I use Bazzite for development bc it works like a Mac with sane defaults and a just works approach:
- IDEs are no problem. Editors will "just work" for anything you type into the app store - Bazzite handles the special cases for you and installs them through brew taps or Flatpaks.
- For development it's basically just like a Mac where you also can't install system-level packages: Node, Python etc work through brew / nvm / uv same as on Mac. Development that involves containers will be unchanged from a Mac. For compilers specifically, same as on Mac: Install it through brew, or if you need a Debian or Fedora base you do `distrobox create` and you can apt-install in a transparent podman container.
Having read above article, I just gave llama.cpp a shot. It is as easy as the author says now, though definitely not documented quite as well. My quickstart:
Go to localhost:8000 for the Web UI. On Linux it accelerates correctly on my AMD GPU, which Ollama failed to do, though of course everyone's mileage seems to vary on this.
It's a new-ish project FYI. But to answer your questions:
- Apps: It's Linux (like desktop or server), but "image-based" so you install apps in containers like iOS or Android do (and therefore OS updates basically-never break). https://flathub.org is generally the main app store for Linux containerized phone apps.
Updating without worries has made it much more daily-drivable for me on a Oneplus 6 (ie. it has rollbacks and image-based updates), despite being so new. It's fun that image-based OSs - which were arguably popularlized by phones - are now coming back to phones on the Linux side too.
Hot take from an AI skeptic: between this, Nano Banana and generative AI integrated into Gmail for repetitive emails, I’m starting to actually use Google’s AI for tasks I hate most.
Google appears to have their AI product game together!
I'm working on a super-simple budgeting app called https://4keynumbers.com, which is based on Ramit Sethi's Conscious Spending Plan. It currently syncs my expenses from Plaid and cooks it down into a single chart, with only savings, investments, bills/fixed, and "safe to spend" as categories.
As soon as Fedora/Centos updates their images (pretty much immediately usually as it's upstream of EL), and the CI runs to re-layer the Bluefin changes. They also have Dependabot set up. https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin/actions
Portfolio at https://nikodunk.com
Engineer at https://www.pilaenergy.com