I’m working on my transition plan away from Windows and testing out various things in VMs as I do so, and one big hurdle is making sure the VPN client my work requires can connect. Bazzite is my target distro (primarily gaming, work less frequently), though other more traditionally structured ones like Pop!_OS and Garuda are possibilities.
I’m currently trying and failing to get the VPN client working in a distrobox (throws an error during connection saying PPP isn’t installed or supported by the kernel). However, I can successfully get the VPN connected if I overlay the client and its dependencies via rpm-ostree install, but I read somewhere that Bazzite’s philosophy is to use rpm-ostree as sparingly as possible for installing software to preserve as much containerization as possible.
Since I can get it working outside of a container, am I overthinking it? Should I just accept that this might be one of the “sparing” cases? Is Bazzite perhaps a poor fit for my use case? I’ve been trying to make sense of this guide, but I’m having trouble understanding how to apply it to my situation, since I’m not that familiar with Docker or Podman.
I currently run Bazzite full time on an HTPC laptop, but I don’t use that for work purposes at all. It’s been great, and I would be a little sad if I couldn’t fit Bazzite into my use case.
But I’m fully aware that my frustrations are atomic problems, and I’ve had no issues installing the software I need on non-atomic distros. The reason I’m so smitten by atomic distros is the fact that there’s theoretically no down time. I’ve had distros break in the past due to some squirrely install or update, and I’ve never once had that issue on Bazzite.
I just recently learned that openSUSE users also have a lot of stability due to btrfs snapshots, so maybe that’s really the feature I’m looking for. I don’t know much about it, honestly.
Are these frustrations solved by layering with
rpm-ostree? If so, just go with it. I’ve always layered over a dozen or so packages and it has worked out fine; it’s defaulted to automatic upgrades in the background, so you don’t feel much of it anyways.I love openSUSE and what they do with Btrfs snapshots and Snapper.
However, in terms of ‘robustness’ and ‘stability’, I don’t think anything currently out there can hold up to Fedora Atomic, Guix System and NixOS. This is just by design; the leap from traditional to atomic, then reproducible and finally declarative ensures that issues related to hidden/unknown state, accumulation of cruft, bitrot, configuration drift are left behind in the past. If Btrfs snapshots + Snapper would have been sufficient, then openSUSE themselves would never have desired the creation of openSUSE MicroOS (i.e. their attempt at an ‘immutable’ distro) in the first place.
An excellent point.
But to your earlier one, I can get the VPN client working outside of a container. There’s even an RPM file from the vendor, so installing it is just as easy as installing any other package.
I appreciate the input!
Aight. You know what you ought to do then 😉.
It has been my pleasure!
I’m been daily driving openSUSE Tumbleweed for almost a year and from my end there are no problems with it. In fact, no problem that can be pinned to the particular distro.
I ran into an audio issue with my Bluetooth Headset in Kernel 6.9 3, with sound profiles not appearing. However, this has now been fixed since 2 kernel updates, (eg.it was a bug in the kernel)
The snapshot feature is awesome and always worked without a hitch when I have been tinkering with stuff I dont know how it works.
It has my recommendation. Good for gaming as its a rolling release with all the new stuff to boot.
That’s good to know, especially the gaming part. I have tried it in the past, only briefly, and I remember enjoying the experience (older laptop, so gaming was out of the question). I’ll have to throw an ISO on my thumb drive to give it another try!
As someone who switched from Windows to Kinoite about 6 months ago (and now using bluebuild to create custom images), wether to use an atomic distro or not comes down to how much time do you want to spend learning everything.
I’m a very technical person with years of experience, and I’m still figuring a lot out. You’r not only learning about the ins and outs of linux, but now your adding more complexity with an atomic distro, and even more if you decided to create your own image.
Atomic distros are very much a work in progress and they do have issues you won’t find in non-atomic distros. Creating your image allows you to get around some issues you may run into that layering alone can’t do.
Also, keep in mind that version upgrades (which happen every 6 months or so on Fedora based atomic distros like Bazzite), can and do sometimes break apps baked into your image until they are updated (which also happens in non-atomic distros). Flatpaks can help avoid this breakage.
There are other distros that are gaming focused if atomic distros are not for you.
And this is kind of how I’m starting to look at it, after reading all of these comments. There definitely feels like there’s a disconnect between services like Podman and atomic ideology born out of the fact that they were created with different goals in mind. If the two can be married a bit better, the learning curve can be flattened (and I think that’s a distinct future possibility, since Podman and Fedora Atomics have Red Hat backing).
Regarding breaks, being able to
rollbackis very handy, and I’ve used it many times when I was running Bazzite on my Steam Deck. Regressions happen, and I’ve experienced problematic regressions on non-atomic distros where my only option was to reinstall. This will be my daily driver that needs near full uptime, so whatever I pick, it’s gotta be solid without entirely sacrificing relative newness (i.e. not Debian).Either way, there’s more to consider than I initially thought, and I appreciate your input.