Alternate account: @woelkchen@piefed.world
Standard Bluefin is based on Fedora.
I don’t get Universal Blue’s desire to give slightly different flavors and entirely new name. With the non-LTS option, what is the difference between Bazzite Gnome and Bluefin? Preinstalled code editors instead of Steam and Lutris?
But SteamOS is Arch?
No, it’s an immutable OS based on Arch. Also not rolling release.
So why not suggest CachyOS, which is in a similar space?
You were also suggesting regular Arch and that’s irresponsible.
If all they want a computer for is Steam, they’re going to get a better experience on Wayland.
That’s different than outright suggesting Arch.
I have bazzite on a gaming laptop for games with the kiddo, Zorin on my main laptop and desktop.
Btw, if you want Bazzite but without the gaming stuff for work computers, there are also Aurora and Bluefin. The latter is more conservative, based on CentOS and using Gnome. They are all Universal Blue projects, so you’re not dealing with vastly different systems.
Which is why LMDE exists.
Too bad LMDE is based on Sid. Some stuff can break on occasion.
I few months ago I helped an older lady at a repair café to replace her Win10 with LMDE (because that’s what she wanted). Installed just fine but didn’t boot after reboot. Installed LMDE 2 or 3 additional times, to make sure I didn’t overlook something. Same result.
Then installed Fedora and it just worked.
I’d much sooner suggest Fedora if Wayland is needed.
Bazzite is Fedora Silverblue with a bunch of quality of life additions.
If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy. If you want stability, stick with Mint and X11.
If you want Wayland and stability, use Bazzite.
The more Ubuntu enshittifies, the more work Mint has to do to work against it. That’s why my personal recommendation is against Mint. Ubuntu just isn’t a good foundation to build on, IMO.
YouTube is full of Bazzite tutorials. Whatever is out there at documentation is also quite recent. When people ask ChatGPT about how to do something on Ubuntu or Mint, the answers are generated from 15 years old forum posts. Often not only unusable but also damaging. My expectationnis that for immutable distributions LLM answers in 15 years will not break the OS. At worst it’ll recommend some tool deleted from Flathub and it’ll merely not work instead of breaking everything.