Honestly after reading Antheas’ story I’m inclined to believe his side. (Linked in the article: https://ba.antheas.dev/bazzite-postmortem.html)

I’ve had sudden breaking changes in my Bazzite install that seem like they should have been easy to catch in testing, I’ve been surprised by some of the seemingly random gnome tweaks that come pre-installed and I’ve seen them equally randomly appear and disappear, and I’ve seen Kyle Gospo be rude and aggressive in the support discord.

Yeah the extensions are important. I have my top bar completely hidden until I open quick search. I like the aesthetic of a completely clear screen with just my desktop background and my windows (I also generally configure macOS this way as well).

I’m a long term Mac user and have been periodically playing with Linux because I want to fully switch eventually. (full disclosure I currently still have a MacBook I use as well as a Linux desktop)

I’ve tried Ubuntu, Debian, Elementary, and probably a few others I’ve forgotten, but the first one I’ve really felt is a viable daily driver OS is Bazzite. This is because it largely just works out of the box, such that you only need to install and tweak extra things if you really want to.

I strongly recommend Bazzite, and I personally prefer the Gnome variant.

Bazzite gives you:

• easy way to update everything in one place
• “App Store” like application to find most apps you’ll need
• all the basic drivers and utilities you’ll need out of the box
• a “Files” application that feels like Finder
• a “Document Viewer” application that feels like Preview (although it’s not as powerful)
• a quick search feature that’s a lot like Apple’s Spotlight, and honestly is way more reliable than Spotlight in more recent macOS releases
• multitouch trackpad gesture support out of the box
• a Settings app that is pretty straightforward to navigate and controls most of the things you would care about
• There are other settings apps for finer tweaking. I know that sounds confusing, but Linux people wouldn’t complain if it wasn’t possible to change every detail somehow. Bazzite does a good job of making the important stuff accessible in the main settings app IMO, so you generally don’t have to worry about the deeper options.

Here’s a guide to get you started:

1. Go here: https://bazzite.gg/
2. Fill out the dropdowns (Q: What hardware are you using? A: Desktop, Q: Who is the vendor of your primary GPU? A: this depends, it’s important to get it right, ask for help if you are unsure, Q: What desktop environment do you prefer? A: I recommend gnome, but KDE is great too, Q: Do you want Steam Gaming Mode? A: No, I want a traditional desktop experience)
3. Click the “download Bazzite …” button
4. Make a USB stick into a bootable Bazzite installer (I recommend using https://etcher.balena.io/)
5. Boot your computer from the USB stick. How to do this depends on the motherboard, but generally means holding down a key while booting (on a Mac it’s Option, on other computers it’s often something like Del or F2 or F12 or something) This will bring you to a menu that you navigate with keyboard arrows until you find the option to boot from the USB
6. Follow the steps from the installer. It’s pretty user friendly.

Note that this will delete all data in the USB you use and the drive you install Bazzite on

Once you have installed Bazzite, here are a few programs I’d recommend (these can be found in the “Bazaar”, which is an “App Store” like way to get programs.

• VLC (like QuickTime in macOS, but honestly VLC is way more powerful)
• LibreOffice (there are a couple FOSS Office suite options, this is the one I personally recommend)
• KdenLive (video editing - like iMovie or Final Cut)
• GIMP (like Adobe Photoshop)
• Disk Usage Analyzer (like DaisyDisk on Mac), if you’ve ever used that
• Mailspring (I haven’t found an email app that is quite as nice as Apple’s but Mailspring is the one I’m currently using)

If you have any other questions let me know! I’m happy to help.

It’s not easy to switch, but it can be made easier if you keep all your important files in one place.

• Steam multiplayer networking
• Steam Input

I have set up WireGuard manually running on a home server. It’s not that hard to set up IMO but that definitely depends on your experience level.

Other than that I’d second Tailscale which is similar but easier to set up

It’s the most plug-and-play Linux has ever been from my experience.

This is why I use CloudFlare. They block the worst and cache for me to reduce the load of the rest. It’s not 100% but it does help.

Thanks I’ll look some of these up and maybe I’ll understand why people hate systemd

Windows was developed by a huge corporation for profit, and that drives enshittification, because eventually they have all the users they think they can get, so instead they start trying to milk those users for more $$$.

Linux is developed by a bunch of nerds who are doing it as a hobby, or because they weren’t happy with the other options. This type of group does not leas to enshittification.

I’m with you I don’t really get the hate for it, nor have I seen a suggested alternative.

I found an older version that sounded like it should be compatible on the OpenRGB webpage but it didn’t work. I suppose I should look further. Thanks for the tip!

It’s working for just setting static colors, but when I try to install plugins it doesn’t show up at all. I wanted to use HardwareSync and maybe Effects.

I started trying out Bazzite yesterday and it’s been great so far! HDR is not as simple to get working as their marketing would make you think, but once you know what to do it’s not so bad.

Al’s I’m having trouble getting OpenRGB working correctly.

But other than that it’s been pretty good. It’s harder to tweak than Ubuntu (what I was previously using) but works much much better out of the box.

Some of those services are pretty easy to set up, some might be more complicated. You’d have to look around for open source projects for those services and see if you can find ones you like. It will take more time to get it initially set up than to maintain, but expect to fix something that breaks every once in a while.

As for cost, probably like a few hundred to a thousand USD can get a reasonable computer for this. You don’t need a GPU, but want a decent CPU, plenty of RAM, and a LOT of storage. Look for companies auctioning off old servers.

Loosely I’d say expect this project to be a whole hobby.

As the result of a single misconfigured security setting on my Android, I was locked out of my Google Account on my phone AND all of my PCs.

Just a heads up on what you are getting yourself into, if you fuck up your self hosted setup badly enough there is no recovery.

That isn’t necessarily intended to scare you off from self hosting, just that the first and most important lesson to learn is to have a good system of backups that are backed up automatically, are easy to recover from, and are separated enough from other copies of the data that if something goes terribly wrong one copy will survive.

I use rsync + ZFS for backups which includes historical backups

I can try it again, but what I did was compare h265 to SVT-AV1 in ffmpeg, using a couple different clips of different styles (including a video from my phone and some ripped blu-ray movies). I used “constant quality / variable bitrate settings, and ran each file with a variety of settings for both encoders. I judged the videos with a quality comparison tool ffmpeg has, and I also took subjective notes when I could tell the difference.

I found AV1 did better at very low quality (when it was firmly into the region where it was visibly different, AV1 did have better quality per bitrate).

But when trying to produce high-quality clips, AV1 was never able to produce a clip that matched the quality score of h265, even when the bitrate of the AV1 file was higher.

AV1 only has gains at very low quality settings. For high quality, h265 is much better. At least with the codecs available in ffmpeg, from my tests.

It would be nice if they could finish AV1 first…