Similar to Bluefin’s Developer Experience images, Bazzite will include images that are intended for developers which can be installed or rebased and come pre-installed with development workflows out of the box. The focus will be mainly on game development, but we would like to explore other options if users are interested in other development tools that should come pre-installed on the variants as well.
All -dx variants will still offer the same choice for desktop environments and Steam Gaming Mode.
Suggestions for the Upcoming Developer Experience (-dx) Images
We would love feedback for what applications should be included centered around game development and debugging tools, and anything else that may interest you in general development. We are also open to other areas outside of game development, but there will be a focus on that particular audience. Maintainers have agreed on shipping the Godot Engine as one of the pre-installed applications for this image so far.
Please comment in this thread or the Github resources down below for any suggestions or comments regarding the development images that will be shipping in the future for Bazzite.
Why can’t we just add a new option to the Bazzite Portal which enables use to install the developer/development software we want? This way you don’t have to maintain a new image and people can actually choose what kind of software they want to have installed.
Eventually the Bazzite Portal should include some of this stuff anyways (after the re-write which is currently beta software) but development usually comes with different requirements. The image plans to be more than only pre-installing some software.
I would be happy with just whatever bluefin-dx has. I dont think there is a reason to make it more opinionated than that (i am a fullstack dev). Configs, container stuff and vscode and then the rest of the stuff can be added via portal.
I have zero interest in game development, but I applaud the idea of having one stop solution for game dev. I remember Jonathan Blow constantly complaining how Linux dx is not existent. Hopefully more aspired could start developing games with Linux in mind.
I think the bluefin/aurora -dx experience would be sufficient? Godot has a flatpak, which can lock versions, and one might be better served sandboxing things like Unity and Unreal in Distroboxes. I’m not a game dev by trade or serious hobby, but any time I’ve used Godot I just used its flatpaks and appimages anyway.
I think building around the current -dx experience would be a solid start. At risk of pushing too far, even a -gdx would be a solid option: and at build-time have it depend on -dx. This is more of a pipe dream currently after the initial tooling is done for the modularization of the various image parts (-dx/-nvidia/-surface/etc) that I believe ublue is doing as a whole?
I just want to offer that I’m saying this as somebody who switched to Aurora for its inclusion of Docker, VSCode and libvirt virtualization. I definitely have an interest in helping with any developments as much as I can (mostly testing, but anything I can).
IMHO VMware, VirtualBox, and anything that requires kernel modules should be built in. At least the kernel module part - so that when user needs those tool, they can just be installed from a menu/command.
As long as that’s done, I think everything else can just be thrown to different yafti menu/sub-categories.
Saw call for input on reddit so figured I’d contribute. I’m not doing anything too crazy though and Bazzite (KDE) as is has been fine for my needs. Why I did not reply to this thread before. Been using Linux fulltime for just over a month now.
I develop in the Godot game engine but do have an install of Unity to handle Unity package imports to export assets for use in Godot. I’ll probably install Unreal later for same needs - to convert assets I own form Unreal market.
Only real issue I had was that I used Affinity Photo and Designer on Windows. I did get them working via VM but trying to change to using Gimp/Krita ad Inkscape.
Further I use Blender, GDX Texture Packer, and Audacity. Spine2D and TrenchBroom also installed but not actively using atm since those were for different projects which I might pick up again later.
OBS to record gameplay and Kdenlive to build trailers (been using this on Windows)
VSCode with C# for code.
Will need the Itchio and Steam tooling for Linux later when I need to publish.
Although, I could probably have done some of it via brew. Only thought about that much later.
I installed python@3.10 via brew since i dabble in Stable Diffusion with automatic1111 and needed that version, rather than the installed 3.12, to make it work smoothly.
I’m a game developer making the switch to Linux and been doing some research into making a UBlue-GameDev image, but yeah, a Bazzite variant with dev needs built-in sounds good!
The things that I absolutely need from the jump include:
git
git-lfs
clang
VSCodium or VSCode
And then, to keep it less opinionated but still very useful, options after setup to install:
Unity Hub
Unreal Engine (or Epic Asset Manager)
Godot
Perforce Helix P4V
Blender
Krita
DotNet SDKs
JetBrains tools
One thing I find a little off-putting with Bazzite is just how large in filesize it is. A lot of stuff is included that’s probably useful for people on the player end, but would rarely be used by a developer. But I’m not versed enough yet in the linux ecosystem to know what I would rip out in a custom image that derives from Bazzite.