Hal

For the most part, something either comes with the system or you install it as a flatpak. Or as someone else mentioned, run in Distrobox.

Therre’s actually a Bazzite help page on this: https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/software-intro/

The very last resort is that you can install packages sort of as normal, by layering them in rpm-ostree, then rebooting to rebuild things. It’s discouraged though, as if you manually install packages then it can break updates and upgrades take longer to run. Basically, installing packages manually is defeating the purpose of an immutable system (the purpose being basically to keep things super stable).

They discourage layering on the packages, as that’s how you get conflicts that might break things in future releases.

I tried to run Bazzite as my daily driver but I just couldn’t do it. I probably was not familiar enough with Distrobox, but everything I tried to do had some caveat that meant I couldn’t work it out.

The desktop the kids use runs Bazzite, and I’m pretty close to changing it. Issues with xbox controllers, issues waking from sleep, issues going to sleep to start with. It’s barely used outside of the kids playing games and it still has more issues than I do running Nobara as my main.

I think it’s important to point out (for someone familiar, such as everyone on lemmy obviously) that Bazzite is based on the immutable Fedora Silverblue.

Being immutable makes it apparently stable, but comes with tradeoffs (you are basically limited to flatpaks for installing things, or at least highly discouraged from using other install methods).

If you want a gaming focused distro that is based on the standard Fedora, I can recommend Nobara. Their default version now uses KDE but I use the Gnome version. I think KDE did something recently to make everyone angry but I can’t remember what (AI related maybe?), I use Gnome because I like it.

I don’t think anyone has mentioned this yet, but the idea of AI hacking tools has also led to a lot more human effort in finding and fixing security issues.

A while back there was an article about AI security tools and something about over 200 security vulnerabilities patched (perhaps in Chrome?). But in the detail of the article, it mentioned only 4 were found by AI. The rest were found by humans trying to get there before people with AI tools found them.

Not OP but I use an Enterprise version that is fine, I guess a different release branch. My mother doesn’t have the enterprise version as she works for a small business and it broke.