden gem, as many think Bazzite is just for gaming, but it also has a great desktop mode. Pretty much indestructible (immutable), polished, pretty, has a modern kernel (so good driver support) and has Firefox and Libreoffice installable as Flatpaks. Great for kids and grandmas.

Where tools?

I have just seen your edit. I had a similar problem with no audio but meter levels working on my toughbook. Could you start terminal, type alsamixer and turn all the volumes up? Press F6 to swap through sound cards.

For me I had to adjust the headphone volume.

Cool beans. Let us know how your experience goes and if you have problems. I have it on four devices here and it has been very smooth every time.

Which variant are you trying? KDE? Gnome? Nvidia?

Seconding just installing something easy and pre-setup. Try a desktop variant of Bazzite (I like the gnome flavour) and see if most of your issues just disappear.

Me too. The Bazzite desktops are amazing.

Seconding and thirding the use of an immutable OS. I specifically like Bazzite Gnome. People know it for gaming, but many don’t know it has a fantastic desktop mode, suitable for children, mums and grandmas.

Almost all the software a casual user needs is available from their Flatpak App Store, and it’s pretty as hell (looks very Apple-like and shiny). I have been using it for about a year and I am still impressed how fluid, polished and solid everything feels.

The desktop version of Bazzite is such a hidden gem in the Linux scene. Polished, fast, and no fuss. I rate it the best distro by a good margin, and I have tried many many distros.

How are you dealing with the immutable side of things? Was it easy to get your head around?

Not seen this done manually before. Neat idea!

I got burned by something like this on Manjaro when a rolling update completely borked my graphics card. The devs reacted in a similar way and it made me realise that my priority is stability over bleeding edge and tinkering.

On that day I moved to Fedora. Stable as hell, no fuss. My main OS should just work and not kill itself.

I still love it but jumped over to Bazzite Gnome recently, which is like Fedora with a few bells on top, coupled with having a read-only root-filesystem (stability, man!). It also comes with distrobox, which will let you run arch natively in a container if you need the AUR.

Damn straight. Another reason not to buy a pi.

1. Go into your BIOS and disable Wake On Lan (WOL).

2. Boot Windows, start Device Manager, right click your network card (probably Intel I217-V) and disable all WOL settings there too.

3. Completely power down the PC (don’t just reboot) and then try booting Linux.

Bazzite is stuffed full of polish, especially the Gnome variant and, little known to me at the time, they have a whole set of non-gaming-related tools in the background for developers who use containers (distrobox, podman etc), which is exactly what I use for my job.

I was so impressed that I have installed it as my main OS on my laptop and have replaced SteamOS with it on my SteamDeck.

This distro is one of the best I have used. It is definitely one to keep an eye on.

I don’t know if it fits your use-case but a little known feature is to use a second local drive/folder as a remote, like this:

D:
mkdir D:\git_repos\my_project.git
git init --bare D:\git_repos\my_project.git

C:
cd C:\path\to\your\project
git init
git remote add origin file:///D:/git_repos/my_project.git

This way, you can now push to origin and it will send your commits to your repo on your second drive.

I hate to be that guy

That’s okay. Don’t be.

but OP gave no indication of their gender.

This is unnecessary white-knight pseudo-concern-trolling designed to derail from the topic at hand. This isn’t a conversation about gender. If I misgendered dontblink, I’ll send 5$ as an apology. You don’t, however, get to choose the language I use, as I equally don’t get to choose yours. Now, back to the Linux discussion:

Could you explain what exactly this “tight integration” pertains? AFAIK these are just regular old global-state distros but with read-only snapshotting for said global state (RPM-ostree, “immutable”).

Certainly. That’s essentially absolutely correct. In the case of Bazzite specifically:

• Distrobox comes pre-installed, enabling application installation inside sandboxed Podman containers with restricted access to /dev. Unlike Toolbox, Distrobox can be configured with different and fully isolated home folders, meaning containers won’t have access to your GPG/SSH keys or other user files unless explicitly configured.
• ujust is pre-installed (docs), providing helper scripts for various tasks, including easy virtualization setup for virt-manager/qemu/kvm for running completely isolated operating systems.
• BoxBuddy is pre-installed, a GUI for easy management of distrobox containers, also allowing you to alias/sync .desktop files from sandboxes to your main home folder, allowing you to start sandboxed GUI apps from your normal GNOME/KDE menu.
• Waydroid integration can be added via ujust, allowing launching of sandboxed, isolated Android apps directly from the desktop environment.

That is their one and only stated goal: Run games.

That’s incorrect. While gaming is their primary focus—especially with the “big-screen” edition that boots directly into Steam—Bazzite also offers fully functional, polished desktop environments with thoughtful defaults. For example, even if only an insignificant tweak, GNOME on Bazzite has minimize/maximize buttons enabled by default (unlike Fedora Silverblue). It also supports developer workflows and even isolated, containerized systemd services. (docs). They offer Bazzite editions which boot directly to the desktop environment as default, leaving Steam as only a normal Flatpak application.

Could you point out the specific concrete things Bazzite does to improve separation between applications beyond the sandboxing tools that are available to any distribution?

None, beyond having them pre-installed out of the box. But it’s important to distinguish that dontblink asked for a solution, not the solution. I suggested Bazzite GNOME because it provides a nearly complete setup without needing to manually mess with rpm-ostree first. Everything it can do can also be done on other similar immutable systems with a little extra work.

He specifically mentions containerization, Flatpaks, Docker and Toolboxes, which these suggested Fedora Spins are designed to integrate with as tightly as possible, so completely relevant.

Also, Bazzite is completely the opposite of an OS designed to run one app at once, which means you haven’t tried it before rubbishing it as a suggestion.

p.s. Don’t take this the wrong way but the phrasing in your comments here make them sound quite aggressive and could lead them to be interpreted in the wrong way. Would you speak to someone like that on the street?

Might be controversial as it is usually intended for gaming but: Bazzite (Gnome Edition). It is like Fedora Silverblue but has distrobox and virtualization baked in without fiddling AND… built in Waydroid so you can run Android apps. I am incredibly impressed with it.

Good choice! Me too! Workstation on the PC and trying to learn Silverblue on the laptop. Have you played with Silverblue?

The use case is more for server and linux-type operating systems but I bet there are some crazy folk who use it for their desktops. No idea!