I recently set up Bazzite on my friend’s system after switching from Linux Mint due to some Nvidia driver issues. Although the hardware problems are not there anymore, the distro is now facing problems installing certain programs for software development that they had no problem installing in the previous distro. I think there are issues related to the immutability of the distro, though I am not sure since I am new to Linux too. Additionally, my friend is worried about higher storage consumption and slower performance in certain applications.
I realise the distro is primarily meant for gamers and my friend is not much of a gamer themselves, however they told me they appreciate its friendlier KDE interface so I wish to avoid switching from this distro again if possible. However I fear that they may encounter more errors in the future and that I may not be available to help them out whenever needed, so I am in a bit of a conundrum.
Thus I intend to ask here if it is possible to arrange something for easing development related tasks e.g. VM, distrobox etc. or whether it is easier to simply switch to some other compatible distro.
I…I don’t understand. Why would you use Bazzite for software development and not gaming when user is not a gamer but just likes KDE?
you can literally put KDE on anything. Bazzite isn’t friendly to installing anything that isn’t a flatpak or whatever.
Just use a different distro. you don’t need Bazzite. Switch them to like Fedora KDE or something.
And to people in this thread trying to push a camel through a pin hole…why? you’re talking about setting up VMs and Distroboxs or just using flatpaks on Bazzite when the most painless solution is to just switch distros.
You picked the wrong distro, just switch them to something more appropriate for what they want to do.
He fells for the memes.
To give some context to this.
Bazzite is an immutable distro. Fedora calls them atomic. It means many many things are only really updatable online, and you arent allowed to make manual changes to them. Hence immutable.
Bazzite is a very bad choice if you want the same kind of use you’d get out of a windows or mint machine, or any other non atomic distro.
The shitty news here is if you want a machine you’re doing software dev on you’re going to need to figure out the nvidia driver shit, which is a pain in the ass but if you’re a software developer you should be able to do it.
Or just go with a arch derivative that packages Nvidia driver like endeavorOS
Just installed endeavorOS from Ubuntu Studio (new Linux user as of about 3 months ago). Do you know if there’s a way to add the packages after install? I thought I selected the nvidia install, but it was using integrated graphics so maybe not, so I did some manual installs with nvidia-inst like --prime. It seems to be using driver 580 now instead of nouveau.
I was hoping another distro might fix an issue in Studio with DaVinci Resolve not showing video, but the same issue persists in endeavourOS (keeps saying gpu is low on memory). Running from terminal DRI_PRIME=1 to set it on performance mode doesn’t help so I’m wondering if it’s a full on Resolve issue. I’d rather not reinstall endeavourOS and lose everything I’ve done if it’s possible the OS can do some nvidia magic after install.
But did u install cuda package davinci not working without it ,to have less pain just install nvidia-dkms package,and about dynamic switching exist tool like switecherootctl ,but davinxi smart enough already it can detect multi GPU setup and gonna use card which it like more,so in ur case it gonna use nvidia.I just guess u don’t have installed cuda,and there zero literally magic actually ,u just need two package from nvidia which I already mentioned
Yeah, I have CUDA. I had it working at one point with the Nvidia 550 driver on Studio, but 570 and 580 results in no video. 550 had a few plasma issues (plasma freezing) which is why I didn’t want to use it. I tried rolling back but 550 is no longer an option in software sources on Ubuntu Studio (I keep seeing warnings from people about installing drivers outside of driver management), and it seems like endeavorOS doesn’t use driver management like Studio does so it has me on 580.
Resolve keeps saying GPU memory is full. Best I can tell it’s a driver specific issue as it did work on 550. I’ve been using Blender instead but would love to get the Resolve issue sorted without having to roll back to 550 and have plasma freeze every hour. I’m hesitant about installing 550 from terminal on endeavorOS as endeavor seems to do things different and I’m new to Linux overall.
Oh about memory I also found out that resolve on some version of nvidia driver cannot clear memory allocations when using effects
Interesting, thank you. This happens with the timeline without effects but I’ll look into it.
