I’m working on my transition plan away from Windows and testing out various things in VMs as I do so, and one big hurdle is making sure the VPN client my work requires can connect. Bazzite is my target distro (primarily gaming, work less frequently), though other more traditionally structured ones like Pop!_OS and Garuda are possibilities.

I’m currently trying and failing to get the VPN client working in a distrobox (throws an error during connection saying PPP isn’t installed or supported by the kernel). However, I can successfully get the VPN connected if I overlay the client and its dependencies via rpm-ostree install, but I read somewhere that Bazzite’s philosophy is to use rpm-ostree as sparingly as possible for installing software to preserve as much containerization as possible.

Since I can get it working outside of a container, am I overthinking it? Should I just accept that this might be one of the “sparing” cases? Is Bazzite perhaps a poor fit for my use case? I’ve been trying to make sense of this guide, but I’m having trouble understanding how to apply it to my situation, since I’m not that familiar with Docker or Podman.

  • @[email protected]
    2•6 months ago

    Even if you know how to do stuff, I’d avoid doing ostree on a universal blue derivative.

    I been using Linux for 25 years and just recently embraced the “don’t break Debian” part of the backport manual.

    Stuff you do and don’t document or don’t force yourself to recognize comes back to bite you years later when you can’t use the normal tooling in order to deal with it.

    Anyway, good luck, it sounds like you’ll be fine.

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•6 months ago

      Stuff you do and don’t document or don’t force yourself to recognize comes back to bite you years later when you can’t use the normal tooling in order to deal with it.

      And it’s this right here that forces me to really consider if Bazzite is right for me in this case (and why I didn’t just immediately go with the easier rpm-ostree option). Podman is kind of a necessary tool, at least currently, and if your use case falls outside flatpaks, rpm-ostree, and appimages, it’s Podman or bust (and I currently have an app like that, which I haven’t yet figured out).

      I appreciate your experienced advice. I have probably a total five years of experience, so I would be foolish not to consider to the long-timers offering similar advice in these comments.