Bazzite has a very simple process for installing software that isn’t on Flatpak: You spin up a virtual machine running a better distro and install it there
Bazzite is the better distro because you install things in a distrobox. Muck around, break things in there, but your main distro stays safe, secure and stable.
Hmmm. I use QubesOS mainly for the ability to have a separate VM for different things that I can muck around in and not break shit. Does bazzite offer a similar experience?
You don’t run a VM for everything with Bazzite, Distrobox is more like Flatpak or WSL in that regard.
It also isn’t much more secure, it’s just that everything is a bit more contained and comes with their own dependencies.
So it’s kinda like a docker container its got its own filesystem and root runtime but not its own kernel?
Distrobox is just a set of shell scripts that controlls Podman under the hood. Not only is it like docker, it literally uses the same container format (ContainerD).
As a Bazzite fan, lmao. True
yeah it’s
rpm-ostree install <pkg>what’s the big deal
Bazzite docs repeatedly say ‘do not do that, it will lead to system instability as we update and improve the feature set of our custom rpm-ostree that is the backbone and fundamental core of what Bazzite is.’
It is supposed to be a static, locked down, readonly core OS, just like SteamOS.
Its just based on fedora instead of arch, and has a bunch of other customizations and tweaks and preconfigured apps and helper tools.
fair point
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/rpm-ostree/
so you have to be careful what you add to your base; preferably just self-contained tools that will not interfere with the stability of the system, use distrobox or other container to create larger more sophisticated environments
i used it for an icon theme, amd gpu info tool, android cli tools. they all come from the fedora repos so play nice with the base and i haven’t run into update issues mentioned in the info page
it’s also very easy to
rpm-ostree resetif you do, so it has that safety net
rpm-ostree install would like to have a word with you
They do specifically, multiple times, in multiple places in the wiki… tell you that you really, really shouldn’t use rpm-ostree unless you absolutely know exactly what you are doing… because you can run into dependency conflict hell, and then the tree build will fuck up.
Bazzite updates to a newer version of a shared dependency, but something you manually added… has not?
Or visa versa, your custom thing requires a newer version, or some dependency that is for whatever reason just a conflicting fork of an existing dependency?
Something is gonna break, potentially lots of somethings.
