Sophienomenal

I use Bazzite as my only desktop OS at the moment (I have multiple headless servers with either Fedora or Debian), and have been using Fedora atomic for awhile before that. I noticed no significant change in general purpose computing when switching from Fedora atomic (Kinoite) to Bazzite, other than all the non-free codecs and drivers I would have installed in Fedora already being present in Bazzite. If anything, that improved my experience. I don’t even game much, it’s just something I do occasionally, though I’ve been using Linux exclusively for over a decade now, so I can’t say I get frustrated enough fixing minor things that I’d really remember things that are easy for me to fix, but potentially difficult for someone new to fix. Honestly, the only time I’ve really had to fix stuff in my recollection is from bash scripts I wrote in other distros no longer working, and since it’s atomic, I chose to rewrite for the tools available instead of layering unnecessary packages. Certainly not something I’d imagine someone new doing.

As far as most software goes, you install it via Flatpak, so the experience should be identical across different distros.

I see you and raise you this:

IP over Avian Carriers

That’s a completely fair point, I just do some really wacky stuff on my servers that doesn’t play well with immutable.

With rpm-ostree systems (Fedora and derivatives), you do. Well, technically you can apply them live, but it is highly inadvisable to do so, and sometimes you actually can’t at all

I use the terminal for updates too, I just use the store when I want to install new software, and that’s how I noticed. There was also a dead icon on my taskbar.

Yeah, I have the same experience. Barring sudden changes to included softwares (like changing Discover out for Bazaar), my Bazzite installation just works without any intervention, and major version updates are applied in regular updates.

I find that I have to adjust files that would be immutable quite often for servers. The immutability tends to get in the way of configuring some parts of the system, and having to reboot to apply updates results in downtime.

I can’t imagine anyone would want the former, either. We’ve seen how horrendously insecure vibe-coded projects are, just look at Tea as an example.

I’d agree with that take. I think that immutable distros can appeal to everyone, and after a decade of Linux use, I feel I’ve toned back how much I need to edit the finer details of my system. I still thoroughly customize my desktop environment, but small tweaks to the root filesystem are generally unnecessary for me. /etc isn’t immutable (at least not in Bazzite), and that’s where much of my customization happens, at least what’s outside of my home folder. I find myself writing plenty of bash scripts that I can just keep in ~/.local/bin/ instead of /usr/local/bin/. Beyond that, KDE has so much customization built in, that the only thing I’ve done before that required an overlay to change was the login screen background, which was a simple conf edit with a one-liner overlay command, and has been rock solid ever since.

I think the main difference is that immutable distros just require you to think differently about how you customize your system. You can do anything you want to it with overlays, but I find that I simply don’t need to do any of those things with a distro like Bazzite. It already has gaming-oriented kernel tweaks, including tweaks to the scheduler, so I’m getting what I would have done anyway, but done in a way that is tested and stable. Granted, I’m sure some of it depends on which immutable distro you use, but that’s true of mutable distros as well.

I’d like to make a counter point to this. I’m an enthusiast who hosts my own servers and has been using Linux for well over a decade exclusively. I personally love having Bazzite on my main desktop, as it always works as expected. Of course, I wouldn’t use immutable on my servers, but I think it’s perfectly fine for a desktop OS. I always have rpm-ostree overlays if/when I need to change something immutable, though I’ve found myself not really needing to do so. I get by with only making changes to my home folder.

Immutable distros just have a great user experience, and don’t ever break on their own. I personally recommend them to everyone for desktop use.

Yet another example of why you should never consider anything an LLM says as fact. This is entirely false, and you can verify it yourself by checking most other Hebrew posts. Grok just regurgitates what other people say; it has no idea what is going on, and isn’t capable of even having ideas in the first place. This was a glitch in the translation feature, and nothing more. The original screenshot saying Hebrew isn’t supported for translation isn’t even from X; it’s an Apple Translate popup, and Hebrew is not yet supported for translation through Apple Translate.

Besides, the logic makes no sense. X supports any and all far-right content and actively promotes it. This includes the genocide in Gaza. This doesn’t even pass the smell test.

I don’t have one. In its place I have a meta key with a diamond design on the keycap. Why would I need a “Windows” key if I haven’t used Windows in over a decade?

This comment violates rule 8 of the community. Please get your AI generated garbage out of here.

