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
echo "alias apt='sudo rpm-ostree'" >> .bashrc
LMAO.
You can just use rpm-ostree if 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 machines
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).
As a Bazzite fan, lmao. True
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 reset if you do, so it has that safety net
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?
That is true, but for embedded development it sucks because of specialty drivers, access to dbus, udev rules, etc… And distrobox with vscodium or code oss has some big big slowdowns that I can’t figure out.
Saleae software simply won’t work consistently in distrobox, for example. Luckily they have an app image so I could just install it there and set a few settings and now it works well. Sigrok Pulseview is better but needs a few not-dependency packages to work around it.
There is some weirdness to atomic distros and bazzite, but I am pretty happy with it!
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?
Eh, it’s fedora under the hood with SELinux enabled, and immutable, better than most security wise, I didn’t say much more.
