This, so much. I tried pop_os, mint, ubuntu, and more, but all had the problem that when I had an hour to play games, It became 55min of troubleshooting some random issue and not playing because of it.

With Bazzite i can finally use linux and just boot, play a game, shutdown. No hassle.

This is why I chose it. Gaming living room computer that kids can't easily break. It just worked. Well, except for my idea to dual boot and have games pulling from an ntfs hdd. Bazzite hated that idea. So if you're using bazzite, make sure your games are on a Linux partition. Even though Linux is ok with ntfs for some reason beyond my expertise... Games do not like it.

I was surprised how well it handles printers. We have an old Brother wireless laser mfp. It was pretty cool when it just saw the printer automatically, but I was really impressed with how easy scanning was.

I started going down the rabbit hole of manually installing and configuring it, but then tested some simple terminal command and it already saw the scanner. Ran skanpage and Bob's your uncle.

I second this, it's why I went with Bazzite on my main rig - it just needs to work and be reliable. The last thing I want to be doing in my spare time is funking around trying to fix anything that happens to break.

All my other devices run whatever I feel like so I can scratch that curiosity-itch but they get reinstalled if anything major breaks and I can't fix it in a reasonable amount of time

Ah.

Well one catch I’ve found outside of CachyOS is that if something isn’t working right, it’s easy to create a ton of work for yourself trying to fix it. An example would be fighting your system trying to roll a package forward for a fix, which then gets out of sync with your distro, which requires more manual fixing since you’re the one maintaining it now…

The Arch/Cachy ecosystem, on the other hand, tends to encourage more usage of system packages, and fixes stuff quick. Usually waiting a day or a few days + a pacman -Syyuu fixes what was wrong.

If your Dad is a software engineer, it’s possible he might fall into that trap with Bazzite. It kinda just depends on his habits/personality, though from what you describe this may not be a huge danger.

i'd recommend aurora, it is from the same team that made bazzite, and is literally just bazzite but without the gaming apps preinstalled, focused more on average pc users

It is on by default, but can be disabled in your repo config: https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/conf_ref.html

The feature works by adding a flag to one random http request to a fedora repo every week. Fedora then aggregates the http logs that have been flagged to derive their metrics. You can opt out of sending the flag, but if you're querying fedora repos then you still end up in their http log.

It appears as though it is...

But saying it pings their servers isn't quite a fair statement as it's not some background service that opens a network connection, it sounds to me at least like it's data that is sent to the Fedora repos once a week when you update your system?

Clients (DNF, PackageKit, …) have been modified so they add a countme variable in their requests to mirrors.fedoraproject.org once a week. This ends up in our webserver log data which lets us generate usage statistics.

Would be glad to be corrected on this though as I am a long time Fedora user now and I'm not overly fond of my data being collected by big corpo; it's why I left Windows in the first place 🙄

Proton has a client app as well, doesn't it? If it doesn't have OpenVPN/Wireshark config support I would avoid it

sudo rpm-ostree install foo.rpm

Should work. I've been doing this with the mullvad VPN client. Only annoyance is that I have to manually install when there's an update (the app notifies me)