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]
    1•6 months ago

    My advice is to stick to a popular and well known general purpose distro. Even though I have never tried Pop os myself I would recommend it over that Brazzite thing (which has a very similar name to that one very popular video streaming site if you know) because I have heard good things about Pop os.

    • @[email protected]OP
      5•6 months ago

      Not Brazzite, “Bazzite.” It’s a mineral, and its naming proximity to an adult website is entirely coincidental (and I would hazard a guess that the mineral was named first).

      Honestly, I’m not that concerned with Bazzite being newer, because it’s based on Fedora CoreOS. It utilizes rpm-ostree to manage system upgrades, so for any bad updates, you just rollback to any previous deployments (and you can pin specific ones so you are guaranteed a stable rollback point). Additionally, you can rebase at any time, so you can swap out the system layer for another ostree-based image without touching any of your files in /etc, /var, and /home.

      Pop!_OS is a great choice, too, but the biggest problem facing the family of Universal Blue distros isn’t notoriety, it’s the fact that Fedora Atomics in general are still relatively new. The examples are still being written, and people are getting used to new tooling.

      But if you don’t need specific customizations like me, and all your software can be found as appimages or flatpaks (or is already installed), Aurora, Bluefin, and Bazzite are all rock-solid choices that will “just work.”