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.
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.
There are dozens of us!
(Deb stable is all I work on. Everything else is what I play around on.)
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.
If you want to do both at the same time without knowing which side any given task will fall under use NixOS