93
submitted 23 hours ago by Nexyte@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

My current rig is featuring an I7 10th gen and a nvidia 4070ti. Is there a distro that you recommend me to use as a linux beginner that is also good for gaming and streaming, that will work with my pc parts? Because I heard that intel and nvidia are famous for causing issues on Linux.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] TiredTiger@lemmy.ml 1 points 13 hours ago

As a beginner on Bazzite who's been struggling to figure out said distroboxes (via Distroshelf), is there a good guide somewhere to them? On like, a conceptual level. I.e., when do I need to use a distrobox and why? A lot of information I've been finding has just been command line instructions and that's great, but I really want to know the 'why' of things so I understand what I'm doing.

[-] IratePirate@feddit.org 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Very basically (ELI5):

  • Bazzite is an immutable distro, meaning anything in the file system but your /home is read-only. That makes the OS pretty secure: from the user (who cannot break it by messing around), from software bugs (which cannot really take down the system with them) and from potential malware incursions.
  • Nice... But how do we install software on such a system? Linux software does need write access to system directories (e.g. /bin, /lib, /etc and others) during installation, and now it can't. So we need to work around that. Bazzite does that in two ways:
    • installing Flatpaks, a special way of packaging software together with all of its dependencies and running it in a kind of sandbox, separated from the rest of the system.
    • installing it inside distrobox containers (for any software that does not come as Flatpaks). These are, essentially, a separate complete Linux distro (though stripped down as much as possible) running in a sandbox. And on these we do have system level write access. If we mess up, the software messes up or it's malware, only the distrobox will be affected, not our host machine.

You may now begin to understand why I wouldn't recommend Bazzite to beginners: it's a cool, but advanced concept, and you need to understand its limitations and workarounds. Otherwise, you will just be roadblocked at some point, or, like you are, hacking away on the command line without actually understanding what you're doing. On that note, props to you for succeeding so far! But also, at the risk of sounding like a gatekeeper, it shouldn't be that way, for two reasons:

As a beginner switching from Windows, you have enough things to familiarise yourself with: the file system structure is different ("Where's my C:\ drive?"), software installation is different ("Wait? I don't just download random binaries from the Internet like a caveman?") and a lot of software is different ("Where is Paint? Where is Outlook? And where did the ribbon menu in Office go?"). You really shouldn't have to tackle the command line to get basic functionality working.

If and when you start working on the command line, you must understand what you're doing, because the command line assumes you do. It lets you do anything with and to your system, which makes it a very powerful tool. But powerful tools need to be handled with caution, and as you can see from your experience, Bazzite does not teach you that: it expects you to use the terminal right away, and since you can't, you just resort to copy-pasting random commands off the internet. In Bazzite, this cannot hurt you much because of how the distro ist built. But it's an absolutely terrible habit for new Linux users to get into. Once you switch distros and move to something else than Bazzite, just running random commands on the command line can absolutely wreck your system.

this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
93 points (100.0% liked)

Linux

63265 readers
597 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS