Agreed. Bloody fantastic for general purpose. Seems like a well kept secret. A lot of people assume Bazzite is just Steam in Big-Screen mode.

So, I’m an all-around Bazzite fan, but it does have a bit of an odd learning curve. It’s easy to use for a beginner, child, or grandma. However, if you’re used to fiddling with your system, it might be a little harder to get into because you have to navigate the immutable nature of the OS, which can complicate some online tutorials and potentially lead to frustration for an intermediate/experienced user migrating from Windows.

So my suggestion would be:

Child - Bazzite

Grandma - Bazzite

Gamer - Bazzite

Experienced Windows user - Fedora or Mint, then once you’re used to Linux, Bazzite

Developer - Bazzite

I personally use the Gnome version. It’s really polished and pretty.

En garde!

Haven’t personally the need to connect tv boxes remotely- all of my mobile devices are handheld, so cell phone, laptop, steamdeck etc, all of which have pretty seamless wireguard clients, but I don’t see a reason why it wouldn’t work with the correct Wireguard client installed on a tv box. The only issue might be really old android versions.

I can recommend a local Wireguard server for this. I have one port on my router open for Wireguard and all of my devices can connect to it remotely.

Once connected, they can see all the devices on my local network, including my local jellyfin server. It works pretty painlessly and you don’t need to open any jellyfin ports to the world.

To add one more thing about Bazzite Gnome, as suggested above/below: next to it looking like Fedora, it comes with a thing built in called Distrobox, which is a way of quickly running different mini versions of Linux within Bazzite. This means you can run little Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora/Arch installations and use their package managers. If an app is missing on Bazzite, start up distrobox and install it there instead. It even works for GUI apps.

(This is more of a pro feature though- you don’t explicitly need it, but it gives you massive flexibility, which is normally hidden away.)

Mint for Windows refugees

Fedora for Mac Refugees

My choice: Bazzite GNOME for Gamers, Children and Grandmas. It’s pretty, is damn indestructible and has a speedy app store with loads of cool free apps.

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.