Identify your Windows drive and your secondary drive, install Bazzite (bazzite.gg) on a secondary drive, you’ll be able to test how it runs on your hardware. If you want to keep it, then just chose whatever you want to boot to using your bios. You can set one of them to default, and you can temporarily boot to the other by pressing your motherboard’s designated boot key (usually F11 or F12, look up yours).

Not OP but I will add to the conversation from my own experience:

I have been using Bazzite for over a year now, and I haven’t seen any changes reverted, everything works perfectly fine just as the day I first installed it. It just works. It’s been very easy for me to migrate from Windows thanks to this distro. I distrohopped and tried every major distros (10+), most of my issues were either outdated GPU drivers or unstable OS for noobs like me. Bazzite fixes those issues.

The gist of it is that it’s the easiest distro I’ve ever used. Just go to bazzite.gg and try it.

• GUI apps: use the app store that ships with Bazzite (called Discover)
• CLI apps or libraries: use Hombrew (open terminal, type for example: brew install pandoc)
• if you can’t find what you want either in Discover or Homebrew, the developer might ship it in a portable format called Appimage, you can easily “install” it using the included Gear Lever app. Alternatively, you can install packages meant for pretty much any distro using Box Buddy (built on top of distrobox).

Bazzite is described as atomic but not fully immutable because of how it handles system updates while allowing user modifications.

Atomic Updates

• Transactional Updates: Bazzite uses rpm-ostree, which applies updates in a transactional manner. This means updates are downloaded and applied as a whole, and the system reboots into the updated version. If something goes wrong, it can roll back to the previous version.
• Layered Packages: Users can install additional software as an “overlay” on top of the base system without modifying the core image.

Not Fully Immutable

• Unlike some truly immutable OSes (e.g., Vanilla OS in “ABroot” mode or Ubuntu Core), Bazzite allows modifications:
• Users can install extra software using rpm-ostree install.
• The system has read-only root by default, but users can override this with rpm-ostree override replace or rpm-ostree reset.
• Flatpaks, AppImages, Distrobox and Homebrew, don’t affect the base OS. You can install and uninstall software to no avail and it won’t brick your OS installation.

Thus, Bazzite provides atomic updates via rpm-ostree, ensuring stability and rollback capability, but it remains modifiable, making it not strictly immutable.

I’m sorry Bazzite didn’t work out for you.

Your use case sounds like a better fit for Arch, since you have very specific needs like adding uncommon device drivers, gocryptfs, udev rules, etc. For anyone else, wanting to try Bazzite, I’ll answer the rest of the topics:

Flatpak apps with external devices

All apps I’ve tried support external devices just fine, in the event the app you need doesn’t support external devices out of the box, try adding USB device access through the app’s permissions in the System Settings app.

Distrobox Freezes & dependencies

I have an all AMD desktop PC, and an intel laptop, Distrobox runs perfectly fine. Every package will rely on dependencies inside Distrobox.

Edit: after writing this post, I realized I needed someway to de-drm my Audible books, so I installed the Libation RPM in my Fedora Distrobox, it failed to launch because it needed libicu or something like that, so I opened the Fedora Distrobox terminal and typed sudo dnf install libicu, done. Launched perfectly like it was installed on my base Bazzite installation. But all the dependencies remain isolated, unable to crap all over my system if something happens. My system remains shielded from dependency apocalypse.

Encryption

Bazzite supports LUKS full disk encryption.

corectrl

Use LACT, you can install it through the Bazzite Portal (that’s Bazzite 1st run app, you can run it anytime though)

RPMs are needed for any external devices, like drawing tablets, etc…

Any external devices would be a great overstatement. I have the standard PC Peripherals, then I have: xbox 360 controllers, xbox series X controllers, Thrustmaster Wheel, Logitech x56 Flight Stick, none of them require any RPM and just work out of the box, unlike on Windows. For drawing tablets, there are tons that are supported right out of the box without any additional driver, for example Wacom.

For any developers out there wanting to customize Bazzite to fit your particular use case, you can even easily fork the distro and build your own and still get auto-updates, with any additional device drivers, RPMs, and whatever else you want to fulfill your edge use case. Follow this link here.

