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I was forced into using SteamOS because my puter broked. Can i just install it on my desktop after it's fixed? Can i make a regular Linux as plug-and-play as steamos? (hexbear.net)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/technology@hexbear.net
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I'm not completely illiterate on the subject of Linux i used to mess around in highschool with turning old PC parts into functional machines

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[–] 15 points 3 weeks ago* (23 children)

I installed bazzite a few days ago, and I'm already switching OSes again because of this immutable bullshit that means I can't install any package or run any script. I just want to run the damn Plex media server, and in order to do that, I have to read 200 pages of tutorial according to my Kindle? Got a ton of suggestions and everything I put in Konsole just comes back to "sorry, you can't install things in Bazzite that way. Go read a textbook and get an associate's degree in Containers!"

If you're going to do literally anything other than Facebook and YouTube in Firefox, download games from steam, and play games from steam, it seems like you're just gonna have a bad time with Bazzite.

I'm this close to just going back to Ubuntu.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

    You can install packages from fedora's repositories or loose RPM files by using rpm-ostree install and they will exist as if they were installed imperatively as they are layered on-top of your operating system image.

    I can answer any questions that you have. Sorry for being flippant with my first reply.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (5 children)

    No worries! I ended up just getting so frustrated with trying to figure it out and just having the console return a web link to a guide that may as well be Babylonian to me, so I'm currently installing CachyOS.

    Also it seems like Bazzite hated my multi monitor setup of 1440p 21:9 and a 4k 16:9 display located 10 meters away in a different room. PLM does this weird flickery bullshit and if I try to maximize a window on the ultrawide monitor, it would just left justify a 16:9 window and leave 1/5 of the screen showing only desktop.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (4 children)

    Experimentation is good, CachyOS allows for using the AUR for any sort of package you'd need vs. needing to containerize everything on bazzite. The multi-monitor setup and flickering could be a KDE-specific bug.

    Unfortunately you still have to read: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Plex

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  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago* (3 children)

    The multi-monitor setup and flickering could be a KDE-specific bug.

    negative they can't make me use GNOME, I've been using Plasma for 20 years .

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (2 children)

    Accept your GNOME masters, they know best friend-visitor-3 goblin-dont-care

    But if you have a Nvidia GPU then it's probably that (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA). I had an Nvidia GPU and that monstrosity would completely fry my display after a suspend that I would have to restart my computer and Nshittia has not fixed it in 4 years.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago

    I think Gnome is really pretty and minimalistic, it feels like a great laptop DE to me. But I kinda treat my desktop like a workstation when I'm not gaming and I really like the KDE Human Interface Guidelines. They just work really nice for my brain, so apps feel a lot more intuitive to use than GTK apps tend to.

    Material Design 1 and 2 also really worked nice for my brain, I miss when it was prevalent. Play Music was so much nicer to use and look at than Spotify is.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    I actually did ditch bazzite for cachy because of this. I have since dabbled, though, and it wasn’t as tough as I thought it could be. There’s some stuff to learn about containers and the like, but it’s not too bad…

    Having said that, I’m not going back. CachyOS is good enough for me!

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

    I think I'm a bit too blob-no-thoughts to try and figure out this container stuff from zero knowledge without having the ability to do some stuff kinda wrong and lean heavily on existing scripts and stuff.

    I'm not a computer science person and I don't have the mental energy to teach myself this type of stuff given that I have zero foundation. I can copy a script from a website, but I'm absolutely not going to bother with trying to teach myself some arcane junk I'm going to use exactly one time in my life just so I can do something that was a one-click install on Windows.

