I’m just so sick of Microsoft and Google. But there’s two things holding me back:
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I wanna play Steam games on my PC
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I am just an amateur hobbyist, not a tech wizard
Is there any hope for me?
I’m just so sick of Microsoft and Google. But there’s two things holding me back:
I wanna play Steam games on my PC
I am just an amateur hobbyist, not a tech wizard
Is there any hope for me?
Or, hear me out, you could install Bazzite and avoid all those terminal steps that are intimidating for new, non-tech savvy linux users.
Well, it’s just 4-5 lines that you’re going to have to type and it’s just a one-time thing. Surely, it’s not that intimidating.
Bazzite seems to be based on Fedora Kinoite, an atomic desktop. Now, I haven’t used atomic desktops. Although I wanted to, I ended up not doing that for the following reason.
From what I understand, you can’t easily alter the base image of the system and everything else is a flatpak. This seems fine, but if you end up having to install an application for which there is no Flatpak, how would a non-tech savvy user do that? Still have to use the terminal at that point, I’d bet.
Case in point, even the other day, I came across this application called ‘syncplay’ for which there’s no flatpak alternative and thankfully, Fedora repo had it.
I also hear that if you end up installing apps this way(Layering as it’s called?), the update times become slower. You may shed some light on this.
Also, while it may not be as good as a snapshot system of the atomic desktops, the regular Fedora nonetheless shows the last two kernel installations on every boot so you could revert back to one if an update goes wrong.
I also have to mention that I always have my important files backed up on HDD or cloud that in the worst case scenario of losing my files on any update, (which hasn’t happened so far btw), I can always restore them. In case of Steam games, it shouldn’t be a problem if you have a fast internet connection. You should download them back in no-time. That is another reason I can still live without having to use a stable atomic desktop.
New users find the terminal very intimidating, I’ve seen that come up time and again. It’s kind of the whole point of Bazzite.
If you’re already learning terminal to install software though, at that point you can use a distrobox, install whatever you want in it, and then export the application to your usual application menu. It’ll launch the container in the background when you start the application, and shut it down automatically too. It’s a little slower than a usual launch but it’s still just a stripped down container so it’s fine.
I tried two distros in the past week after your recommendation - Bazzite and Nobara. Bazzite is just like you say and all’s good most of the time and I’m getting used to an atomic distro too. The only problem I seem to be having is that my GPU Freezes very often even while just browsing and I have to force-restart to recover.
journalctl shows me this error. [drm:nv_drm_gem_alloc_nvkms_memory_ioctl [nvidia_drm]] ERROR [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID …] Failed to allocate NVKMS memory for GEM object
I don’t know if this is because Bazzite uses a slightly older Nvidia (open) driver(570.64) and kernel(6.14.6) or because of something else.
However, I don’t have this issue on Nobara and it uses the latest 6.15.4 and Nvidia (proprietary? akmod) driver (570.153). Correlation is not probably causation, but this might be one thing to consider.
And I’ve had issues with nvidia-open drivers in the past, but surely a lot of them seem to have gone now.
I believe if you tell the downloader you have a Nvidia 10-series card then it’ll give you proprietary drivers that still work on newer cards. I have a 10-series and haven’t had these issued fwiw.
Thanks. The downloader gives me an option to rebase, which I find easier to use. It shows me an option to download from ostree-unverified-registry, but I chose to do it from ostree-image-signed:docker instead. Don’t know why the signed image is not shown on the downloader by default. That said, after switching to nvidia from nvidia-open, the driver version still remains the same. Let’s see if I get freezes again in the upcoming days.
Also, there are two applications that I use outside of flatpak - a firewall(Safing Portmaster) and another password manager, for which I have to install using the rpm installer. The password manager has no problem installing using the
rpm-ostree install <name.rpm>command. However, Portmaster installs, but won’t work because of the following error which I found from journalctl.Jul 05 16:28:23 bazzite systemd[1]: Started portmaster.service - Portmaster by Safing. Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite portmaster-start[5786]: Error: failed to exec lock: open /opt/safing/portmaster/core-lock.pid: read-only file system Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite systemd[1]: portmaster.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite portmaster-start[5860]: Error: please set the data directory using --data=/path/to/data/dir Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite systemd[1]: portmaster.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.Someone has supposedly a work in-progress script to make this work, but I don’t think I’m qualified to scrutinize if doing this brings down the security of the system in any way.
And I don’t know if many other rpm installers have the same trouble installing in atomic distros because it’s a read-only file system. For now, I’ll have to live without my favorite firewall.
Update:
Okay, I keep getting the same freeze again with the proprietary nvidia driver too. My suspicion is now heavily on Secureboot being enabled. Some Arch people kept warning me about this back in the day.
I’m going to use Bazzite without it and probably rebase again to open driver if there is no more freezes.