Funnily enough I just had a big plasma issue on Studio and had to get back up and running with x11, Wayland is just gone. Video issues aren’t present in x11 haha
Yeah, I found out the hard way as a new user. Maybe it would be better to move to Fedora and set up everything myself. Bazzite might be perfect for consoles, but for desktop use it limits you a lot, even for normal usage, not just for software development.
but for desktop use it limits you a lot
For example? Because I’ve read this repeated a lot by people who don’t understand immutable distros. Of course you can’t “dnf install clang”, but you can use distrobox for that, ends up fairly similar.
Well, maybe i used a wrong phrase. When i said it limits you, i mean you (as a new user) must learn how to use the system. Any solutions you find from others in the internet do not apply to you. For a power user who frequently tinkers things feels like a limitation (it feels more like i am using my android phone rather than a desktop computer).
The distro as I said, it is perfect for a Console (or simple users like my parents), but for users who want more freedom its a bad choice. The mistake was mine as i did not know what the Atomic system is. First time i learned about them was after 2 days of having Bazzite installed 😅
Well I disagree. I tried Bazzite on my desktop and then installed it on my laptop, even though I seldom play games on it. I’m a long-time Linux user and a tinkerer, and so far I haven’t found anything I wanted to do and I couldn’t.
I can compile software with compilers from distrobox, I can design and slice 3d parts and send them to my printers, manage my servers, customize my system… Sure you can’t easily change your DE, although I guess it would be somewhat possible with rpm-ostree, but other than that I don’t see many limitations.
The main difference is that you should refer to Bazzite’s docs FIRST, because if you just search the web for your issue/goal, you’re going to find instructions that may not be compatible with an immutable distro.
Well i am new user. Now I’m learning how to use this distrobox, so i can install something that would be a copy paste from a git-hub page. Maybe this tool is the solution to my problems.
If you explain, maybe I can point you in the right direction
I’m sorry to say this, but switching distros would be the better option. Bazzite locks down a lot of parts to ensure it works for games. There’s ways around it, but the effort is so much more compared to any other popular distro. Plenty of distros either come with KDE or have a version that has KDE.
Bazzite locks down a lot of parts to ensure it works for games.
This is not entirely correct. It’s a feature of atomic distros in general. Bazzite doesn’t lock anything down any more than its upstream Silverblue and Kinoite parents do, it’s just that most of the system files have been set to be immutable to ensure repeatable and standardized deployments.
This is great for scalability and ensuring the most uptime. Not so great if you want to do a lot of system tinkering.
The other issue is that a lot of existing software needlessly installs itself globally, rather than making use of the user’s local access. It’s a paradigm that needs to change, since most software doesn’t need access to most of the system directories to function.
Does it show I’ve never used an atomic distro before?
We all have different knowledge bases. You were close, I was just providing a little more clarity. No snark meant or intended!
Have a nice day!
Don’t take this wrong, but you should refrain from commenting on what you don’t know. Immutable distros have to fight a lot of disinformation already.
Actual professional software developer here with 10 years of experience. I work on linux for linux targets.
You wanna play around? Use whatever you want with the latest and greatest packages and tweaks, you will encounter issues, learn how to solve them, that is for fun.
You wanna work? Use a serious distro with proven stability, I use debian for example. Yes installing nvidia drivers is a touch less user friendly than on bazzite, but when I update I don’t have surprises and when I boot up in the morning i don’t have to wonder if today will be debugging and coding for my product or for the damn tool i am using to develop it.
As another software guy, I second this advice. Resolving a driver issue on Debian Stable or a Debian-based distro (for example) is typically much easier and would cause many fewer problems down the road than going to a less predictable OS to solve a driver problem. The underlying OS contains so much more software than a driver that the likelihood of introducing problems when changing the OS is way higher. I used to solve hardware issues by changing OS back in the 2000s when I didn’t know any better. Once I learned enough to keep a stable base OS and modify just the bits that need modifying, I stopped reinstalling. My main machine was last reinstalled in 2014. It’s been running Ubuntu LTS since then. Its hardware platform has been changed multiple times.
