Confused between bazzite and bluefin

Hey everyone!

I am a developer and a casual gamer, and my laptop is an MSI GF65 Thin 9SD (blame msi for the ridiculous naming scheme), last week I got to know about the ublue project and digging further I got to know there are two editions. I have decided to use either bluefin or bazzite, but which one would be the best for my use case? as I said, I am a dev and a casual gamer who likes to play old windows games and sometimes new games. Thanks in advance! :grinning:

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Since you mostly play older games and not a serious gamer, the choice I guess comes down more on the side of which DE you’d prefer, GNOME or KDE. Bluefin has only GNOME while I think Bazzite has both GNOME & KDE but latter is their ‘flagship’ DE. Plus also consider if Bluefin-dx (image specifically meant for developers) may not be more suited for you than Bazzite. As things stand right now if you’re primarily a developer you’ll want Bluefin while if you’re primarily a gamer, you may want Bazzite and if you’re ‘casual’ with both, either would do. :smile:

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Thanks for the quick reply!, not asking any ETA but, is there any chance that bluefin can come with a KDE version in the future? I have most of my workflow tuned into plasma as of now, switching to GNOME would take time for me to get adjusted to it.

Bluefin is specifically a Gnome experience. You would basically have to find another custom image out there that makes Bluefin but with KDE. I’ve heard of people asking about that in the past but don’t remember anything materializing.

For you work as a developer, what kind of tools do you need? I think both are set up with containers and such to allow for development work while not impacting the host system, but maybe Bazzite has enough that you can use that?

GitHub - NiHaiden/aurora: The ultimate developer workstation, based on Bluefin with KDE. is a fork of Bluefin which uses Kinoite as a base instead of Silverblue, and it may be worth checking out as a KDE-based equivalent of Bluefin.

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Exactly, but since bluefin is geared towards developer experience, I thought it would be good to go with it

Nevertheless, I will come back to the thread with an update this weekend once I start out with bazzite

Peace : )

Thanks for mentioning the KDE fork, I might switch to it if I feel adventurous :stuck_out_tongue:.

Keep in mind when rebasing that there may be conflits between dotfiles (I think that’s what it is) to where a rebase from a KDE image to a Gnome one or vice versa will result in some icons looking funny.

Ex:

Yes, I do understand that as of now we can’t rebase between GNOME and KDE, apart from that I got bazzite installed, but I am not able to customize KDE with new themes via the settings, any way to do it easily?

You’d have to install KDE themes manually in your Home directory. Hopefully the author of the theme you’re installing has manual instructions.

Check this guide out: How to Properly Theme KDE Plasma [An in-depth Guide]

I’ll try to document this later tonight when I’m home.

Edit: I haven’t been able to write this up yet but I will soon.

Sure please, it will be miles better if we have documentation on it, thanks for the help, what a great team! :smile:

It took a little longer than I wanted to, but I documented the theming. I kind of forgot this was a general question, and this is under Bazzite’s Tips & Tricks document now :sweat_smile: sorry about that, but here’s the link to it:

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