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.

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”?