A coworker of mine asked me to help him install Linux, he hasn’t tried Linux before but he’s sick of Windows.

He is very much into gaming, so gaming support is the first priority. He is also a developer/tester so I suppose that he will also want to have access to dev tools, languages, and other packages like that for personal projects.

My first go-to when recommending to newbies is Mint because it’s simple, tried and tested, but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience. However it scares me that there’s no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks and brew, or even podman images. Will this be a problem as he uses the OS for general usage besides gaming in the long term, would it be better to just go with Mint and set that up for gaming instead?

Feel free to also recommend other distros, but keep in mind that while he is technical, he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    2·
    8 hours ago

    Basically, your OS drive (for the most part, there are exceptions) is read only. Every time your PC boots, it is initialized to your current OS image.

    Yes, you can install software on it. For the most part, you default to flatpak, but it also comes preinstalled with distrobox that allows you to access any package manager from any distro you want. You can also install local RPM packages, but you have to update those manually.

    They suggest you try to avoid it, but you can also “layer” packages onto your OS image using rpm-ostree. This basically adds the package to the image that initializes at boot. You usually only have to do this with things like VPN software. Maybe.

    The result is an extremely stable OS. almost boringly so. Because updates and installed software aren’t applied until the system is rebooted, it’s essentially impossible for an update to break your install.

    Also, rolling back to a previous OS image is trivial and takes like 30 seconds.

    It’s definitely an adjustment if you’re already used to Linux, but it’s really not that restrictive, it’s just different.