Bazzite is just Fedora Atomic with extra things slapped on top (Nvidia drivers if u have an Nvidia card, kernel tweaks for gaming, Steam and Lutris preinstalled, etc.). It functions just as well as a normal desktop as any other distro. It’s also my default recommendation for anyone that plans on doing any gaming, where my recommendation for complete non-gamers is Fedora Atomic, which is what it’s based off. Since it is Atomic (the root file structure is kept consistent across all installs, and updates aren’t applied while the system is running), it’s very resilient and reliable. If anything ever does break (which won’t happen under normal conditions), then you can revert to the previous version from the boot menu and restore it, then either try to update again, or wait a bit before you upgrade if you suspect the issue was a bad update or something. All you need to know is that is called a rollback, and you should be able to find all the information you need about how to do it via a quick search. I can tell you to memorize sudo rpm-ostree rollback, but chances are you would rather look it up in case you remembered wrong anyway.

For people coming from Windows, I recommend the KDE Plasma version, as the UI is more Windows-like than GNOME, so it’s a smoother transition. It isn’t like GNOME is difficult to learn or anything (it’s likely what you used with Ubuntu), it’s actually simpler, it’s just very opinionated and differs in design philosophy from both Windows and KDE Plasma. You can always feel free to look into the differences on your own by watching videos, as they show off the desktop environments more than text ever could.

EDIT: For game compatibility, I’d recommend checking https://protondb.com/ (for games without anti-cheat) and https://areweanticheatyet.com/ (for games with anti-cheat). Note that it’s very often that anti-cheat works in WINE/Proton, but the developers go out of their way to detect that it’s running in Linux and explicitly block it. This is not the fault of Linux, or some compatibility issues, it’s an explicit blacklist.

Generally, it depends on the issue. The first thing I’d check is journalctl, and if there are any errors, I usually look up “[pasted error] [distro name]” and go from there. if I’m unable to find errors, then my next bet is to look up “[description of issue] [distro name]”. Unless I am directly familiar with the component that is having an issue, I try to see if I can find a solution online first. Of course, I never recommend running commands you read online that you don’t understand, so take it as a learning experience and pull up some man pages to see what everything is doing. By doing that, you can even begin to learn how to debug and fix these issues by yourself. Even just finding issues other people have and proving it isn’t your issue helps narrow it down.

What I will never under any circumstances recommend is using an LLM. Please, just use a normal search engine (I prefer DDG), and find forum posts from real people. Those people are generally capable of understanding what they’re saying, so they won’t give completely made up information based on generation of the most likely next word from the data an LLM model was trained on. Besides, chances are that the LLMs are trained on the data you would find by searching anyway, so why not go straight to the source?

I do find myself having to troubleshoot issues entirely on my own sometimes, but usually those are of my own doing, and I can likely figure out what I did wrong (I host my own server and tinker with it quite often). Of course, since switching to atomic distros on my desktop, I haven’t had any system issues to troubleshoot with it in years. Running Manjaro is practically a guarantee that you’ll have system issues, though. I’ve never had a worse experience with my system than when I ran it, and I’m not alone in that.

Otherwise, if you find yourself unable to find an easy solution, backups are a wonderful thing. My server recently had part of its boot corrupted, and it was just a case of recovering from a backup to restore it. Remember, with backups: 2 is 1 and 1 is none. Data can (and will) get corrupted eventually.

If you want the easiest experience possible with Nvidia, I’d recommend Bazzite (and go with the KDE Plasma version). It comes with everything preinstalled and consistent across installations. Plus, it’s a tank when it comes to stability; very hard to break it due to the atomic nature. Just install everything through the built in store and you’ll be fine. Installing programs is much easier than Windows in Linux due to easy software stores. Bazzite currently uses Bazaar as its software store.

I’ve run Nvidia with Wayland for years and never encountered a single issue. This sounds like it’s probably just an Ubuntu issue (go figure, there’s a reason the Linux community despises Canonical). It’s worked perfectly fine for me in Fedora and Arch in Wayland, and my distro of choice nowadays is Bazzite, which is based on Fedora.

I don’t have experience with mobile Linux (still on Android), but you can emulate Android apps through Waydroid and that would (probably) work. Granted, Idk if notifications would work, but that’s an option if mobile Linux can handle Waydroid. There’s also Molly, which is a signal client that doesn’t rely on Google Play Services for notifications.

I just bought an 8bitdo Ultimate 2C with hall effect sticks, and it’s been amazing! Highly recommend, and the D-Pad is great