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.

  • doleoEnglish
    2·
    12 hours ago

    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 :(