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.

  • blindsight@beehaw.orgOP
    5·
    11 hours ago

    Thanks 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.

    • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      11 hours ago

      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)