easymode

Installed Bazzite on my couch gaming PC to replace vanilla Debian. It's alright, though I had a random crash and I'm getting some audio stutters. To be fair, I was getting audio stutters on my Debian install too, so I think some adjustments need to be made... I'm partially debating switching back to Windows for my main gaming rig, since it "just works" and doesn't require any additional configuration. Dual-boot is the way to go for now I think.

bumbervevo wrote: May 13th, '26, 11:27 Installed Bazzite on my couch gaming PC to replace vanilla Debian. It's alright, though I had a random crash and I'm getting some audio stutters. To be fair, I was getting audio stutters on my Debian install too, so I think some adjustments need to be made... I'm partially debating switching back to Windows for my main gaming rig, since it "just works" and doesn't require any additional configuration. Dual-boot is the way to go for now I think.

I think it all depends on how much you want to fuss. Installing mods on Silksong was 2/10 fussing on Windows and about a 9/10 fussing on Linux, but I made it work... I think a big part of the learning curve is figuring out where directories are especially with Wine since I'm a newb with that stuff... Then there's network mounts, which I can get to work fine on Linux, but I still haven't figured out the best way to do this... I used systemd and some mount files and that took forever... so yeah, for gaming and certain things... Windows just werks. Hopefully Linux will get there. It's weird... I can imagine very casual users will have a fine time with Linux... and extreme-nerds will be fine, but it's the people in the middle who want to do a bunch of weird and complicated things, but don't want to no-life their OS, lol... those are the ones who have the most trouble (me).

ward wrote: May 13th, '26, 12:37 Hopefully Linux will get there. It's weird... I can imagine very casual users will have a fine time with Linux... and extreme-nerds will be fine, but it's the people in the middle who want to do a bunch of weird and complicated things, but don't want to no-life their OS, lol... those are the ones who have the most trouble (me).

I think you've hit on something I've been trying to articulate for quite a long time. this really sums up what my experiences have been. It's a reverse bell curve of sorts.

@Casey @ward Yeah, exactly this. Proton and GPU support on Linux has come a really far way, but it just requires a bit too much knowledge and upkeep for me to comfortably run as a daily driver. Just installed Windows alongside Bazzite, so now I've got two fresh OSes to configure and customize.

I really like using AtlasOS for Windows; it's one of those debloaters that you can run and it sets a bunch of sensible defaults for you while also giving you the option to revert those changes if you don't like it. I found out about it about two years ago and have set it up on every Windows system I have.

I dabbled in some virtual machines years ago around 2013-2014ish, Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint, Zorin OS, Puppy Linux... was very pleased with how they all performed on low end hardware for the time. The gaming part has come giant leaps and bounds, I remember back then dx11 stuff didn't work and when googling around people said they didn't know if it'd EVER work lol. Fast forward all these years later with Vulkan and Proton and most things just working, or at most a little googling around will fix stuff it seems. I watched Steam Deck stuff here and there over the years and most stuff seemed to just work, or switching to a different Proton version after googling would fix stuff for the person. Shame with a big price jump on the steam deck ~yesterday I saw that made news.... probably not getting one now unless I come across the marketplace deal of the century lol, I can't justify the msrp of them now

Been debating trying it out again, maybe Bazzite as well. I read to not try dual booting with Bazzite and windows on the same drive and to put the windows portion on a separate ssd, but maybe that doesn't apply anymore or the person was misinformed.

I really liked the retro themes and the wallpapers y'all showed, made me feel nostalgic haha

WhiteSnake9191 wrote: May 30th, '26, 00:25 Been debating trying it out again, maybe Bazzite as well. I read to not try dual booting with Bazzite and windows on the same drive and to put the windows portion on a separate ssd, but maybe that doesn't apply anymore or the person was misinformed.

I'm not sure how great bazzite would be on a desktop due to it using an immutable filesystem, I believe like steamOS you'd be limited to using flatpak applications which can be a bit unwieldy.

I have been Ubuntu, currently on 26.04 LTS, on both my laptop and desktop for almost five years now. I do not dual-boot anymore, and have never had any problems with Ubuntu. I don't use snaps, but getting flatpak on Ubuntu has always been easy. Used to distrohop a lot back in the day... but these days I would rather spend my free time playing games. Ubuntu is stable, and certain research software, like ERPLab and Neurodebian, work best on Debian and Ubuntu.

I would use pure Debian, gladly, but some packages there are really old. On the gaming front though, I have never had any hiccups with either Ubuntu or Fedora. In spite of having almost always been on Nvidia cards. Granted, I am not much into modding... and I have strict policy of not playing any games that require access to my kernel. But performance-wise, I have always found Linux to be on par, or slightly better than windows.