I use debian for example
There are dozens of us!
(Deb stable is all I work on. Everything else is what I play around on.)
The point is there are much more of us, than gamers on bazzite or enthusiasts on NixOS. The tons of institutional debian and rhel users offset the gamers and experimenters. I want to work, not be the offloaded qa of someone else. So i will not use fedora for work for example. I will also not run a non mainstream distro, for the same reason.
Oh well aware, just making a joke since you mostly see people comment that they run arch or bazzite or nix or whatever while around and about on here. The reality is just as you say, there are many, many, many folks on Debian stable.
So what I hear you saying is: install PikaOS, a Debian-based gaming distro.
(h/j 😉)
If you want to do both at the same time without knowing which side any given task will fall under use NixOS
Or have a pc for work with the most stable and boring distro possible, and a pc for the rest with a real os, like arch. Or if only means for one pc dualboot.
So no, i disagree. NixOS is not stable nor proven in my book, it certainly is a good idea though. If it still is around in 5 or so years i’ll consider giving it a shot.
It’s like 20 years old, with stable releases for over 10 years. How old does something have to be for you lol?
10 years old, first stable release in 2013. It needs to have a significant userbase for 5 to 10 years for me to consider using. Again, I am not here for the adventure, a computer is a tool, I have work and family.
I like the idea of NixOS and Guix System, but to recommend them to someone new to Linux is crazy.
To be clear this was not a recommendation lol I completely agree with you
Maybe rebase* to
https://docs.getaurora.dev/dx/aurora-dx-intro/
before nuking and going a classic Linux distro like others have suggested?
(Personally I’m not sure if I could go back to non-atomic, having the option to just boot the old image if after an update sleep mode is borked or something is just too good.)
This is what I would suggest, as well. Rebasing is one of the best features of atomic distros.
ujust setup-virtualization, distrbox ,homebrew are ur friends
Yeah, I thought one of the main reasons to use distrobox and the likes is for dev work having cleanly seperated environments.
Rebase to Aurora DX
This is the right answer OP!
Hey, something I can maybe help with.
Flatpak IDEs on the main system are not very useful for development. I got rid of mine entirely. I am developing firmware so it might be a bit different from your case, but what I did in have a single arch distrobox where I could install everything embedded-dev-related that had to work together (JLink, nordic tools, code-oss, etc…) on that. Then a few standalone debugging tools like STLink and Saelae logic2 could be installed to the home folder by default and Code could still find them from the distrobox (but they could be installed in the distrobox also). It doesn’t even need to have an init system, but I ran into a few problems like having to manually chmod usb devices to give STLink access. Udev rules are also hit or miss in /etc/udev/rules.d, e.g. the STM udev rules just don’t work, but nordic does.
High storage consumption is likely negligible (or at least nitpicky) since storage is so cheap nowadays. Your SSD doesn’t care if it has 15GB or 20GB of system programs, especially when development codebases and SDKs, games, and media will likely make up 90% of space and almost never share libraries even on traditional systems.
there is a bazzite-dx image that may be more accommodating to software developers. though, bazzite and the bootc/atomic distros are more geared towards containerizing software as opposed to installing a bunch of packages to the system.
distrobox and devcontainers may work for their use case but they would likely need to learn more about what that would entail.
generally people seem to like the atomic distributions once they understand them. i know I prefer them.
There’s definitely a learning curve with atomic distros, and I agree that it’s worth trying to surmount it.
the distro is now facing problems installing certain programs for software development
What programs? What kind of errors?
I think there are issues related to the immutability of the distro
Unlikely. That only applies to the OS partition.
they told me they appreciate its friendlier KDE interface so I wish to avoid switching from this distro again if possible
Pretty much every distro will have KDE Plasma optional.
