A coworker of mine asked me to help him install Linux, he hasn’t tried Linux before but he’s sick of Windows.
He is very much into gaming, so gaming support is the first priority. He is also a developer/tester so I suppose that he will also want to have access to dev tools, languages, and other packages like that for personal projects.
My first go-to when recommending to newbies is Mint because it’s simple, tried and tested, but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience. However it scares me that there’s no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks and brew, or even podman images. Will this be a problem as he uses the OS for general usage besides gaming in the long term, would it be better to just go with Mint and set that up for gaming instead?
Feel free to also recommend other distros, but keep in mind that while he is technical, he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.
Since gaming is the first priority, does he play competitive multiplayer games? Better check their anticheat state first, as some just flat out deny linux, full stop.
I have no real recommendation in regards of distro, but afaik either should do.
And what I gather, Bazzite has package management ‘ujust’ https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/ - but beyond this hastily googled doc, I have no idea, never used Bazzite.
ujust is not a package manager, the way I understand it from this thread is that it’s just a convenience script that internally will use one of the other methods shown in the doc you mentioned (brew or flatpak for example). So it still seems risky to me not to have access to common linux package managers besides brew
You can access any package manager you want through distrobox then run the app directly from your host OS without really even noticing that’s what’s happening. This is how I run librewolf because it was givit me a weird lag on flatpak. The only way I remember it’s on distrobox is because it says so in the task manager.
Aside from that, you mostly use flatpak. You can also install local .RPMs and appimage. You can layer packages with rpm-ostree, which adds the package to your base OS image that is initialized at boot. They recommend that you try to avoid that if possible. I’ve only really needed to use it for things like VPN software. I don’t use brew.
You’re right about ujust. Bazzite comes with a bunch of premade “recipes” to make some things people often need easier. For example, “ujust update” updates everything including os image, firmware, drivers, flatpaks, packages, etc. all at once. Being immutable, nothing changes until you reboot. Rolling back is insanely easy, but I’ve only had to do it once (and it was my fault).
I’ve been using it for like a year and a half now and it’s almost boringly stable. People will say it’s limiting or restricting, but I disagree. You can do pretty much anything, the process just might be different.