Bazzite-DX and Bazzite-GDX
Hey. I have spent my entire weekend attempting to setup an environment for one of my unicourses. In this unicourse we have to simply work with unity 2022.3 and work on a game. On bazzite i can install unityhub and open the project and work on it as normal, however I am running into an issue when it comes to writing/debugging code with vscode on bazzite. Between vscode only being the flatpak version and me not being able to install the .NET SDK (and therefore not being able to use the debugger) i was running into a lot of issues. I tried fiddling around with Distrobox aswell but i got nowhere with it sadly.
So now my question is the following. Is Bazzite-DX or its game dev oriented brother any better of an OS when it comes to development? I am sure there are lots of ways to get around things, but the truth of the matter is that while I like bazzite alot, I cannot spend a weekend everytime one of my uni courses needs me to set something up. I don't want to go back to ubuntu (or similar) but currently it feels like the only realistic choice if i still want to get my assignments done. So if anyone could give some information about the developer experience on bazzite-dx and/or gdx that would be greatly appreciated. Otherwise I will have to say goodbye to the OS (atleast for now).
5 Replies
Can’t answer much about DX apart from it being the same as regular bazzite but with docker, vscode etc baked in.
Have you thought about spinning up a VM of a mutable distribution to do these sort of things? That’s what I would do to keep it totally separate from my daily driver.
I'd strongly recommend getting comfortable with using containers for development. Set up a distrobox for your preferred non-atomic distro, install your necessary dependencies and tools, install an editor, export the editor to your host and code in that. Or, swap to bazzite-dx which has host native vscode, and export the tools and dependencies from the distrobox. They both work.
I have a dedicated web development container, and a dedicated python development container, for example.
To my knowledge, some people have set up their full unity workflow in a distrobox and have had no issues. Containers add zero overhead, as opposed to a VM.
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Distrobox/
The issue i ran into with that was that Unity could not create a stable connection to my browser as dbus didnt launch automatically with it. So everytime unity on the distrobox asked me to sign up it didnt redirect me to my browser and i couldnt log in. Therefore bricking the whole process. From what i could figure out it looked like it was „luck based“ wether this worked or not.
But if someone figured out how to get this to run in distrobox id be very glad to take a look as i couldnt get it to work over this weekend
ahh ok, I'm assuming you already found this page then?
https://moonpiedumplings.github.io/guides/unity-distrobox/
https://discord.com/channels/1072614816579063828/1429573967190032506/1429573967190032506
this person also managed to get it working, different problems than you but could be helpful if you run into another issue
good luck getting it working!