I’m running Bazzite on my desktop now. I hopped distros again because wrestling with GPU drivers was just too much trouble. After I upgraded my GPU, I couldn’t get it working optimally in Debian (see my previous thread about OpenCL). On Bazzite, it’s handled for me out of the box.
To me, the only difference between a “gaming” distro and a regular distro is that gaming distros come with smarter hardware drivers and configs out of the box. I see no downside.
It was a rough learning curve, though. There were so many major things that were new to me, such as:
“Immutable” distros in general (weird term but okay)
Wayland (first time it was viable for me, and I still kind of hate it tbh)
Plasma 6 (I was previously stuck on Plasma 5)
Flatpak-first mentality (previously more of a last resort for me)
Distrobox (never used it before)
My biggest advice to anyone making the switch is, do not fear Distrobox. I didn’t realize how easy it was to make both GUI apps and command-line tools available as first-class citizens within the host OS. For example, I installed Signal within my Debian box, then exported it with distrobox-export --app signal-desktop and boom, it operates like any other app within Bazzite. I slept on Distrobox for years and now I feel like a fool. It’s awesome. You can use Boxbuddy as a GUI to help you get started.
I use Aurora DX instead which has the same Universal Blue core as Bazzite. I’ll echo what you say about distrobox- its fantastic once you realize how capable it is. You can set up a container for each development environment you need and never worry about conflicts or anything like that. Install SDKs, editors, IDEs, etc. and as you say, just run them as if they were on the host OS. Your container can be based on Fedora, Ubuntu, NixOS, and many more- so choose whatever you’re most comfortable with and just get to work. Aurora DX also comes with brew setup which can provide a lot of packages to run on the host as well, but I don’t often feel the need to do so.
I do wish I could add certain features of Bazzite to Aurora, like the gamescope session and the ujust waydroid script.
I dis exactly the same thing. Ran ubuntu for prob 12-15 years. Been following bazzite since it started and was getting frustrated with ubuntu snaps and gnome. Decided to give bazzite and kde a go and damn i fell in love. Its now my daily
I’m running Bazzite on my desktop now. I hopped distros again because wrestling with GPU drivers was just too much trouble. After I upgraded my GPU, I couldn’t get it working optimally in Debian (see my previous thread about OpenCL). On Bazzite, it’s handled for me out of the box.
To me, the only difference between a “gaming” distro and a regular distro is that gaming distros come with smarter hardware drivers and configs out of the box. I see no downside.
It was a rough learning curve, though. There were so many major things that were new to me, such as:
My biggest advice to anyone making the switch is, do not fear Distrobox. I didn’t realize how easy it was to make both GUI apps and command-line tools available as first-class citizens within the host OS. For example, I installed Signal within my Debian box, then exported it with
distrobox-export --app signal-desktopand boom, it operates like any other app within Bazzite. I slept on Distrobox for years and now I feel like a fool. It’s awesome. You can use Boxbuddy as a GUI to help you get started.I’m overall very happy with Bazzite now.
I use Aurora DX instead which has the same Universal Blue core as Bazzite. I’ll echo what you say about distrobox- its fantastic once you realize how capable it is. You can set up a container for each development environment you need and never worry about conflicts or anything like that. Install SDKs, editors, IDEs, etc. and as you say, just run them as if they were on the host OS. Your container can be based on Fedora, Ubuntu, NixOS, and many more- so choose whatever you’re most comfortable with and just get to work. Aurora DX also comes with brew setup which can provide a lot of packages to run on the host as well, but I don’t often feel the need to do so.
I do wish I could add certain features of Bazzite to Aurora, like the gamescope session and the ujust waydroid script.
I dis exactly the same thing. Ran ubuntu for prob 12-15 years. Been following bazzite since it started and was getting frustrated with ubuntu snaps and gnome. Decided to give bazzite and kde a go and damn i fell in love. Its now my daily