I recently set up Bazzite on my friend’s system after switching from Linux Mint due to some Nvidia driver issues. Although the hardware problems are not there anymore, the distro is now facing problems installing certain programs for software development that they had no problem installing in the previous distro. I think there are issues related to the immutability of the distro, though I am not sure since I am new to Linux too. Additionally, my friend is worried about higher storage consumption and slower performance in certain applications.

I realise the distro is primarily meant for gamers and my friend is not much of a gamer themselves, however they told me they appreciate its friendlier KDE interface so I wish to avoid switching from this distro again if possible. However I fear that they may encounter more errors in the future and that I may not be available to help them out whenever needed, so I am in a bit of a conundrum.

Thus I intend to ask here if it is possible to arrange something for easing development related tasks e.g. VM, distrobox etc. or whether it is easier to simply switch to some other compatible distro.

  • chickenf622@sh.itjust.works
    294·
    19 hours ago

    I’m sorry to say this, but switching distros would be the better option. Bazzite locks down a lot of parts to ensure it works for games. There’s ways around it, but the effort is so much more compared to any other popular distro. Plenty of distros either come with KDE or have a version that has KDE.

    • Telorand@reddthat.com
      26·
      17 hours ago

      Bazzite locks down a lot of parts to ensure it works for games.

      This is not entirely correct. It’s a feature of atomic distros in general. Bazzite doesn’t lock anything down any more than its upstream Silverblue and Kinoite parents do, it’s just that most of the system files have been set to be immutable to ensure repeatable and standardized deployments.

      This is great for scalability and ensuring the most uptime. Not so great if you want to do a lot of system tinkering.

      The other issue is that a lot of existing software needlessly installs itself globally, rather than making use of the user’s local access. It’s a paradigm that needs to change, since most software doesn’t need access to most of the system directories to function.