I recently set up Bazzite on my friend’s system after switching from Linux Mint due to some Nvidia driver issues. Although the hardware problems are not there anymore, the distro is now facing problems installing certain programs for software development that they had no problem installing in the previous distro. I think there are issues related to the immutability of the distro, though I am not sure since I am new to Linux too. Additionally, my friend is worried about higher storage consumption and slower performance in certain applications.

I realise the distro is primarily meant for gamers and my friend is not much of a gamer themselves, however they told me they appreciate its friendlier KDE interface so I wish to avoid switching from this distro again if possible. However I fear that they may encounter more errors in the future and that I may not be available to help them out whenever needed, so I am in a bit of a conundrum.

Thus I intend to ask here if it is possible to arrange something for easing development related tasks e.g. VM, distrobox etc. or whether it is easier to simply switch to some other compatible distro.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    31·
    16 hours ago

    Hard disagree.

    Installing Debian on Nvidia means you are maintaining Nvidia yourself, and you are just holding your hands together hoping the 3rd party repo’s don’t fall out out of sync and you don’t have to troubleshoot some Nvidia conflict yourself. This is the whole reason I left that ecosystem behind, it was a huge waste of my time…

    …Maybe you got lucky and just didn’t run into any Nvidia bugs? But that was not my experience.

    (And to be clear this is different if you’re using it headless or something).

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
      3·
      7 hours ago

      Dear sir/madam, NVIDIA 550 is available in the Debian stable repo itself so no need for third party repos and therefore no significant risk of breakage. If that driver works well enough you’re good. Ubuntu LTS has NVIDIA 580 in its official repo. I’m running in on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS as I write. Then of course if you’re on Debian and NVIDIA 550 does not work for you, you could grab the official driver installer from NVIDIA which would very likely work fine on Debian stable, and it won’t break on its own via Debian updates since Debian stable doesn’t ship major version changes of its packages between releases. You’d likely have to uninstall, then reinstall every few years when you upgrade to the next stable Debian release, but that’s best practice for anything that was installed outside of Debian’s repo.

      There’s always a possibility for unintended fuckups but these methods are fairly safe and stable. Using 3rd party repos is significantly more risky to break things one of those days as you innocently apt upgrade.