sirico

I don't run a lot of extensions on Gnome, but this one is a great way to add some customisation to the desktop.

So I've been really interested in immutable OS's since Silverblue, kept jumping off and on again as I hit what I thought were brick walls. I was just not approaching them properly.

I've been using Bluefin for work for the last 6 months and started making distrobox containers for projects. One thing I always ended up with was a load of mess with pip or NPM, so the idea I can just jump into a container for that specific project was really appealing.

But it never occurred to me, I can do this for everything, I know this is something that has been done before, but I've just stumbled on it. I made a distrobox container using boxbuddy that used the arch-bazzite-gnome image, called it arch-gaming. This has given me a containerised gaming setup that runs like arch native. I can just chuck all my gaming stuff through that and box buddy auto exports the icons into the app menu, so the GUI side of things is sorted. As it's bazzite the nvidia drivers and steam are all ready to go I installed lutris that was it.

The added bonus of bluefin is that I don't need rpm-ostree for anything, languages are handled by brew, apps with flatpak, and now the aur for anything niche or apps I want to use in a more traditional setting.

I now have a portable, reproducible system that should be pretty robust.

One of the things I struggled with initailly when using immutables was installing programs like VPNS that need to interact with the immutable parts of the distro but don't have a flatpak option. I figured I'd just make a post to help anyone with this specific issue regarding mullvad or if it helps people install other software they need.

Adding the repo

Jump into a location to download the repo file

cd Downloads/

Download the repo

wget https://repository.mullvad.net/rpm/stable/mullvad.repo

copy the repo file to the yum.repos.d folder

sudo cp mullvad.repo /etc/yum.repos.d

Install mullvad vpn

rpm-ostree install mullvad-vpn

Reboot to reimage

systemctl reboot

Join the client to the service

sudo systemctl enable --now mullvad-daemon

Install libappindicator that at the time wasn't included in Kinoite

sudo rpm-ostree install libappindicator-gtk3

Reboot to reimage

systemctl reboot

I thought I'd chuck windows on my gaming laptop an Acer nitro 5 from last year, to see how it's going do some bits I can't on Linux VR, certain multiplayer games etc.

What a disaster! I've spent the whole day brute forcing drivers and generally dicking about trying to get my setup sorted.

Upon installation, Wi-Fi drivers don't exist, so you cannot use the internet while installing if you're on Wi-Fi. Mint's had this since what 2006? But that's cool, Cortana is here to chat away and not understand any requests. Once finally in the OS after 20 questions that could be considered harassment if it was a person, nothing was ready to go. Every single driver needed sourcing and installing.

People have the cheek to complain about Linux's Nvidia install, literally two clicks on most distros if it isn't already baked in. Go to website find driver, download click click click agree click wait more software click click wait.

Plug in my sound card OK it's a bit old now UA-25 but nothing happens...hmm find obscure video partially install a driver from Vista then cancel the installation program so you can side load a driver from 8,1 but wait there's more disable core isolation to allow the driver to work reboot into a now slightly more compromised OS.

OK plug in wheel again not new stuff G25 oh it works cool. Oh, no H-shifter OK download driver. "Can't find device, ensure it's plugged in". Windows decided it knew better, downloaded its own driver that blocks the official one and loads a steering wheel as a gamepad..GG cool cool.

I do not understand why we still have this image that Windows is noob friendly, it's such a convoluted obfuscated process to do anything. It does worse than nothing, it thinks it's smart enough to carry out tasks on the user behalf and just bork it.

All of these issues are because I don't have the new shiny things, but it really highlighted why I love Linux now if you'll excuse me I'm going to install a distro and play on my 20-year-old peripherals

I was watching InfinitelyGalactic recent video on Linux mint and he highlighted this program. Works really well I've always found steam to be a bit unruly within my desktop especially as I run the forge gnome extension, which further exacerbates the weird behaviours. Supports most of the big colour schemes so finding something that will work for you is pretty easy.