Silverblue + distrobox is enough for me.

Aight. Hope to meet you next time your hand and fingers start tingling and itching 😜.

I super appreciate all of the tips!

It has been my pleasure 😊!

I thought I was good installing Bazzite with a fresh install using an ISO, made sure to pick the NVIDIA option… it just failed to load the drivers, and showed a gray screen switching to open drivers.

Very strange. Consider reporting this as a bug on their Github or ask assistance on their discord server.

I played with NixOS in a VM. I have sooooo much to learn… so I think I will just install the package manager, and gorge on the cake I get to keep.

NixOS, while excellent at what it offers, is indeed very different from almost anything else. I wish you the best of luck if you wish to conquer it, but I’ve personally put it on my backlog; I hope to return to it eventually, but not now. Perhaps consider using Fleek, which would be Nix-made-easy. Obviously, it isn’t as powerful, but perhaps a new user doesn’t need that much power in the first place 😉.

You may be happy, or perhaps dismayed, to learn that I finally installed Bazzite on my desktop.

Well played! Welcome to the cool kids club! I’ve actually used Bazzite myself for a short while a couple of months ago. It felt like a holiday destination with lots of cool stuff, but it was more opinionated than what I’m comfortable with. So I returned back home (read: custom uBlue image) afterwards, where I am in command for what’s found inside and where I am free to do whatever I will. Though, I did pick up some of the things I liked from Bazzite 😜, so it was not for naught 😉.

I did a bit tonne of sampling, with BlendOS and Vanilla, trying things out, but Fedora wins.

Very interesting! I’ve got my own reasons for preferring Fedora *cough* _security *cough*, but I’m very interested to know your findings! I’d have to admit that Vanilla OS’ upcoming 2.0 Orchid update is very tempting though.

I have Fedora Silverblue on a usb in case Bazzite does not like my computer,

Hmm…, perhaps consider the following:

1. Rebase back to Silverblue with rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/39/x86_64/silverblue (assuming you’re already on Fedora 39).
2. After you’ve booted into Silverblue, pin the Silverblue-deployment with sudo ostree admin pin 0.
3. While still in the Silverblue-deployment, rollback to Bazzite with rpm-ostree rollback.
4. Reboot, and you should notice that you have one additional entry in the GRUB-menu. That’s the Silverblue-deployment where you can always fall back on; just in case*.

The above steps do assume that you haven’t pinned any prior Silverblue-deployments; as you don’t necessarily need multiple Silverblue-deployments 😅. Furthermore, they assume no additional steps involving Nvidia; but that’s mostly because I don’t have any experience dealing with that (thankfully).

I swear I will just jump onto the NIXOS (or guix) bandwagon if I ever decide to switch again.

FWIW, you can install both Nix and Guix on Silverblue.

Thank you for your feedback! I am learning a lot.

Glad to be of use 😜!

This is the first time I have run into issues where I was not tempted to abandon ship and go back to what works. I actually care about this system and want it to succeed. I think this is a super cool path forward.

I wholeheartedly agree!

GoboLinux

Wow, I almost forgot about that. Thanks for reminding me!

One problem I had is that I was trying to download an image for linux mint, because it gives me access to PPAs without needing to use SNAP due to Ubuntu, but I could not get an image to download, no matter what combination of linux + mint + version I used. I finally realized I could search podman, now I can go forward!

Good job learning about podman search! I’m sure you’ll manage 😉!

Yup, it’s absolutely lovely. Did you experiment with a custom home directory for your distrobox yet?

Thank you for reporting back! Much appreciated!

So it turns out, I cannot use my NVIDIA card using distrobox. I guess it only works with AMD?

Interesting. Unfortunately, I don’t own an Nvidia device. Therefore, I can’t tackle it myself. Distrobox should allow the use of Nvidia, but I’m unaware if this applies to the bazzite-arch container as well. The picture you shared and the link to its FAQ-page (found below) do suggest otherwise, unfortunately…

I was wondering if distrobox would somehow allow better performance

FWIW, I’ve always experienced better performance inside the bazzite-arch distrobox container, at least compared to Flatpak*.

I see that this image is used a lot on Steam Deck, which I also don’t understand why (as opposed to having everything native).

Because the distro image it’s used in conjunction with, Bazzite, is Fedora-based, while Steam OS is based on Arch. Bazzite is Fedora-based in the first place, because Arch doesn’t officially have any plans for ‘immutable’ distros yet. As for the remaining distros, only Fedora and NixOS (see Jovian-NixOS) have a sufficiently mature and suitable platform at this point in time.

maybe I am missing some graphical dependencies

This happens way more often than you might expect. Even the so-called ‘toolbox’ containers from Distrobox miss a lot of packages required to support software graphically. Consider running it inside a terminal and pay attention to error codes etc; those might/should help you resolve the issue. Sometimes it helps to explicitly use the -v or --verbose option to ensure that the program actually communicates what’s happening.

We would love to help you! But please consider helping us by providing more information:

• Do you actually want to switch distros? Or just interested in what’s out there?
• If Fedora 39 didn’t satisfy you, then what exactly is bothering you?
• What is it that you seek from your distro? Being out of the way? Freedom? Polish? Blank slate? Security? Privacy? Ease-of-use? Up-to-date? Big repos? etc

I cannot wait to get home and try it out!

Please consider reporting back after you’ve tried it; I’d love to read your experiences.

Wouldn’t it be fun to have “a ready-to-game Arch Linux based OCI designed for use exclusively in distrobox”?

Besides the already mentioned Star Labs and System76, there’s also Insurgo, Nitropad and NovaCustom.

As for an exhaustive list on the matter, unfortunately, I don’t think something like that is out there. Though both Canoeboot (formerly known as Libreboot) and Dasharo do have their own respective lists.

There are like a gazillion questions one might ask to better derive what keyboard would suit you best. As so far you haven’t given us much to work with, I’ll just post my personal favorites:

• Dygma Raise
• Ultimate Hacking Keyboard

Obviously, I’m a sucker for splittable keyboards that adhere to traditional layouts. With both of these being the current endgame-models within that space; tilt, wrist support, excellent software, good add-ons, name it and it’s probably found between the two.

The simple virtue of being able to genuinely express these words; “I don’t know”, “Sorry” and “Thank you” (or any derivative of these*).