Thus I intend to ask here if it is possible to arrange something for easing development related tasks e.g. VM, distrobox etc. or whether it is easier to simply switch to some other compatible distro.
Hard to say without knowing what the problem is but switching distros rarely solves anything.
In terms of immutability, Bazzite by design makes it very difficult to install things that aren’t in the app store/flatpal/homebrew. It is an OS dedicated to gaming, and tries to make it as hard as possible to mess that up. I’ve ran into similar issues when I try to do some non-gaming things, or more advanced gaming things on it (like installing a fan patch). It’s not a good OS choice if you want to do more than game and surf the web.
Distrobox is there for other software and works for most cases. The only time I personally had trouble was with VPN software clients.
If they want to try new distros, maybe try Fedora with KDE? Installing the Nvidia drivers isn’t too difficult.
For RTX 20 series and above, it’s recommended to use Nvidia’s open-source drivers. The instructions for how to switch on Fedora are here: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA#Kernel_Open. Note that this is not Nouveau, which is a different open-source Nvidia driver not made by Nvidia themselves.
This is the answer, much of what makes bazzite good is it’s mostly just fedora, and they can be set up near identically, sans immutability.
Check out the ‘dx’ variants within universal blue It would be a good time to become familiar with rebasing.
I run bluefin-dx environment. (gnome).
There is a different learning curve to immutable/atomic systems and workflows. I don’t think it’s harder per say, it’s just you’ll have to be cognizant of the differences when searching for relative and relevant information when you come up against anything (like any opinionated *nix distro). Learn Homebrew, and Flatpack (and thier quarks running with atomic systems).
Also, I’ll add, that I think that beginners learning this immutable, devcontainer, distrobox workflow offers you more space to practice and learn by doing. You’ll will learn a lot by recovering from some misstep (rollback), and/or by blowing it up, to rebuild it again. (and I encourage you to do it often for the practice and confidence)
I realise the distro is primarily meant for gamers and my friend is not much of a gamer themselves, however they told me they appreciate its friendlier KDE interface so I wish to avoid switching from this distro again if possible.
KDE lives on probably every single version of linux, most downloads have an option to have it as a pre-loaded download version (https://kubuntu.org/ , https://fedoraproject.org/kde/ , etc : https://community.kde.org/Distributions )
Even if your chosen version doesn’t come with KDE, you can usually rip out the existing UI, and install KDE through the package manager.
Are you me and your friend is also me?
This sounds a HELL of a lot like my scenario. I swapped to Bazzite from Mint on account of NVidia/gaming issues, and IMMEDIATELY noticed a big improvement, but I’ve had a handful of issues dealing with the flatpak of JetBrains Rider, and Firefox for that matter.
One thing I figured out early was to configure permissions to allow Rider to access the filesystem outside of its sandbox. That seems to be not something that flatpaks are setup for, by default.
More recently, I found that flatpak sandboxes don’t inherit PATH or other global system variables. Which makes sense, but I haven’t figured out the solution yet.
I would definitely take a shot at another KDE distro, cause I also have liked KDE/Plasma (that’s what Bazzite runs, right?) more than I did Cinnamon, but I don’t know anything about what Bazzite does to get great NVidia performance for gaming, or how I might replicate it on a non-immutable distro.
I’ve had decent results running jetbrains IDEs from a Fedora Toolbx, probably doesn’t have to be fedora though. You just have to start them from a toolbox terminal.
Maybe don’t try to drill a hole with a hammer…
There are many user friendly KDE distros.
There are many distros tailored for software development. Some of them certainly use KDE.
Linux is learning. Don’t be afraid to learn new things. But don’t make your work more difficult on purpose.
You probably are having issues due to it being immutable. Its not impossible to get around but in your circumstance you might not want an immutable distro. Firstly the is Bazzite DX which is the development centric version of Bazzite. Id use that if you do development firstly and gaming secondly. Also look into the docs about installing non flatpak software, if you MUST install non flatpak software: https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/
