My question is basically the title, but here are some more details.
My computer is used about 75% for work, 20% for personal use (almost entirely web), and 5% for gaming. ~2 y.o. midrange rig w/ Intel CPU, AMD graphics, 32GB DDR4 RAM.
For work, I need lots of straightforward things: video conferencing on Teams (web is fine), Zoom, Word document editing (web is fine), a bunch of other web apps, some light database stuff, etc.
Plus two things that are a bit trickier: OneDrive professional/SharePoint (so I’ll need abraunegg’s onedrive) and Excel 2024 desktop (web isn’t good enough) for which I’ll need to run Windows (10? Ameliorated, maybe?) in a VM.
But I also want to do gaming. I wouldn’t install a kernel-level rootkit anyway (and I boycott Denuvo), so SteamOS-level compatibility should work great for my needs. I also have a Quest 3, so I’ll want to do PCVR, which apparently works great (with Bazzite).
But I don’t really grok what Bazzite being immutable means for using it as a daily driver for work/productivity. Under the hood, it’s just Fedora 42, right? For immutable distros, you use flatpaks instead of apt install, and they’re basically just “apps” that should “just work”, right? Do I care about kernel modification?
Or, more to the point, I don’t know what I don’t know. After preliminary research on this all, I think my plan of going for Bazzite then adding abraunegg’s onedrive and a Windows VM with Office 2024 will hit all my needs, but can anyone “sanity check” that plan, or compare the pros/cons with a non-Ubuntu-based alternative?
I’m good enough with computers that I should be able to tinker through the inevitable small challenges that will come up, but I don’t really have enough time to do it twice if my initial plan is terrible. (I connect to a Debian server remotely using the terminal, so I have some background—but I needed to install a bunch of packages to get web app software running, and idk if I’ll need that as a desktop user.)
Any advice much appreciated! And thanks for reading this far, even if you don’t comment. :)
Edit: thanks for the input so far! I’m turning in, but I’ll read everything and reply to stuff tomorrow.
Pro of running an immutable distro is that it is much harder to break during daily use. The con is that you’re pretty much setup to only use flatpaks and some things like abraunegg’s onedrive aren’t available as a flatpak.
Have you considered making the
Win10Win11 VM a complete work jail? If you do all things work in there then you get a nice separation of private and work and won’t have to worry about work apps linux compatibility.
edit: Windows 10 support ends on October 14, 2025Thanks for the reply!
A few thoughts:
I was thinking Win 10 EOL won’t matter if the VM has no Internet access. Linux would sync the files for me, so the Windows VM can just run Excel (and maybe Word, since I’m setting up Office 2024 anyway) using the files synced by abraunegg’s onedrive, so it doesn’t need internet access. (Assuming there’s a partition format that works well for both Windows and Linux that I can use for onedrive, which I assume is a “solved” problem by now—i remember this being hard 20 years ago.)
And his package apparently works in Fedora 42 with docker, which I assume should work fine.
But yeah; maybe what you’re suggesting makes more sense. And that VM definitely would need web access, then, so Win 10 is a non-starter. The database work I do is likely easier in Linux, but that’s likely easy enough to get data files out of the VM for just that work, I would expect.
Another question now comes to mind; I’m going to look this up now; how hard is it to copy/paste between Linux and a VM? Edit: As I’d hoped, this is also apparently a solved problem and sounds easy to configure.
Just something to consider as you’re thinking about using a virtual machine for windows; you have enough RAM to comfortably run a linux host with Windows 11 + Debian Stable VMs for work + work db server.
I’m allergic to mixing private stuff with work stuff and there’s a great thing to be able to shut work down at the end of the day. (Freeing up all your hardware for your private fun at the same time)
For me, I personally just run my workplace stuff in a VM (Debian 12) using KVM.
For excel desktop, OnlyOffice has a Desktop application that you can use to edit local files, which has pretty good compatibility with Microsoft products.
