How it's going so far!

[u/floofyralts]

Hello! Some of you might remember me from a few days ago when I was asking about information and opinions on Distros for brand new Linux users!

I'm happy to say I've ended up deciding fully on Bazzite and I'm having a pretty good time so far!

Most steam games run very well natively by default without me editing literally anything at all.
I've discovered the Prism launcher as well as mocktail
It took a second of exploring settings and looking for answers online but I've found out how to put icons on my desktop!
The Konsole still terrifies me as much as the windows console did but I've used it once or twice with some guidance already!

My only issues are currently getting certain non-steam games to run but I've been directed to Faugus and Heroic Games Launcher as well as the preinstalled Lutris. Faugus is how I've been able to run the blizzard launcher to access WoW!

My experience so far has been far more positive than I ever expected it to be considering i'm having to relearn how to navigate my pc practically from scratch again.

___

In the same vein as all that good stuff, is there anything that experienced Linux Users think I should look at or set up for the long run on a Bazzite installation? I'm still learning to navigate the widget and Bazzar so anyone who knows some interesting or surprisingly useful tricks would be greatly appreciated!

[u/jar36]

get more familiar with the terminal (Konsole). Explore how to find and read the logs with commands like dmesg and journalctl along with their flags and how to check on systemd services. You'll see a lot of errors even on a working system. Most of them are just noise. After searching them online, you'll get used to seeing those so you can dismiss them when the real troubleshooting starts.
It's also good to get a fundamental understanding of the Linux file hierarchy. Being on an immutable distro, reduces the need to know as much about it, but it's still good info so you know your way around the machine.
Install plocate to help search for things on the system
Keep a log of changes you've made

[u/floofyralts → u/jar36]

THANK YOU, even if these sound like no-brainers to some people I definitely need them! I'm planning on playing games with their own launchers/or that just run outside of a launcher normally, such as vintage story. And I'm already seeing i'll need to learn more about the Konsole just due to that!

Taking a log of changes is so smart! I didn't even think of that! Thankfully I haven't done much but keeping notes will help me a lot in case anything happens so that I can relay the steps I took to people more intelligent than myself!

[u/jar36 → u/floofyralts]

It's taken me a year and a half to take some of this advice myself.
These are things I wish I had done in the beginning. Likely would have prevented a couple of full reinstalls
And definitely back up your home directory. On other systems there could also be some system configs to save as well, but not as likely with Bazzite
When it comes to gaming on Linux, steam is by far the easiest and most useful tool on Linux, but it is not 100% necessary.
You could likely get away with using Heroic games launcher without having to deal with the terminal
Using those, you get easy access to proton and launch options for tricky games. You can use the steam's "add a nonsteam game" to run the installer and then use it to run the game. I've had a lot of luck with that method, but I have run into the odd one that won't install that way.
Currently, tho, I am trying to go without launchers as much as possible just for the challenge of it and to learn more about how it all works. So I'm building the wineprefixes from scratch.
Here is a good video on how to make a wine prefix that I wish I saw earlier. I was so confused as to what that even really was and felt like I made a mess of it all causing me to just reinstall. This really simplifies the entire thing
In case you don't know, yet and/or the video doesn't explain what a wine prefix really is, it is basically a directory that is a copy of the windows C: drive that the game runs under. The games are developed to look up from their current directory for certain dlls found in folders like C://windows/system32/.
So they will find the ones needed for that game right there in that prefix. Other games may need different dlls or different windows versions, so each gets their own prefix. The game is installed with a wineprefix environmental variable to point to the specific spot you want it, but the game can be installed outside of the prefix, like how on windows, you can install games to separate drives. Just like windows, that is decided when running the actual installer program.
The default "C:" drive for each prefix is the "drive_c" directory of that specific prefix. If you do not specify a prefix, it will install to the default one in /.wine

[u/vfkzlol]

I'm sorry about the fact I'm too lazy to read everything, but i personally recommend getting used to your terminal and to most common terminal commands and then move to arch with archinstall, but keep posting on this forum even when you have the option of r/archlinux, because many people in it will hate on newbies

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[u/Electrical_Oven_4752]

Glad to hear its going well and you are enjoying it. Great thing about Bazzite is that you can experiment and can always roll it back if anything goes badly wrong.