Well…

I recently burned a Linux Mint live ISO to a thumb drive for repairing a PC that isn’t booting right into Windows. The ISO is about 2.8GB in size, doesn’t take that long to download or to write to a thumb drive. It also fits on a DVD if you’re still living in 2007. Bazzite’s ISO is 8.9GB. Takes a lot longer to download and longer to write. Bit of a pain.

Once you’ve got the ISO on a thumb drive, it boots to the typical GRUB menu asking “Install Bazzite, Test this media and install Bazzite, Quit or something.” Test this media is the default choice, and it fails and tells you not to use that media.

They offer a Live ISO version of Bazzite, though it’s marked as in beta. This allows you to use KDE’s settings to set things like scaling so you can read the text from the couch when setting up an HTPC. Problem is it tends to lock up. Through the time consuming process of picking options in the installer, the mouse cursor will just stop moving, and the only thing that works is Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get to a terminal and reboot the machine.

The plain installer doesn’t let you rescale the video, so pull an office chair into the living room to 4k your way through the installer. Anaconda…isn’t good. It’s got some of that Gnome minimialist jankiness to it. Mint’s installer is a series of screens you can go back and forward through, it’s a process. Anaconda is built like an N64 game, first you start out in the mandatory tutorial level where you do the language, time zone, keyboard layout, then you arrive in a hub level where you can choose the order you do things in…for some reason. This leads to a weird structure.

There’s a DONE button up in the very top-left corner of the screen. Not near the middle where all the other interaction is, Not near the bottom-right where most people who read left-to-right, top-to-bottom would look to finde DONE, way in the top-left corner. Which is real fun to keep going between on a 4k monitor at 100% scale when the installer is designed for a 1080p monitor or less, and the mouse sensitivity is low. It also means that the DONE button can mean BACK or FORWARD depending on context, like in the partitioning menu, you select Manual partitioning and then hit DONE, and it takes you FORWARD to the manual partitioning dialog, then you click DONE again to go back to the main menu. But if you click automatic partitioning, DONE just takes you back. Mint’s installer is a linear series with a BACK and NEXT button that make more sense.

If you’ve got a system with more than one drive, and you want to put the root file system on one drive and /home on the other, especially to separate a game library or something, you have to do it the manual way. They give you two manual options, one doesn’t make sense. The other is a LOT fussier, you have to just know to make a /boot/efi, a /boot as EXT4 and / and /home as BTRFS, it takes a lot of clicks, it asks you if you’re sure a lot, and it throws a cryptic error and crashes out of the install if you get it wrong. Oh, you also have to know it’s /var/home, not /home as well. Like, the whole immutable thing just makes it more fussy about what its file system looks like. Can you even add a drive after the fact? Can an immutable distro be FSTABed?

It’s just…jankier. Having done it, I wouldn’t point a newbie to it.

I installed Bazzite a few days ago, and it was a bit of a pain.

They’re gonna move to Florida for a few months, then when they realize they hate it there they’ll move to North Carolina to tell us all about how they did things up north.

I have personally found Bazzite’s installer to be particularly brittle.

I CAST: SUCKING CHEST WOUND!

For new users, if it doesn’t exist in the repos, you’ve gone too far.

I don’t think this holds up under scrutiny. Theoretically sure, installing using your distro’s package manager is the beginner skill, compiling from source is the advanced skill.

The reality is, people transplanting from Windows often own hardware they want to continue to use, that require software that isn’t in a distro’s package manager. For me, this included a DisplayLink docking station, an Epson printer and a SpaceMouse. For some, it will include gaming keyboards or mice, stream decks, who knows what else. A lot of times, there are folks making open source software for these things, but they don’t package them. So you end up on Github as a beginner looking for the thing to make your thing work.

As you migrate into the ecosystem, you start buying hardware that is well supported by the Linux ecosystem, that problem starts to fade away.

by rpm vs deb, I wasn’t meaning downloading individual files…though I’ve done that. DisplayLink offered their driver as a .deb. At first, that Epson printer only issued a .rpm, and I had to use Alien to install a .rpm on a Linux Mint computer. With time, they offered a .deb, and eventually the printer was just natively supported by CUPS. I meant, I find that the Debian/Ubuntu repos (the dpkg/APT system that uses .deb files) have more stuff in them than Fedora’s repos (the DNF package manager that uses .rpm files) do.

Does Mint still not use Wayland?

When I built my current PC, Wayland support in Mint Cinnamon was “We’ve just now added it, it doesn’t work worth a damn but you can try it.” They’re coming along, but they’re behind.

Is an older codebase generally good for new users? The first distro I installed on an x86 PC was Mint Cinnamon 17. Quiana. On a then brand new Dell Inspiron laptop. For about 6 months, the kernel that shipped with the OS didn’t support the laptop’s built-in trackpad. I had to manually update the kernel through Mint Update for the trackpad to work. There’s problems at the bleeding edge, but there’s problems at the trailing edge as well.

