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?)

  • quarterlife@lemmy.sdf.org
    1·
    12 hours ago

    I appreciate the input. You and I had the same opinion which is actually why I went with container native in the first place. I was trying to avoid the word cloud because I felt that some gamers would misconstrue it.

    The reason I’ve changed it back and made it accurate is that I feel we have reached the point of saturation where some benefit of the doubt is present, and the word cloud may lead people to look twice rather than just run away.

    I did make sure to watch our numbers before and after that change and I saw no discernible difference in bounce rate or ISO download growth rate. In fact in a previous comment in this thread I said we had 400TB/no in ISOs - That is now 460TB not even a couple days later.

    One other way to look at it to is it benefits us twofold, in one sense we’re getting cloud nerds like you and me interested in a fun new toy that is directly in our wheelhouse (and we want those, cloud nerds are quality engineers and contributors), and in another, we’re showing both windows users and existing Linux users an ironically lesser known part of Linux among desktop users – cloud native – despite it being probably the biggest money maker in Linux. People can contribute to Bazzite who might have never done anything in the Linux space before and accidentally find themselves on the path to a real paying Linux job.