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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1d ago (text post)   178 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for May 26th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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Because this thread is Deadsville, and because I was talking about it earlier, let me dive a little deeper into my first impressions now that I've installed and used Bazzite for a little bit.

First off, the good:

  • The desktop isn't fucking Cosmic. I could say a Lot about this, and maybe I should, but for all its (alleged) strengths, Cosmic has been a massive headache for me as a desktop. Granted, it might well be better with a fresh install, but I still think it's inexcusable that my desktop session can slowly grow to hog all of my available system memory, which is a particular WTF given that it's written in bloody Rust of all things (please, potential Rustaceans, I am well aware that it's not the fault of Rust, that the coders are Doing It Wrong, because of course they are, that's what fucking happens when coders have the option to create unsafe blocks of code as opposed to getting gud at Rust), silently fail to black screen when Dumb Shit happens like power saving overriding an active full-screen game, be bad at keeping screen settings for modern games, generally, and not just with Steam games either, create both graphical and alphanumerical screen glitches with alarming regularity, along with countless other small annoyances like the file manager not properly dealing with MTP devices, leading to my need to use the Gnome Files app to be able to copy shit to my phone. I'll take Gnome back over this mess any day of the week.
  • It's container based. 'Nuff said.
  • It speaks volumes to me that I spent ~4x longer waiting for the stock Windoze install to copy off onto a backup drive than I did installing Bazzite and getting it off the ground. Moreover, after getting over my Linux-land autism (see the Meh, below), said install was quick and easy-peasy compared to all of the hoops I'd have to jump through to get to a Win 11 desktop like tell it not to "help" me by tracking everyfucking thing I do and driving the point home by going and telling it everywhere else to kindly shove its telemetry crap right up its /dev/null, let alone the extra crap I'd have to do in order to avoid creating a Microsoft account. For bonus points, it's not shoving Copilot down my throat either. Fuck you, Micro$oft, in particular for unleashing that fresh new hell upon your users, especially the ones with <16G of system memory and/or the ones that don't want a bloody Microsoft account.
  • Speaking of installation, installing ollama and oss-gpt:20b for teh lulz was painless as well and fun for five minutes or so. Now to mess with it in detail...
  • And speaking of ollama, Bazzite handled going with my iGPU for display flawlessly, letting the dedicated GPU do its LLM thang right out of the box, or at least AFAICT. Will have to try switching to a game and using a port on the GPU to see what kind of an impact that has, some time...

The Meh:

  • BTRFS -- Seriously, has this actually, finally, gotten to be decent? I wanted to believe in BTRFS around about a decade ago, but as it languished in its half-baked state, I eventually gave up on it and moved back to XFS or ZFS, depending. The last thing I wanted to do when I was installing Bazzite was to dick around with doing my own system partitions and file systems by hand, so I ultimately rolled with it, but it still seems a little slow to boot up after POST compared to the last-gen system that I'm writing this on.
  • The Bazaar -- not bad, but pretty sparse compared to the OOB software available in most Ubuntu-based distros.
  • OpenRPG is (still) a PITA--not really Bazzite's fault, per se, but they're pimping it out in the bazaar, the bastards.
  • Flatpaks -- again, not Bazzite specific, and I understand why they're the New Hotness, but they can still be a PITA as often as not, too.
  • Steam -- I get why it's here by default, I'm not mad, and I may even go back down that road some day in the not too distant future, but for now stop popping up a bloody login screen every time I fire up the desktop! I'd like to keep my old pusher at arm's length if I can, pls, kthxbai

The Bad:

  • Lack of desktop options -- If left to my own devices, and all other distros being equal, I probably would have tried Hyprland, but for now I've got enough stuff to worry about without tinkering with another desktop. Again.
  • The learning curve -- The last time I was using a Red Hat based Linux distro with any regularity, Firefox was still easily the best browser around, so there are going to be places where I have to slap my own forehead and go finding the right switches to add to dnf to make it Do Right as opposed to the much-more familiar apt or even dpkg. Guess we'll see how that goes.

And that's all that I can think of for now. I've rambled on for long enough, but my goal here is to play around with it for the next couple of weeks and see what works well, what crashes, and what havoc I can wreak with it, so I might just have more to say next week!

one of us, one of us

Agreed on a lot of the annoyances, especially flatpaks and various Bazaars. My experience is that BTRFS is genuinely good enough as long as you never need to get to the partition from a Windows boot, but I haven't pushed to many edge cases. Hyprland isn't that rough to learn, but it's still something new (not helped by three different config revisions in a year!), especially if you ever switch to something else and back.

My experience is that BTRFS is genuinely good enough as long as you never need to get to the partition from a Windows boot, but I haven't pushed to many edge cases.

Thank you kindly, the only way Windoze is going back on this hardware (assuming I keep it, which isn't quite a given just yet) is if there's some must-play game that Bazzite-flavored Lutris/Proton (and maybe Heroic...?) can't handle, and I'll be all too happy to annihilate that bridge if and when I come to it. In the meantime, I feel a lot better about not going to great lengths to set up a non-standard FS, and will get back to installing other llms and maybe kicking the tires on Bluetooth 5.4 to see how well Bazzite handles multiple Bluetooth devices at once...

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