A coworker of mine asked me to help him install Linux, he hasn’t tried Linux before but he’s sick of Windows.
He is very much into gaming, so gaming support is the first priority. He is also a developer/tester so I suppose that he will also want to have access to dev tools, languages, and other packages like that for personal projects.
My first go-to when recommending to newbies is Mint because it’s simple, tried and tested, but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience. However it scares me that there’s no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks and brew, or even podman images. Will this be a problem as he uses the OS for general usage besides gaming in the long term, would it be better to just go with Mint and set that up for gaming instead?
Feel free to also recommend other distros, but keep in mind that while he is technical, he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.
Definitely not bazzaite, it has lots of unremovable bloatware and since it doesn’t have native package manager it will be a problem. For gaming i propose cachyos, it focuses a lot on performance in games. They have their own proton, kernel and they even had their own browser
Such as?
No native package manager? How does Bazzite manage packages then?
Ideally, you don’t. You can layer packages with
rpm-ostree, but that’s typically something you want to do very intentionally and sparingly, not as a first resort for installing packages.Instead, everything is typically installed in userspace via Flatpak/AppImage or using the
distroboxcommand to create podman containers (where you can install software using its package manager, depending on what base distro you chose for it).When you update, you are replacing the current system image with a new one, so if there’s a problem with the new system, you can just
rpm-ostree rollbackto the previous one.Let me know if you have other questions. I run Bazzite on a laptop daily.
Thanks for the explanation.
I’m only vaguely aware of the concept of an atomic distribution, so there’s a lot to learn. I guess it’s about time I sacrificed my spare laptop to silverblue.
When it comes to recommending a distribution to a newbie, I have mixed feelings about atomic distributions. If the newbie in question just wants to leave the OS alone and focus on gaming, Bazzite sounds like the best option.
On the other hand, if the newbie wants figure out how things work, starting with an atomic distribution doesn’t really sound like the easiest starting point. Is it though? Could be mistaken.
I think it’s pretty simple to understand if the system just pulls packages from the repos and downloads what needs to be updated. If you add flatpaks and appimages to the mix, it just adds another layer of confusion. Totally fine for your second distro though. After all, getting to experience new and interesting ways to do things is the joy of distrohopping.
And then there’s rpm-ostree thing. I really need to read more about that, but that sounds like yet another layer in an already very tall cake. Those newbies who want to know how these things work may find an atomic distro a bit overwhelming.
But do you really need to understand any of that to get started? Do you think it’s enough for most newbies to just install a few flatpaks to get the apps you need? Do you think they would need to involve rpm-ostree within the first year?
This is where I would agree with you, except to clarify and say, “It depends.” There’s plenty to figure out, and there’s a lot you can learn about when it comes to understanding what layer(s) a piece of software runs in. A driven newbie could find it rewarding to figure out this new paradigm. I once read a post from someone who installed Aurora on a grandparent’s laptop, and the grandparent ran with it and learned how to use everything themselves. It’s good to know who the end user is.
It also highlights some of the pitfalls and old practices of relying upon
sudowithout good reason. Lots of software only needs to run in local userspace, for example, and devs should really take into consideration what permissions they actually need, rather than choosing what’s easiest and expedient.It’s not so much another layer but dividing the existing cake into very distinct layers. You have an immutable system layer, you have an app layer for apps that you apply with
rpm-ostree, and you have the user layer where your Distroboxes and Flatpaks live.The benefit of this structure is that you can swap out the system layer at will. In theory, you could swap from a Gnome-based system to a Niri-based one, and rather than keeping all the Gnome apps and settings, you now just have the Niri ones. This ability to swap out the system layer makes it so system updates are much safer and less prone to conflicts, and they’re much more scalable for large deployments.
But do read more about it. There’s pros and cons to it, and then you can really get into the weeds with
bootc…Do I think a newbie needs to know this stuff from the get go? Probably not. I think that particularly since atomic distros have been around for several years now, the Flatpak ecosystem has grown quite a bit. There’s a lot already there that will work for most people. There’s a possibility they would need to layer something within their first year (I needed Java, for example), but it’s not likely they’d need it often if at all.
If they can’t help but tinker or theme, though, I would steer them away from atomic distros entirely. As interesting as they are, they’re geared towards duplicability, not bespoke modifications. My daily desktop driver is CachyOS, and I tinker with that, but the laptop with Bazzite is one I need to have maximum uptime.
Using something called rpm-ostree. rpm-ostree is a hybrid image/package system. It combines libostree and libdnf to provide atomic and safe upgrades with local RPM package layering. Still that isnt real package manager since you cannot remove or install anything from fedora repo, it is only used for updates and thats all
rpm-ostree, brew, and dev containers. I haven’t felt the lack, but it is likely not for everyone.
Also distrobox
Flatpacks