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
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?
Oh so before I started using it
Yes, this did happen, but also, they fixed it, and owned up to and totally explained their mistake.
I dunno, I fixed it at the time because I saw the post but I had to go digging a bit. I think they could have done a better job of disseminating that information wider.
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?
Distrobox is just a set of shell scripts that controlls Podman under the hood. Not only is it like docker, it literally uses the same container format (ContainerD).
As a Bazzite fan, lmao. True
yeah it’s
rpm-ostree install <pkg>what’s the big deal
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 resetif you do, so it has that safety net
rpm-ostree install would like to have a word with you
