I’m running Bazzite on my desktop now. I hopped distros again because wrestling with GPU drivers was just too much trouble. After I upgraded my GPU, I couldn’t get it working optimally in Debian (see my previous thread about OpenCL). On Bazzite, it’s handled for me out of the box.
To me, the only difference between a “gaming” distro and a regular distro is that gaming distros come with smarter hardware drivers and configs out of the box. I see no downside.
It was a rough learning curve, though. There were so many major things that were new to me, such as:
- “Immutable” distros in general (weird term but okay)
- Wayland (first time it was viable for me, and I still kind of hate it tbh)
- Plasma 6 (I was previously stuck on Plasma 5)
- Flatpak-first mentality (previously more of a last resort for me)
- Distrobox (never used it before)
My biggest advice to anyone making the switch is, do not fear Distrobox. I didn’t realize how easy it was to make both GUI apps and command-line tools available as first-class citizens within the host OS. For example, I installed Signal within my Debian box, then exported it with distrobox-export --app signal-desktop and boom, it operates like any other app within Bazzite. I slept on Distrobox for years and now I feel like a fool. It’s awesome. You can use Boxbuddy as a GUI to help you get started.
I’m overall very happy with Bazzite now.
Weird. That used to say “container-native”, which at least makes sense – it heavily emphasizes container technologies like Flatpak, Docker/Podman, and Distrobox.
There’s no yum or dnf like on a standard Fedora system (though you can use rpm-ostree if you are desperate). As an “immutable” distro, it’s designed so that you do not install apps at the system level.