I’m switching my main desktop from popos 20.04 on Hades Canyon to a NUC 13/Nvidia GPU.
Since I’m coming from popos, I’m quite used to Gnome. Prevoiusly I had a gaming PC via vfio on promox + parsec.
If I want to use the system for both work/productivity (mostly libreoffice/obsidian/console/etc) and some gaming which flavour works best?
Bazzite or Bluefin? I played around a bit with Bluefin last year, but didn’t switch due to lack of time.
It’s my understanding that Bluefin and Bluefin-DX are aimed at development, while Bazzite is high-graded for games, which could also be used for some development work. This is knowledge from the Universal Blue web pages.
I game on Bluefin all the time, I use the steam flatpak. I’m pretty happy with my setup, and it’s also my work machine so I keep it on bluefin:gts which is one cycle back (f39), whereas Bazzite is always on latest, so it’s based on Fedora 40.
My HTPC steam machine is Bazzite.
So I guess it depends on what your primary use case as they’re both still like 99% fedora.
Stability is important for a workstation, that’s a good point. Might also come down to UI preference. I’ve never really used KDE, but my short use of Bazzite has been quite good.
I’m also a new user of Bluefin-DX. My laptop is rather new (2024 model) so I have switched to the latest instead of gts.
I have installed the stem flatpak and have been pretty happy with occasional gaming…
I rebased safely from aurora-dx to Bazzite to get some Steam and Nvidia stuff working properly (something about my config didn’t like playing select games), but it doesn’t seem like ujust devmode exists in Bazzite, nor a -dx image variant. Is there a “neat” way to get my tools (or at least devcontainer-ready vscode and boxbuddy) back through some sort of layering? Or at least a list of layered packages and flatpaks that it added.
I don’t think that transitioning tool exists yet. You will have to do it manually. It is not that hard but bit laborious. I have been able to reproduce Bluefin-DX on a fresh Silverblue 40 (no rebasing), by following the steps in the bluefin repository here, in my attempt to debug the vscode integration with distroboxes.
I am not familiar with Aurora or Bazzite regarding Docker. If Docker is not installed, you will have to install it first by layering it. First step before installing it is to add the docker-ce repository to /etc/yum.repos.d, which you can do by saving a file from the repo above. And then you will be ready to install Docker.
The installation of podman, Distrobox is straight forward by layering them. I suggest you install Docker and DevContainers extension first and test all of their capabilities fully working before adding more packages, meaning Podman or Distrobox. There are two fixes necessary to make Docker work in a Silverblue derivative: (i) enabling and starting the docker service; (ii) manually adding the user to the docker group. Test if, at least, the minimal docker run hello-world runs without errors, before venturing in vscode.
When the moment of installing vscode comes, you will have the choice of flatpak-vscode vs layered-vscode. The former requires a bit of tinkering with scripts for docker, podman and distroboxes, while the latter saves you the extra tinkering on the docker side. Still, you will need to add couple of scripts to layered-vscode to enable it to see podman or distrobox containers; a one line script, really. If your objective includes also logging in container terminals, with flatpak-vscode then you will need to add few lines to vscode on the the terminal integration profiles to spawn a terminal in bash or zsh.
To make Docker and DevContainers work with vscode (layered or flatpak) you really don’t need podman, distrobox, or BoxBuddy.
You can read more about the tests I am running to make vscode (flatpak and layered) integration work with Docker, Podman and Distrobox here.
Boxbuddy is a flatpak so that should run anywhere.
I run Aurora-DX as my daily driver with steam run out of the bazzite-arch image via distrobox. Steam VR doesn’t work out of steam flatpak, so that wasn’t an option for me, while the full bazzite install produced a large number of issues for me during the initial change over to 40. This approach of Aurora + a virtualized bazzite has been the most effective for me.
That’s an interesting idea. Containerise components (steam, etc) needed for gaming. Means you can turn it on when you want to play and turn it off when you need to focus. Any performance issues?
Absolutely none. Benchmarks actually ran (very slightly) better on the bazzite arch VM than native bazzite.
I have a fairly beefy rig (Threadripper 7960x, 2x nvlinked 3090 tis, 128 gb of RAM) that has mostly been built for ML/AI shenanigans. That said I’ve been able to run cyberpunk and similar absolutely maxed out with raytracing without any issues at ~50 fps on the VM. Obviously does even better with games that actually support multi-gpu, but I doubt that’s a concern for basically anyone but me.
I also run steam in a distrobox! I do because Gamescope does not work with steam flatpak. I took the bazzite-arch as a template and built my own. Mostly because i wanted have gamescope installed by default for said container and it allows me to either build from aur or just arch repos for what ever reason. Now that being said I have not exactly had a great time trying to make gamescope work in all of this. For the most part it does work but has its own headache’s that I’ve wished that steam and gamescope was just on the base image of my blufin-dx desktop. Now I have considered rebasing to bazzite-gnome but switching from bluefin-dx to bazzite has some pro’s and cons that I’ve just stuck with bluefin.
If anything I wish I had more insight to this. I thought at first bazzite used this bazzite-arch pretty much exclusively for all gaming needs. Thus allowing portability of features to bluefin and other images, but from the aforementioned headaches from getting gamescope working I could understand why bazzite would make this decision.
If anything I wish I had more insight to this . I thought at first bazzite used this bazzite-arch pretty much exclusively for all gaming needs. Thus allowing portability of features to bluefin and other images, but from the aforementioned headaches from getting gamescope working I could understand why bazzite would make this decision.
Nvidia drivers were not playing well with the Distrobox container, and we figured it would be easier to keep all the images uniform and have Steam layered since -deck images already layered it and now Nvidia had to (at the time.)