A girl sexually assaulted me in middle school.

At least some of the problems I reported about Bazzite are inherited from Fedora. Bazzite didn’t create Anaconda.

Fedora has the problem of being generally fine, but most of the world for the last decade has been targeting Ubuntu as THE Linux distro, so there’s a lot if Git repos out there that don’t include instructions for Fedora. Way fewer things are packaged in rpm rather than deb. I’ve never seen Linux Mint kernel panic unless I was fucking around with the video drivers, I’ve seen Fedora kernel panic.

The main reason I’m using Fedora right now rather than Mint is Mint tends to have an older codebase, and we’re at a point in PC technology where things like wayland offer support for video and graphics stuff that don’t work well under X11. like my 1440p ultrawide 144Hz monitor sitting next to a 1080p 60hz side monitor. Fedora KDE has it ready to go, Mint Cinnamon does not.

I had one fail fairly early, giving me a cryptic message because apparently it couldn’t cope with how I’d set up the partitioning.

I’ve had a Linux Mint install fail because it couldn’t cope with a BIOS setting, the error message gave a plain English explanation “it’s probably the XMBT (or whatever acronym) setting in the BIOS, see this page on the Ubuntu wiki for details:” and it gave a hyperlink, because the installer runs in a live environment, it had a copy of Firefox ready to go, AND it gave a QR code so you could easily open that link on a mobile device. THAT’S how it’s done.

Having played with it for a little while now that I’ve got it installed…I think it’s alright for a mostly or entirely gaming machine. I wouldn’t want to use it, or any immutable distro, as my main computer.

I’ve attempted to stay out of the trendy distro of the month club, remember Garuda? Remember Peppermint? Remember Endeavour?

Bazzite offers KDE or GNOME, and in the menu mentions KDE is what is used in SteamOS.

I installed Bazzite on my HTPC recently. It was the worst install process I’ve seen in over ten years of using Linux. I shall enumerate the problems I had:

1. The image is weirdly large, it’s like 9GB in size. It takes awhile to download and a weirdly long time to write to a USB stick.
2. Once written, you boot the image, and GRUB has the options to Install Bazzite or Test Media And Install Bazzite. By default, Test Media is selected. It always fails this test.
3. If you use the typical non-live environment image, the scaling is tiny on a 4k monitor, and there’s no way to adjust this.
4. If you use the live environment image (in beta at time of writing), it might just lock up. I had that happen twice just while clicking through the Anaconda installer.
5. The Anaconda installer, which I think they inherited from Fedora, was I think designed by one of the contrarian idiots who work for Gnome. There’s a DONE button up in the far upper left hand corner of the screen that sometimes acts as a back button, sometimes acts as a forward button. You have to move the mouse from the top corner of the screen to the center of the screen a lot, for no reason. The top-left corner of the screen is a dumb place to put a DONE button because most languages read top to bottom, left to right, the DONE button is where a START button should go.
6. There isn’t a simple way to tell it “put / on this drive, put /home on that drive.” There’s an automatic installer which will do god knows what…fail, most likely. There’s a “custom” partition dialog which I couldn’t make heads or tails of, and then there’s a “custom advanced” one that lets you set the size and position of each partition to the byte. Doing it this way apparently REQUIRES you to not only set up a /boot/efi partition, but also a /boot partition separate from /root.
7. If you’re in the habit of putting /, you know, operating system and software, on one drive, and /home on another drive, you have to learn from osmosis that part of Bazzite’s immutableness means that there is no /home, there’s a /var/home symlinked to /home.

And if it doesn’t randomly lock up, you’ve got Bazzite installed!

Bazzite markets itself as a newbie friendly Linux. They’ve got that configurator on their website that gives you a little Cosmo quiz about what system you have, what desktop you want etc. which is good! That is good user friendly design. But the actual software you get rattles like a Chrysler. How many noobs are going to bounce right off that?

wasn’t that one made for Last Action Hero?

look up the life and times of Edward Teach.

Precisely.

This is Izzy, aka Her Majesty Queen Isabella Greypelt, Isabella Busy Boo, Izzy Boo, Busy Butt, and The Monochromatic Quadropus.

This is Miss Chiff, aka Widdle Bit or Tiny Tux. She weighs 8 pounds and she hates everyone except my mother.

30 knots indicated would take a plane out of the sky too, that’s well below most airplane’s stall speeds. We can probably fix that before doing the Monsanto Slam though.

When the humans win the class war against the lizards.

The computer can’t be held accountable, but the programmer and operator can.

I could go on a whole thing about mission rules and command decisions here, but I’m sick of typing for the day.

Things like Minetest exist.

Fun fact: In several episodes of the original Star Trek series, Spock can be seen holding and using an E6B flight computer, which is a slide rule invented for the US Navy in World War 2.