What’s the story on integrated amd gpu support? I know it’s technically supported, but would love to hear from others on how it actually feels.

You can use Bazzite to code just fine. The great thing about OS like Bazzite is it's so easy to switch to many other atomic/immutable distros. You're not locked in. You can just 'rebase' it to Aurora with a command, which is the development focused version by the same team.

Yes, especially if it's your first distro and you haven't learned habits from non immutable distros. Distrobox and flatpak cover most, and technically, you can install other stuff with rpm-ostree, at the cost of some space and longer update times the more you layer on.

I personally had some trouble wrapping my head around distrobox while using bazzite and trying to install coding dependencies, but I've been having a great time gaming and programming on Nobara! The nice thing with Bazzite is the integrated distrobox which lets you run something under any linux OS (and even windows, I think?), and should theoretically be good for coding, so if you spend more time than me you should be able to program just fine. Maybe VSCode with remote ssh addon or something.

I think they even have a developer version of Bazzite. Not sure what the differences are though.

Is it a newer Nvidia GPU? If so I believe it pretty much works the same these days. It was mostly the older Nvidia GPUs that seemed to have a lot of problems.

Nvidia finally made official linux drivers, so you should be good unless you have a really weird setup.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/

I run NVIDIA for work related reasons, and it all just works in Bazzite,

agreeing with orclev - i setup an older nvidia gpu pc on linux mint and that pc has to have all other applications closed to play minecraft when it used to handle youtube video or actual video running and maybe an antivirus scan in the background and minecraft on top fine in windows.

GPU is running (as opposed to when the driver failed to load haha) but some kind of processing is still on CPU, i tracked down the problem but the point where i figured out i need to keep up with the latest vaapi and compile it to just diagnose it i stopped and told the kids how to quit other programs first before minecraft. or bloons.

edit: found my problem. mission center randomly spikes in cpu and memory use and gets to 99% in both......and i'm constantly running it. now i bask in swap utilization 0% forever and ever

As an experienced Linux user, I just migrated my last windows machine to Debian sid, my gaming PC. And it's great. But I started on stable, and moved to sid after a few weeks, and it really wasn't an issue for gaming or general use. My partner's gaming computer is still on stable.

But yeah for someone less familiar, Bazzite and Mint are great choices. Pop! OS if you like the look of it, or Zorin OS if you like its look. You can always try something new if you're interested in its features.

Which driver does it install? Does it choose or do you? I’m curious how the installation process compares to Ubuntu. My install is a little borked because I started with Xorg and AMD and 22.04 and switched to Wayland and Nvidia and 24.04 all around the same time. It works but was a PITA to reconfigure everything.

It's very popular to the point where multiple other distros are starting to offer its patched kernel on their distro. It's very focused on gaming performance, particularly around Steam and Proton.

Cachy is the most popular distro on distrowatch. Has been for a month or more. That’s a good place to get the list of current distros.