    This shouldn't be this hard, and it shouldn't be difficult for developers to understand why nobody wants to do this bullshit. Just let me open a package in a package manager like a normal OS, holy shit.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    yeah my day to day use cases are way beyond the limitations of immutable too. i feel like i get why it's recommended to new people but seems very easy to run into that wall

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago

    I think Bazzite would be perfect for my wife whose Windows install has:

    Discord

    Firefox

    Steam with no games installed

    (Pirated) Microsoft Office for work file compatibility

    Zoom for work

    That's it, it's a clean and spotless Windows install other than these five things.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

    Bazzite is great for a gaming computer and only a gaming computer. If you want a console experience from linux? hell yeah. Anything else? Hell no

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    Nah disagree, I used it for everything on my pc, I can even use custom firmware, like I do for my 5.4 Bluetooth dongle. They even have a developer image called Bazzite-DX

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    If you're going to all the effort of installing extra packages and custom firmware what does bazzite give you that fedora doesn't?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    I mean Bazzite is basically a heavily modified Fedora Atomic image, but for me a lot actually, better out of the box experience, I don't have to install a bunch of stuff I would already download, OGC kernel, a bunch of gaming first tweaks and tools, easy rollback into multiple previous versions if needed (I had to use this for a while actually), easy access to the previous image if an update goes bad directly on grub, easy tpm2 setup, secure boot support out of the box, easier upgrade from one major version to another (instead of doing an upgrade from fedora 43 to 44, a simple update takes you from bazzite 43 to 44) and great stability on a rolling release model.

    And there's probably more I'm forgetting right now.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago* (3 children)

    That makes a lot of sense. I think it would make a great HTPC.

    Is steam's in-home streaming any good these days? I'm probably still better off just using a 10m HDMI cable connected to my desktop pc, yeah? I wish there was a way to have plasma desktop at the desk and a separate 10ft interface at the TV which are mutually exclusive, like using RDP or something (I know it's not FOSS, it's just better than VNC.)

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago* (2 children)

    Steam streaming is shite with wayland but sunshine (host) and moonlight (client) work great. Fussy with HDR but fine for mere mortals.

    You might be interested in a BC250. It's what I did after wanting exactly the setup you describe lol. Now I just game on the couch and stream anything CPU and ram heavy.

    Stretching a cable halfway across the room makes anything with a weak Bluetooth antenna horrible :( controller dropouts and stuff

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 child)

    BC250

    Can you give some recommendations for buying/making this as inexpensively as possible? I don't have access to a 3d printer.

    Ideally I'd like to be able to use my Xbox series controllers with the microsoft dongle, but that stoppex working under Win11. I have the pride design lab controller and an Elite series 2 and neither one will reliably connect or stay connected to the dongle.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    Buy board, remove heatsink from board, open heatsink find carefully (look up youtube vids for technique). Apply new thermal compound to the APU and put the heatsink back on. If you have a PSU with the right header use that, else a metalfish 500W is ok. Buy 3 cheap but good quality fans (arctic pN (where N is the diameter in centimeters) are my choice).

    Make a cardboard box with good airflow, you can stiffen it with wheatpaste paper mache if you want to go super cheap, or build a fancy wooden one or whatever. Make it so one fan passes air across the box, one pushes air into the fins ( you can fabricate a cardboard bracket, use hot glue to glue it in place whatever) and one replaces the fucking awful metalfish fan (remove from case and mount new removing old)

    Design your box so air flows over the back of the board too, so it should be held off the ground by something. You can screw into cardboard stiffened by wheatpaste, so the case can be well designed and literally made of scrap and painted nicely if you like. No need for a printer, that's just easy if you are bad at arts and crafts.

    You'll need to salvage a latching power button or switch from something as a power button. I use a missile switch from some old tool I scrapped years ago lol.

    You can go super fancy mounting coolers and stuff for quiet operation but the basics are make sure you have a PSU, new thermal paste, modify the heat sink to work with fans, and a case with good airflow.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago* (2 children)

    I understand the frustration but if you're willing to test it again sometime, Bazzite have really good docs that tell you all of that. Usually you want to use flatpak (using the app store, called Bazaar), if the software you want is not available there then you have other options like appimage, brew, distrobox and rpm-ostree (this is like dnf and apt, but it layers the packages since it's atomic distro).

    Scripts should just run like normal unless they rely on some tool not available by default (brew is usually used to install cli tools) or if it modifies something in a read only directory like /usr.

    It seems like a lot but when you get the hang of it, it's fine.

    Oh and the Bazzite Portal app should help with installing the most common stuff.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    I ran into a similar issues on the steam machine when I tried it as a desktop PC. It absolutely would work but I'd prefer a more traditional distro over an immutable one like steamos. It's likely great from a stability stand point, but I wanted more competition over the os.

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