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?)

  • luciferofastora@lemmy.zip
    1·
    9 hours ago

    How would you recommend anyone measure this?

    Not at all, that’s my point. We can’t measure absence.

    So far the answer has been things like nvidia drivers and “anti-cheat doesn’t work”, which are things out of our control.

    For the cases you get an explicit reason, yes. Again, we can’t measure or evaluate data that isn’t there. We can’t know how many potential users just weren’t convinced by the pitch.

    If you don’t understand what something is, it may be that you are not the target audience!

    So the target audience for Bazzite are people familiar with cloud-computing based development practices? Otherwise, they wouldn’t make it past the first five words of the pitch “Bazzite is a cloud native image built upon Fedora Atomic Desktops”.

    Also, that’s a great way to build walls, but I’d prefer we build bridges and help people understand instead.

    Laypeople don’t install operating systems.

    Laypeople with respect to OS development or cloud development may well do so. Many Linux users - particularly the share of Windows Gaming converts - have no expertise with “standard cloud tools”, but that doesn’t and shouldn’t be an issue for using Linux.

    If it is an issue for using Bazzite, specifically, that would again lead back to the point: Are Gamers in general the target audience, or just a specific subset?

    Less technical users don’t care and go download the ISO, they don’t need to care about any of this.

    How do you know? Here, we circle back to measuring absence. If less technical users read “cloud” and close the tab, there’s no way of detecting that.

    The conventional marketing wisdom is to deliver strong selling points in your pitch. In the absence of statistical ways to test it, I would approach the question from the perspective of the “customer”, assuming that would be gamers: They want gaming, they want stability, they want to not worry about breaking their system. Bazzite can deliver on that, so why not put those points in the pitch instead?

    Now, I understand that what you’re doing right now works well enough for you. What I don’t get is the strong reaction to an apparently frequent suggestion to improve a detail. The whole thread started with an unprovoked “the more I see this whining the more I want to keep it on the website.” Instead of eventually reconsidering or just ignoring the complaint, quarterlife felt the need to be explicitly spiteful.