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
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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.
Until the keys change. And you spend forever wondering why it updates every day only to realize it was the same update over and over and over, and the only way they announce they broke things is a GitHub issue.
I love Bazzite, daily it on my gaming PC. But imutable distros do have challenges, and installing non-standard software is defintlately one of them.
Until the keys change. And you spend forever wondering why it updates every day only to realize it was the same update over and over and over, and the only way they announce they broke things is a GitHub issue.
Keys for what? Bazzite? When did this happen?
Oh so before I started using it
Yes, this did happen, but also, they fixed it, and owned up to and totally explained their mistake.
I dunno, I fixed it at the time because I saw the post but I had to go digging a bit. I think they could have done a better job of disseminating that information wider.
I don’t disagree with you that they could have better publicized it.
I think the project got massively more popular more rapidly than the devs expected… and coder type people are rarely also PR type people at the same time.
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
echo "alias apt='sudo rpm-ostree'" >> .bashrcLMAO.
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
Seems like someone didn’t bother reading any of the documentation… There are like 4 alternative ways to do it, including using apt (in a distrobox).
I’m a noob, and I thought Bazzite would be simpler, but when I had an issue (monitor going black under heavy load), I couldn’t solve the problem because of the immutable OS. I went around in circles with Google and ChatGPT, and couldn’t get it to work.
You can just use
rpm-ostreeif you really need something as a system package. Otherwise toolbx or distrobox if it’s not available as a flatpak. None of these are virtual machinesrpm-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.
I have Debian on my Legion Go because of this.
You could have just made a Debian distrobox
But why, though? Why not just use the better distro directly?
Because I play games on my PC and bazzite works wonderfully for that right out of the box?
Because I like the concept of an immutable distro and not having to ever worry about an update breaking my install, and not being able to boot to my desktop ever again?
What makes it a “better distro” exactly?
Also, I can install/run packages from any other distro and package manager from there, not just “the better distro.” I use it to access the AUR for example. There aren’t many limitations there at all. While also being incredibly stable…
I have nvidia, so Debian works better for gaming personally
Well, I can’t speak to that as I have no experience with it. I do know that bazzite has a couple preconfigured “ujust” commands related to setting up nvidia drivers. No idea how well it works.
Bazzite desktop seems to be completely usable with a 20XX+ card. It’s Gaming Mode that boots straight into steam big picture mode that where all of the issues lie.
Cards below do suffer even on desktop though and can regularly crash due to an instability in their drivers when using wayland.
I don’t know how true this is considering my GPU idles at pretty much 0%
