Look, I’m a Debian user for 15 years, I’ve worked in F/OSS for a long time, can take care of myself.
But I’m always on a lookout for distros that might be good fit for other people in my non-tech vicinity, like siblings, nieces, nephews… I’m imagining some distro which is easy for gaming but can also be used for normal school, work, etc. related stuff. And yeah, also not too painful to maintain.
(Well, less painful than Windows which honestly is not a high bar nowadays… but don’t listen to me, all tried in past years was to install Minecraft from the MS store… The wound is still healing.)
I have Steam Deck and I like how it works: gaming first, desktop easily accessible. But I only really use it for gaming.
So I learned about Bazzite, but from their description on their main site I’m not very wise:
The next generation of Linux gaming [Powered by Fedora and Universal Blue] Bazzite is a cloud native image built upon Fedora Atomic Desktops that brings the best of Linux gaming to all of your devices - including your favorite handheld.
Filtering out the buzzwords, “cloud native image” stands out to me, but that’s weird, doesn’t it mean that I’ll be running my system on someone else’s computer?
Funnily enough, I scrolled a bit and there’s a news section with a perfectly titled article: “WTF is Cloud Native and what is all this”.
But that just leads to some announcements of someone (apparently important in the community) talking about some superb community milestone and being funny about his dog. To be fair, despite the title, the announcement is not directed towards people like me, it’s more towards the community, who obviously already knows.
Amongst the cruft, the most “relevant” part seems to be this:
This is the simplest definition of cloud native: One common way to linux, based around container technology. Server on any cloud provider, bare metal, a desktop, an HTPC, a handheld, and your gaming rig. It’s all the same thing, Linux.
But wait, all I want to run is a “normal” PC with a Linux distro. I don’t necessarily need it to be a “traditional” distro but what I don’t want is to have it running, or heavily integrated in some proprietary-ish cloud.
So how does this work? Am I missing something?
(Or are my red flags real: that all of this is just to make a lot of promises and get some VC-funding?)
This same Bazzite discussion came up last week. I claimed I hadn’t heard so much marketing bullshit since when everything was called Object Orientated.
There’s nothing cloud about it. It’s a bad marketing term.
…you mean, what if … what if the cool Linux/FOSS hackers are somehow also very bad at marketing?
You know, that’s probably something every Linux dev team could use: a volunteer marketing team. Devs volunteer their time, and not everyone can or wants to code, so it seems to me that there should be space made for other skillsets.
I recall Jorge talking on one of the podcasts, and heard a line like (paraphrased) “You can just run your own, integrated into your own CI/CD system that you’re running”
Even though I’ve been running Linux for a long time, I feel like suddenly got a glimpse of what normal people might feel when we try to get them to use Linux at all.
Yeah, we’ve replaced “you can build your own kernel and install own grub” with “it’s cloud native”.
Not sure it’s better…