I installed Bazzite and it felt so much like installing Windows for me (huge install image, slow process, lots of loading wheels and user friendly “pretty” screens to get set up). It didn’t feel great, but I figured I’d give it a fair chance and learn how to use a different setup than I’m used to.

I still haven’t had a chance to actually do much with it (only a couple of hours between work and other stuff) but I am really interested in the concept. After reading up more and watching some videos I now understand why the install process is so big and the reasoning behind it. This type of distro really does seem like a great option for regular users.

Only issue I’ve had so far is connecting to my RaspberryPi to control my 3d printer using the .local hostname, since flatpak apparently has a bug with mDNS. IP works fine, and I did rps-ostree install a browser, which was kind of a pain, and probably not the correct way to address the issue, but that was within the first hour or so of using it and I haven’t figured out the best way to do that type of thing yet. Really looking forward to learning more about the setup and how to customize stuff on top of it. Distrobox seems extremely powerful and sounds like it will give me everything I want.

Still have vanilla Debian on my laptop, which I absolutely love, but using it on my desktop PC was kind of a pain due to some proprietary drivers required there (nvidia).

pretty

This is the real pro tip. “Debian packages are behind” but you can just clone the repo or download the .deb and get the latest version of the tool you want. I know there can be dependency issues but I haven’t run into any with the stuff I use.