Going Atomic

One of the challenges of running Linux is that it can be somewhat easy to “break” if you don’t know what you’re doing. One errant update and your flow is completely broken, and you’re stuck in a command line, desperately writing in commands to get it working again.

(Leave an Arch-based distro alone for a couple of months and go back to it, and you will be in for a fun time.)

This is also true of Windows—that OS can get pretty flaky depending on what you do with it.

But the nice thing is that, with Linux, it’s easier to build architectures that are a bit more user-proof, ensuring users have a nicer experience without losing the underlying capabilities of the operating system.

It’s with all that in mind that I bring up Bazzite, which perhaps represents the state of the art in power-user Linux distros. Bazzite, my current desktop distro of choice, is the gaming-focused part of the Universal Blue suite of Linux distributions, which promote themselves as “cloud native,” a reference to their use of containerization in desktop Linux development (think Docker or Podman). For the end user just trying to load up Steam, the takeaway from this is that the operating system uses repeatable elements and can be brought back to a stable state easily.

It is considered an “immutable” or “atomic desktop” distro, based on Fedora Silverblue. For those not steeped in Linux-dom, these terms essentially mean that you cannot easily make changes to the operating system’s underlying structure—kind of like ChromeOS, but with significantly more flexibility.

While Bazzite is branded as a gaming distro—and is known as a pretty solid alternative OS for the Steam Deck, something I still need to test—it is also a very capable GNOME-based desktop experience, one where many of the hardware and software headaches are solved for you by the time you plug it in.

In roughly 90 percent of cases when you want to just use your computer, Bazzite is great. You can install Flatpaks for most of your applications, and for the ones you can’t, you can install applications using Distrobox, a tool for building bespoke Linux containers. Have a Fedora-compatible RPM file? Just whip up a Fedora instance in BoxBuddy. Need an Ubuntu or Arch instance? BoxBuddy can do that, too.

This is not the normal pecking order for app installation on Linux, but it means that it’s harder for a random app you installed from GitHub to destroy your system by accident.

Most people are not installing apps via Distrobox, so they can likely stick to Flatpaks. This OS is an excellent choice if you want to set up a mini PC to run as a console-like experience and not ever have to think about it.

I occasionally use my device to game rather than using a separate console, so I tend to use Linux distros that have all the gaming stuff already worked out so I don’t need to think about it. The OS I started with, Nobara, also did this, but while it has some touch-the-metal advantages, I did occasionally run into situations where I updated the operating system, and it kicked me into the grub command line because some random underlying thing broke. Like Bazzite, it’s also based on Fedora, but the distros have diverging philosophies, with Nobara favoring optimization and Bazzite stability.

I liked Nobara, but Bazzite feels like a more architecturally advanced version of the concept it’s selling. Even more esoteric use cases I had wanted to look into, like the Android interface Waydroid, had already been considered by the Bazzite team, which helped me avoid having to do low-level stuff just to screw around. I even got GPU passthrough on a virtual machine working on my laptop, which kind of blew my mind and I had struggled to do with Nobara.

Bazzite sounds great. So what’s the rub?

All that said, if you want to do things more complex than run basic apps or play games, you will eventually run into the limitations of Bazzite, but they will come later in your experience than you might expect. Many of the headaches will be related to differences in how things work at the command-line and architectural level.

A key one: The relatively simple approach to setting up Docker isn’t quite so simple on atomic desktops, which can make using the OS a bit of a pain from a dev standpoint if you haven’t yet moved over to podman. I eventually figured it out, but it was non-trivial, and it doesn’t seem to love my VS Code install, either. (If your goal is development, you likely will have a better experience with Bluefin, which is built for these kinds of use cases.)

With that in mind, I would recommend Bazzite as an end-user OS, and leave the server stuff to a more basic version of Fedora or Ubuntu. You might even be happier if you just run your Docker containers off a remote machine anyway and connect to them remotely.

For people who just want to get stuff done, though, and think a little less about the innards of what they’re using, there’s a lot to like about the Universal Blue distros.