It seemed to me that it was all the friction of immutability without any of the benefits of reproducibility.
I like the friction aspect to some extent because I think keeping the base system pure confers many benefits. But you’re right. Bazzite imposes a certain workflow. For installing new software …
1) try ujust first (since there is some porcelain provided for some things that can be challenging to install properly on immutable distros, such as Steam or DaVinci Resolve)
2) if that doesn’t work, try flatpaks from Bazaar/Flathub
3) if that doesn’t work, use Homebrew which installs into your home dir by default
4) use rpm-ostree as a last resort.
Functionally I find this has driven me towards a very devcontainer-centric setup. Of course in theory Nix can do better, but in practice I’ve found the combo Bazzite offers, not to mention the excellent hardware support, hits the sweet spot for me.
Like I’ve created a rough media player with curl, jq, mpv powered by my subsonic server. The same issues happens with my emacs config which depends on various utilities. Yes I could create a main toolbox for all of that, but the whole thing was a bit cumbersome.
When I do want proper isolation, I create a VM.