Gaming and programming

Hello,

I would like to ask what will you recommend for a person that do both. Gaming and programming? What will be more suitable? Bazzite or Bluefin?

You can probably do both on either images if your system is laptop/desktop. Ultimately, the underlying programs/libs are the same for both. But I think Bazzite might be a touch more suitable since they include a lot of QoL s/w for gaming ootb. Recently, theyā€™ve also begun to include some s/w to make developers live happier on their distro. Bluefin on the other hand has so far not really focused on wooing over gamers as well. Also GNOME (default DE on Bluefin) still hasnā€™t implemented variable refresh rate according to reports, and KDEā€™s (default DE on Bazzite) compositor is better from gaming PoV, from what I can see.

Check this out! We include the GNOME VRR patches in Bluefin using the same packages Bazzite does. You can toggle it with this just command:

image

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Thatā€™s awesome. I was just idly thinking if Bazzite and Bluefin should not aim to kinda converge, reduce the workload on the small team you guys have and also both are equally tempting the use and the only ā€˜disadvantageā€™ of an immutable system (as compared to traditional ones), is that you canā€™t run two DEs at the same time, switching as needed as login time. Imagine if the ā€˜baseā€™ for Bazzite & Bluefin is common and you can login to ā€˜Bazziteā€™ when you feel like gaming or ā€˜Bluefinā€™ for general use or development. I guess that could be made possible by including both DEs in the same install image, but perhaps the potential s/w issues would be greater than just leaving it up to users to choose either/or.

Sort of, but not in the way youā€™re thinking. Weā€™re exploring using systemd-sysexts do deduplicate a bunch of things people are asking for.

(This is still early ^ )

The current thing weā€™re pursuing looks like this: Things like Bluefinā€™s DX, Bazziteā€™s Steam parts, etc. can be shipped as extensions so they can just be bolted onto the more basal image.

People ask for a Bazzite DX image all the time but weā€™re not setup to share that. So by just using extensions we can do things like: What if Bazzite had a game development -DX with Godot, Blender, etc. Then you could bolt that onto Bluefin if you wanted. You wouldnā€™t even need to rebase images, you could just bolt on parts without even having to reboot. Our image count would go waaay down (which is a long term goal). Slap an AI extension on top of your nvidia image with all the goodies along with the existing container ecosystem. The potential is pretty awesome.

Logging into Bazzite or Bluefin wouldnā€™t really make sense in that context, youā€™d have a button in a GUI somewhere that just puts you into ā€œgaming modeā€ and then turns on the bazzite extensions. And in that panel thereā€™d be ā€œdeveloper modeā€, and so on. And then that way the entire concept of image management can just be hidden under the covers, it sucks that this is so user visible. But Iā€™m sure someone out there will help figure it out. :smile:

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Just skimming over man page for systemd-sysexts, and wondering how long this has been a thing, and why most distros havenā€™t taken advantage of it yet (and it seems like even non-immutable ones can benefit from it too). Looks like skyā€™s the limit when it comes to this. Making everything more modular, so you can just load or unload parts of the system instead of having to rebase to any entirely new image just for a few programs, or a DE or some custom settings would be a big win for usability. Itā€™d literally start to live up to its name as ā€œuniversal blueā€ā€¦ install a base system and pick your set of extensions for a variety of workloads. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for all answers. What a great and friendly community.

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