Games

Heroic Launcher, Lutris, Bottles, or just launching them through the command line if you really want to for some reason, are your options. Heroic I just started using and it's great. It's especially good for games from other stores, but you can add anything to it. Lutris is pretty good, but you have to add everything manually (which you'll have to do no matter what for what you're asking about). Bottles is functional, but it is much harder to use than the others, but probably lighter weight if that matters to you at all (and I'll tell you now, it doesn't).

You can just add the .exe to steam and then they are as plug and play as most other steam games.

Honestly, even for a living room PC it's a pain. My living room machine uses Corsair fan controllers, so I had to battle to get OpenLinkHub installed, and a realtek 2.5gbe card, which I attempted to get working and gave up (kernel src package does not match the kernel for some reason). Not overly fun.

Yes but people seem to really want a SteamOS like experience on their desktop. Thats what Bazzite provides.

I dont think steamOS is a good desktop experience but if that makes people feel safe enough to try linux then I think Bazzite does a 100x better job than SteamOS.

If they want an actual desktop that can game and do everyything then they should try Fedora with KDE.

I can attest to this. I daily drive bazzite exclusively now.

Rocket league specifically only uses 40% of the GPU and 25% CPU and refuses to use any more at all. It is only a bazzite problem. Other distros are completely fine and other bazzite users have reported the same thing, regardless of settings, launch options, etc...

It is hell when trying to do embedded firmware development. Pretty much everything has to be done through distrobox related to it because JLink needs to be accessible by NRF connect which has to be accessible by VSCode, etc... vscode and oss versions simply don't work if you have to install more than the very basic UI extensions.

Plus then you have udev rules that you have to manually place in the read only file system (recommended by a Bazzite maintainer on their discord) which they explicitly tell you never to do in the docs. There is absolutely nothing regarding JLink (the most widely used industry flashing tool for ARM) in any universalblue docs, even the bluefin and aurora versions "for developers".

Also, there is absolutely no known way to handle eID credentials, crypto keys, etc in order to digitally sign documents. Also key management and access simply does not work at all in flatpak.

Network scanning simply doesn't work at all (yes, saned is set up). It is completely nonfunctional, it can't discover anything.

Outside of those cases though, it works fine. Themes work, font installation works as expected: the firewall, KiCAD, freeCAD work, browsers, media players, etc... All work fine. Distrobox, while start menu applications via distrobox sometimes simply don't start, they often work fine. However, I haven't had to worry about updating my system in 4 months because updates are in the background and completely seamless and not a single thing breaks during updates which by itself is the reason I switched from arch.

(Arch never became unbootable or seriously broken in 8 years, but I would have update problems and have to search for forum solutions to make a full update work every month or two)

But SteamOS is also immutable 🤔

I'm a daily driver of Bazzite and Bluefin. I felt this way initially but it's been generally painless. I typically check flatpak -> app image -> homebrew -> distrobox when I need something. If that fails, I use rpm-ostree and reboot.

I work in development/devops/infosec by trade and to date there hasn't been a single package or program that I needed that I couldn't get running with minimal fuss. I've even run a couple of MDM packages that my work requires.