Noob Question Thread: Ask Any Questions About Linux!
I thought I'll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!
I'll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!
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This is where I see atomic distros like Silverblue becoming the new way to get reliable systems, and up to date packages. Because the base system is standardised there can be a lot more QA as there is alot less entropy in the installed system. Plus free rollbacks if something goes wrong. You don't get that by default on Debian.
Distrobox can be used to install other programs (including GUI apps), I currently run Steam in a distrobox container on Silverblue and vscode with all of my development stuff in another one. And of course use flatpaks from FlatHub where I can, these are more stable than distro packages imo (when official) as the developers are developing for a single target with defined library versions. Not whatever ancient version Debian has or the latest which appeared on Arch very soon after release.
I've tried Debian a couple of times but it's just too out of date. I like new stuff and when developing stuff I need new stuff and it's not good enough to just install the development/unsupported versions of Debian. It's probably great for servers, but I think atomic distros will be taking over that space as well, eventually.
I need to play around with that sometime. Is it a chroot or a privileged container or is it a sandboxed container with limited access? How's hardware excelleration in those?
It's just a podman/docker container. I'm pretty sure it is unprivileged (you don't need root). I've tried it on both NVIDIA (RTX 3050 Mobile) and AMD (Radeon RX Vega 56) and setting up the distrobox through BoxBuddy (a nice GUI app that makes management easy) I didn't need to do anything to get the graphics drivers working. I only mentioned BoxBuddy because I haven't set one up from the command line so I don't know if it does any initial set up. I haven't noticed any performance issues (yet).
You should definetely check out Bazzite, it's based on Fedora Atomic and has Steam on the base image. Image and Flatpak updates are applied automatically in the background, no need to wait for the update on next boot. Media codecs and necessary drivers are installed by default.
The Bazzite image also directly consists of the upstream Fedora Atomic image, just with quality of life changes added and optimized for gaming
It looks pretty good, I've been planning on installing it on another computer for use as a media centre. Probably wouldn't use it as my main image as I'm not a huge fan of their customised GNOME experience (I quite like vanilla GNOME with maybe a system tray extension). But I must admit watching some of the videos by the creator of Bazzite and ublue got me interested in this atomic desktop thing again