Hello!
Just a longish ramble to share how much I am enjoying Linux.
I have recently swapped to Linux from Windows, I want to say it’s about 6 weeks now. Still having to use other OSes though due to work.
I feel I went on a crash course trying to learn a ton of concepts. I went from, “You shouldn’t need to touch the Terminal”, to looking at containerfiles. (Although I will caveat that most users should not need to use Terminal still, because the majority are not interested).
I really liked the Arch (btw) customizations, but I went away from it mostly due to security considerations: I didn’t like configuring Apparmor (let alone SELinux). I might know that I don’t want this specific app to access certain things, but I don’t know the ins and outs of how absolutely every process works on my PC. Even with some templates available online, that was one rabbit hole I tried a couple of times and noped out of.
But the fact that Bazzite worked out of the box, given my initial hostility with terminal, was such a fresh breeze. Every time some other distro failed, my Bazzite installation was patiently waiting for me there, ready to work.
Then I decided to run upstream Fedora alongside, as I didn’t understand where some problems required solutions to do with immutability, or solutions to do with just Linux at large.
At first I thought, “I can’t do this in Bazzite, but I can in Fedora”. Eventually everything I could do in Fedora I could do in Bazzite. And from that moment on, I spent my time in Fedora trying to add the optimizations that Bazzite had.
Here is an example.
I am now running Fedora with the same version of mesa drivers Bazzite runs, but I had to work out how to do that, as Fedora is still behind and has not updated them in a while. (EDIT: of course Fedora released new drivers the day after this post – Their test branch for Fedora 42 doesn’t seem to have new ones cooking, although it could have been an error on my part when checking, I am still learning. I see they have the version I want with the upcoming Fedora 43. So I figured I was not going to see the drivers I wanted until the next version of Fedora in September/October without manual intervention. I am now on an RDNA 4 AMD card, swapped away from Nvidia a few days ago, so I wanted the capability to turn FSR 4 on.)
So yes, I have my Fedora with everything I want but instead of getting extra flexibility to tweak, I just got extra work to make it almost as specialized as Bazzite.
Don’t get me wrong, this was actually fun and that’s the point of this post. My gaming time has now gone towards learning Linux things.
But now I am sitting here thinking: the Ublue gang keeps talking about making your own image and how you can do everything you want when you learn that.
So I could:
- Not worry about the latest drivers and optimised kernels
- Not worry about security features
- Keep the benefits of immutability
- …And still get my tweaking fix, now learning newer, non-destructive ways to customise my system
I feel I keep going into a new rabbit hole every 5 minutes with Linux, but I am rather enjoying it.
Even just learning about how the process of making images work, it feels a little archaic now to run updates on a live system with user tweaks in full force and hope it doesn’t break. No wonder Windows updates can be a pain for some people (admittedly they have never been for me, but I attempt to always run software in safe ways).
Anyways, my lunch break is almost over so I better skedaddle.