Look. I’ve been there. I started my Linux journey with Arch based distros, then distrohopped a lot, and finally found the best for me, and what I personally consider the best either for normal users or those that don’t want to do any maintenance.

It’s the Universal Blue family of distros: Bazzite (gaming / KDE / gnome) Aurora (standard / development / KDE) Bluefin (standard / development / gnome)

Set it and forget about it. It just freaking works. For GUI apps install from the Discover app store (which uses Flatpak), for cli apps use Homebrew (brew install whatever). If you can’t find something, open Distrobox (already included) create an Arch container, install whatever you want from the AUR, and use it like you’re used to. It works like freaking magic.

If somehow you manage to brick your installation, when you reboot you’ll be able to boot to a past snapshot.

You just can’t fail with this. It’s the best of the best IMHO.

Holy shit! I didn’t know about GadgetBridge. Is there a way to connect it to Home Assistant?

https://www.rocket.chat/

The software itself is free for less than 50 employees. Has all the features you need. You can very easily host it for cheap (From $4.0/month ) on http://pikapods.com/apps#chat

You can’t trust them, being a centralized service based in a country where things could go way lore south anytime.

He’s right. As I stated at the beginning of my comment, I was only speaking about Bazzite and Aurora, I wholeheartedly recommend you try them.

I will answer to your annoyances from my context: I use Bazzite on my gaming rig and Aurora on my work laptop.

1. I only use Flatpaks for GUI apps and Homebrew for CLI apps, things are stored in their respective folders.

2. My chosen distros are atomic / immutable, only user files can be changed, the system is shielded from breakage. You just can’t brick it unless you really want to.

3. Caps lock works the same as windows.

4. Desktop shortcuts rearranging, didn’t happen to me / haven’t noticed.

5. Firefox restoring session no matter what: I’ll try that and get back to you.

6. Bazzite & Aurora are very polished.

7. Flatpaks are the best, for CLI apps I use homebrew.

8. Bazzite / Aurora have automatically generated rollback images.

Honestly, if you want something that works for you and not the other way around, I suggest you use an Universal Blue distro.

This benchmark is against Thorium / Mercury. Which is already way faster than regular Firefox. The total aggregated speed is considerable. https://thorium.rocks/mercury_performance

looks way better, are there any plans for a grid view with thumbnails ?

lol, what a shitshow. A product from the same company is distancing from the stench. Good on them, but it shows who did some things wrong.

Holy crap, I gotta try this.

I have experience doing exactly that with Bazzite, Aurora and Bluefin. Booting from a USB, it works perfectly out of the box. If you want to switch between any of these distros, with one command you can rebase (switch) to another distro without losing any data. Except when you switch between different desktop environments (Bluefin is GNOME based). This is how I use Linux on my work laptop, on a daily basis. I settled on Aurora on an M2 caddy.

To install it to a USB drive, you’ll need two USB drives, one to boot to the installer, the other one is the target for the installation.

If you are more security minded, there’s also https://secureblue.dev/ but I haven’t tried it to be able to recommend it though.

The home dir on all these distros has persistance enabled.

You know what just works ? Bazzite. It’s as easy to use as a PlayStation.

OCI CLI apps can also be obtained from brew

The build instructions for all flatpaks are in one repo, you could build it yourself and maintain your own registry if you wanted.

You’re just not the target user.

The whole OCI mindset is geared towards absolute noobs like me, and cloud native devs that develop inside containers on a daily basis.

Take me for example. I use Bazzite, it’s the first distro I couldn’t break. On top of that, flatpaks, appimages and brew are my only options for software. Since Bazzite is an atomic distro (think immutable ) I could also use Distrobox but I don’t want to deal with it.

Everything just works for me, I don’t care about anything. I broke so many distros before. Sure, I don’t control every nut and cranny but I don’t want to.

If you know how to not break your stuff then that’s great, but I don’t, and I don’t want to learn that. I just want to learn other things.

Kde’s Spectacle is awesome

No. Betterbird adds random features.