Daily driver work-from-home on Bazzite? Or something more mainstream (Debian?) and install Steam/proton?
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.
Pro of running an immutable distro is that it is much harder to break during daily use. The con is that you're pretty much setup to only use flatpaks and some things like abraunegg's onedrive aren't available as a flatpak.
Have you considered making the
Win10Win11 VM a complete work jail? If you do all things work in there then you get a nice separation of private and work and won't have to worry about work apps linux compatibility.edit: Windows 10 support ends on October 14, 2025
For me, I personally just run my workplace stuff in a VM (Debian 12) using KVM.
For excel desktop, OnlyOffice has a Desktop application that you can use to edit local files, which has pretty good compatibility with Microsoft products.
Unfortunately, I'm tied to Excel 2024. I make heavy use of new functions, like SORT that aren't available in any other desktop app, and the web client doesn't allow for VBA scripting, so it's not suitable, either.
Distrobox is much more suitable for installing RPMs on immutable distros, unless they need deep system access (e.g. Docker).
Bazzite even ships with DistroShelf for that purpose.
Just create a Fedora container for RPMs and a Ubuntu/Debian container for DEBs and install them there.
Just something to bear in mind regarding OneDrive; the unofficial clients don’t have access to certain APIs that the official clients use meaning that it only syncs every 5 minutes at best. As far as I know there’s nothing you can do about it.
Oh, that's very good to know. That's a big limitation. That might make moving to Linux at all DOA for me. I'd likely need to do everything for work in a VM, but then what's the point?
Debian is far from being a mainstream workstation distro.
Debian is/was a very good server distro but there are lots of good alternatives to debian nowadays which may be much better for someones usecase. Debian is not the ultima ratio.
What are you even talking about? Debian is fine and extremely stable, which is what you want for a work PC when your pay is on the line.
I never said debian wasn't fine. Where do I doubt that debian wasn't stable? Which of the bigger 10 distros isn't stable?
Debian has always been an excellent and mainstream workstation distro. It has been mine since around 1996.
There was a time when lacking non-free or proprietary drivers meant it could be tricky to get it installed, but that time is long gone.
With Debian, you can in fact choose whatever desktop environment (or none) you prefer. You can even have all of them installed and switch at login time.
Debian is also my gaming rig OS and it’s been excellent.
And yes, it will always be my first choice for server OS as well. Except in some container situations where a flavour of distroless might be in order, or for my personal Kubernetes hosts where my preference falls on Talos OS.