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.