I’m working on my transition plan away from Windows and testing out various things in VMs as I do so, and one big hurdle is making sure the VPN client my work requires can connect. Bazzite is my target distro (primarily gaming, work less frequently), though other more traditionally structured ones like Pop!_OS and Garuda are possibilities.
I’m currently trying and failing to get the VPN client working in a distrobox (throws an error during connection saying PPP isn’t installed or supported by the kernel). However, I can successfully get the VPN connected if I overlay the client and its dependencies via rpm-ostree install,
but I read somewhere that Bazzite’s philosophy is to use rpm-ostree
as sparingly as possible for installing software to preserve as much containerization as possible.
Since I can get it working outside of a container, am I overthinking it? Should I just accept that this might be one of the “sparing” cases? Is Bazzite perhaps a poor fit for my use case? I’ve been trying to make sense of this guide, but I’m having trouble understanding how to apply it to my situation, since I’m not that familiar with Docker or Podman.
Are these frustrations solved by layering with
rpm-ostree
? If so, just go with it. I’ve always layered over a dozen or so packages and it has worked out fine; it’s defaulted to automatic upgrades in the background, so you don’t feel much of it anyways.I love openSUSE and what they do with Btrfs snapshots and Snapper.
However, in terms of ‘robustness’ and ‘stability’, I don’t think anything currently out there can hold up to Fedora Atomic, Guix System and NixOS. This is just by design; the leap from traditional to atomic, then reproducible and finally declarative ensures that issues related to hidden/unknown state, accumulation of cruft, bitrot, configuration drift are left behind in the past. If Btrfs snapshots + Snapper would have been sufficient, then openSUSE themselves would never have desired the creation of openSUSE MicroOS (i.e. their attempt at an ‘immutable’ distro) in the first place.
An excellent point.
But to your earlier one, I can get the VPN client working outside of a container. There’s even an RPM file from the vendor, so installing it is just as easy as installing any other package.
I appreciate the input!
Aight. You know what you ought to do then 😉.
It has been my pleasure!