Some Months with Bazzite and Bluefin
Earlier this year, I decided to take the leap and install Bazzite on my Desktop. For the last several years I had been using either Linux Mint or MX Linux on my daily driver. Curiosity got the best of me after listening to people discuss atomic distros on a couple of podcasts and I decided to try one out.
Over time, I have had less desire to tinker with my computer and I generally prefer a curated experience out of the box. The root of that preference is best saved for another post. Bazzite happened to be a good fit due to its high level of polish. So much so that I ended up installing Bluefin at work.
It's Linux, so there's been some small snags here and there. Stumbling through how to properly install packages was a big issue initially. At the moment I've settled on avoiding local layering all together (which is the direction the project wants to go anyhow). My path is typically: Flatpak, AppImage, ujust, homebrew, distrobox, podman, and then finally local layer. At the moment, the only package I needed to layer locally has been the venerable galculator so I can have a graphical RPN calculator.
Bazzite has been nice for gaming. I wouldn't classify myself as a “gamer”, though I do spend an hour or two every day or so playing. My desktop hardware is good enough to run some modern games. I find that Steam works really well and emulation is a breeze by way of Emudeck and ES-DE. If I still had a Steam Deck, I would probably use Bazzite there, too.
Bluefin for daily work has also been nice. It has the familiarity of Bazzite with a lot of the tooling I need daily. I work as a professional computer toucher wearing many hats. I've given up on customizing my dev environments and try to use the tools at hand with their defaults. Bluefin provides me with Docker and VSCode out of the box with sane configuration. With a few extra Flatpaks, I'm off to the races.
Speaking of Docker, it seems like 2024 is the year when I finally learned to stop worrying and love the container. I've containerized a lot of my personal services and I'm all in on containers at work due to a lack of choice. Overall it's been pretty bearable and it's just part of the nature of my work: learning something new every 3-5 years.
Due to its stability and freshness, I'd like to find something from the UBlue project for server use. I wouldn't use this in a production environment at work but it would be really great for my home services. For the moment, I'm still using Ubuntu on my servers at the house. I'll keep looking around and hope for the motivation to move an already stable system for no reason other than the fun of it.
Happy Hacking