The Universal Blue people emphasize containerized stuff a little too much. It’s perfectly possible to add non-flatpak software to ostree distros, it just slows update processing down a little bit.
Since abraunegg onedrive is available as an RPM, you can just layer it on top of Bazzite; download the rpm and and then
rpm-ostree install ./onedrive.rpmIf the RPM works on Fedora it will work in ostree distros too. Besides, if it foesn’t work, you can just
rpm-ostree rollbackand it’s like you never installed it, apart from things in your $HOME like config files.The recommendation is to avoid layering wherever possible, not that you can’t do it. Many apps are still a bit wonky as flatpaks, even if available.
Distrobox is much more suitable for installing RPMs on immutable distros, unless they need deep system access (e.g. Docker).
Bazzite even ships with DistroShelf for that purpose.
Just create a Fedora container for RPMs and a Ubuntu/Debian container for DEBs and install them there.
Just something to bear in mind regarding OneDrive; the unofficial clients don’t have access to certain APIs that the official clients use meaning that it only syncs every 5 minutes at best. As far as I know there’s nothing you can do about it.
The main issue you’ll run into is nicher proprietary software being hard to install, but that’s what containers are for. The main one I see is if you need to install some proprietary VPN client it gets annoying, but since you’ll be running a VM anyway you can do some network trickery. My work’s antivirus only works on Ubuntu and RHEL, proprietary kernel modules so it’s got to be at least one of those kernels.
Linux is Linux, nothing’s impossible to solve even with Bazzite’s immutability. Worst comes to worst you make your own images and it’s not that hard, you basically just fork it on GitHub and let the CI do its thing.
But do you have time to fiddle to make it work and take the risk, or do you want to play it safe? How confident are you with Bazzite’s more advanced topics?
oh, shit:
The main one I see is if you need to install some proprietary VPN client it gets annoyingf
You’re right. I have a crappy work-supplied Windows laptop that has exactly that installed. It would be nice not to need to boot into that when I need to work on the server from home, but it’s not a deal breaker.
No other specific non-web-based software is needed for work, aside from the aforementioned OneDrive and Excel 2024.
Edit: Your last paragraph is exactly what I’m asking about; I’m capable of doing slightly involved tinkering, but it would need to be something that I can Google Fu through each step of someone walking through most of the steps. I don’t know it at all well enough to go completely “off script” and just tinker with confidence.
It sounds like you’re suggesting that going for something mainstream and getting it to work for games is likely a better option, particularly for someone with limited Limits experience?
I’m by no means an expert on this, but I have used both Bazzite and Fedora workstation as my exclusive operating systems.
What I would say is that they’re both perfectly adequate for the tasks you described.
Personally, I’d say unless you prefer things handed to you, choose Fedora. I don’t have a problem with flatpacks, but I missed being able to easily use dnf. At the end of the day, though, there are ways around everything; you can still get what you need done on Bazzite.
In terms of kernel tweaks, etc. I barely noticed any difference in performance between the 2. Keep in mind that this was a relatively modern pc so performance wasn’t really an issue that I was looking out for.
Overall though, you’ll be fine whatever you choose. I also had to use MS office for work and it’s pretty much the one thing you can’t get working on Linux. You’ll have to explore your options for that, I ended moving back to a Mac because of Ableton live :(
Debian is far from being a mainstream workstation distro.
Debian is/was a very good server distro but there are lots of good alternatives to debian nowadays which may be much better for someones usecase. Debian is not the ultima ratio.
What are you even talking about? Debian is fine and extremely stable, which is what you want for a work PC when your pay is on the line.
I never said debian wasn’t fine. Where do I doubt that debian wasn’t stable? Which of the bigger 10 distros isn’t stable?
Good to know! I use it at work for a server; ngl, my non-Bazzite distro search hasn’t been extensive, except getting to the point that I think I don’t want anything Ubuntu-based.
Debian isn’t Ubuntu-based, Ubuntu is Debian-based. That person is also full of shit.
