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.

  • somethingsomethingidk@lemmy.world
    26·
    3 days ago

    I think that it’s definitely a good case for overlaying with install. They say to use it sparingly because it increases the chances of something breaking, but that doesn’t mean it will. Something like a VPN usually needs liw level access that container isolation makes difficult.

    I’ve only had 1 issue on silverblue years ago where I couldn’t update because I had vim overlayed and they fixed it within a day or two.

    • Telorand@reddthat.comOP
      3·
      2 days ago

      Ah, okay. Yeah, I only need to install OpenJDK and this client, and I don’t think either of those are likely to be included in future Bazzite images, since it’s gaming-focused and not development- or workstation-focused.

      • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        Look at Bluefin or Aurora. They are also made by Universal Blue and have developer versions that come with Tailscale VPN. They’re built on Fedora Silverblue just like Bazzite. I personally just moved to Bazzite two weeks ago, and then switched to Aurora.

        • Telorand@reddthat.comOP
          2·
          2 days ago

          Aurora is really nice, and I should see if I can get it working better in a VM to try it out. The main differences between Aurora and Bazzite that I can tell are the suites of preinstalled packages and the particular ujust recipes included.

          Tailscale is probably not something I can use, unfortunately, since my employer has set up connectivity via SonicWall. I doubt they’re going to allow a change just for me. 😅