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?)
The methodology IS cloud native, we didn’t invent this. 😼 People will update their terminology, we’re not doing anything new, Linux in infrastructure went through this a decade ago. It’s an update in vocabulary because it’s a shift away from the traditional distro model and has more in common with the rest of industry (k8s, docker, etc) than a desktop. The desktop is just the payload.
We know some people will complain but whatever, it’s our job to help people understand the tech and there are proper definitions for this stuff - The whole “immutables” or whatever slang people are making up doesn’t really make sense but we can’t control what people think, we can just do our thing and keep pushing out updates.
RancherOS doesn’t exist anymore, but a difference here is everything on the machine runs on the metal except whatever workload you have. Here’s people who do a way better job explaining it:
Our systems share the same tooling as Fedora CoreOS so this is probably a better example. You can make custom server images – we build on top of that too, similar to Bazzite but for server nerds: https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore - basically if you can script it, you can make an OS image out of it. Here’s bootc upstream where people are hanging out: https://github.com/containers/bootc/discussions
Hope this helps!
That’s great, thanks! I really appreciate the detailed response and the links.
Ok great. Is it also fair to say that cloud native is the methodology? Or is cloud native a higher order concept that the methodology can fall into? I.e. rock is music, but music is not rock.
I would say it is the methodology. To distill it a bit more in the context of bazzite and universal blue:
FROM bazziteyou can start from there.Thanks Jorge. Just confirming that this is the single most complete reply. I couldn’t have asked for a better explanation.