Upstream images vs bazzite: https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_upstream_with_bazzite.svg
My prediction: bazzite may have more installs than Fedora KDE by the end of the year.
So freaking glad to see!
Let’s go everyone, now’s the time. Windows GDID is appalling and we deserve privacy.
I chose Fedora, but there’s a distro for everyone and my friends use and love Bazzite.
My brother in law made the switch last week to bazzite from win11. 8 gigs of ram, he wasn’t expecting much.
Now he’s amazed he doesn’t have to buy a new computer after all.
been two years since I started using it daily, it’s one of the best!
“massive”
Bazzite is awesome. Not surprised it’s so successful. Congrats to the team. :)
While I see value in something as NixOs for the reproducibility. I do not understand what is the value in having an immutable system. I’m not saying there’s no value, I just can not imagine a use case in which it is better than a normal system.
I like Bazzite because it has a bunch of optimisations for getting games runnin well, and because it disallows applications screwing with the system. If I really need an application that demands it’s files be put in a bunch of places I can’t audit easily, it can go in a toolbox and not impact the system, or I can audit exactly what it does and layer it into the system.
For a Linux newbie, I really appreciate a system that stays what it is, and doesn’t let anything change that without my explicit approval.
its a container image with a kernel. the whole idea is reproducibility.
“immutability” doesnt really make sense it the context of the container. like, if you want to change the image, just make a new one with whatever changes you want and boot that.
in my opinion, it doesn’t make sense to change the whole base OS image just to install some random package or program. keep that in the user writable domain, or userspace. not in the base OS image.
I’ll give my own nerdy answer, besides the “good for amateurs” one.
Personally, I’m pretty techy, but I use my PC primarily as a living room gaming PC. As such, keeping it working is paramount, although I can’t resist tinkering with it anyway. I was afraid an immutable OS would limit my tinker projects, but I’ve found it to be a total non-issue. Even for complex tasks like self-hosting AI to play around with, podman has served admirably. Honestly, it gives me confidence to try more ballsy things than I would otherwise, rather than limiting me.
Additionally, I like the feeling that my core system is essentially unbreakable. Even if I ran sudo rm -rf, I don’t even have the ability to truly pooch things. Similar deal for any virus or hacker that might access my hardware, you can’t hide weird behaviour deep in my system, it’s immutable. I’ve also crashed my computer a few times by blowing through my VRAM budget while tinkering with self-hosting AI, and such crashes don’t scare me, I’ve got easy rollbacks if I crashed my PC while it was doing something delicate.
I’m even running the testing branch right now (I want earlier access to the latest Mesa, as it has bugfixes for the DOOM DLC), and I don’t have to fear anything from an unstable branch. If it breaks, I can trivially rollback and switch branches to the latest stable in a few minutes, with immense confidence.
I love the assurance it gives, and the only thing it’s ever blocked me from doing was installing my VPN client, but an OpenVPN config has done that job just fine. I’d consider switching to CachyOS, but the main reason I haven’t is that I’d miss the comfort of my OS being immutable.
I tried bazzite and kinoite and they are great. Unfortunately I don’t have a souped up gaming pc and I found them a little on the slow side compared to other distros… I’ve been using NixOS for a couple of months and I am loving it. The system is responsive, the boot time is half that of bazzite and while perhaps it isn’t ideal for someone’s very first distro it also isn’t that complicated, if I can figure it out 90% of other users could. I have all my old windows games working and my old hybrid Nvidia card chugging along nicely.
Run an update on a traditional system, and pull the power plug out when it’s half way through. If it recovers when you reboot it, you got pretty lucky.
Now do the same with an immutable system like Bazzite. It will be running the pre-update image when you reboot it. No harm done. It’s essentially impossible for an update (or even a failed update) to brick the system. You can always roll back to the last working image.
CachyOS does this just fine with bootable BTRFS snapshots before and after each update, without forcing me to use Flatpaks that don’t support all of the features of the normal apps or else break the immutability. For example, it’s not possible to get all Discord features working in Flatpak (even with tinkering) due to inherent limitations of Flatpak.
The real problem is config drift. You have to maintain a lot of little fixes over time as you operate vanilla Linux. I’ve run fedora atomic (and rebased to bazzite when it got fairly big) since it launched years ago with only one relatively minor hiccup that was resolved by a single line in terminal (rpm-ostree rebase). You can layer stuff over it to modify the base image and clear it if something breaks, whereas manually removing critical packages and being sure to clear every file would be a nightmare on any other distro. It’s an extremely hands off experience that works just like git does and is very bullet proof and reproducible.
I like putting it on old people’s computers. It’s perfect for a seamless experience.
Yeah, a file system snapshot is another way of achieving safe upgrades. There are upsides and downsides of all approaches though.
Rolling back to a btrfs snapshot might be harder than just picking the other ostree image in GRUB. And you still have the problem where old binaries might be running when only the new binaries/libraries exist on disk. But it also saves space on disk compared to an immutable distro, and it’s much easier to make changes to system files. Every approach is a compromise.
Yeah rolling back snapshots is way more annoying than ostree and is kinda a shotgun solution. Also ostree saves more disk space.
I see, that is a really nice feature! No idea why this is not something already safely handled my normal package managers.
It’s cause of the way an immutable system works. In an immutable system, the entire system is an image. Two are stored on disk. One is active, and the other is usually the previous image. When you update, it overwrites the old image. The current image stays untouched. It’s only once the new image is completely written to disk that it’s marked as the current image.
Package managers are working on the currently running system. They write over the only set of system files, and they can only do that one file at a time, so you can rely on the file system’s journal to make sure each file is correctly written, but there’s nothing preventing the system from being only half updated. If a package relies on a package that hasn’t been installed yet, and the update fails before it gets installed, that package is broken.
In a system like Ubuntu or Fedora, that’s mostly ok, because packages are always built for the kernel and library versions available throughout the lifecycle of the release. So a half updated system is probably fine and will continue the update when rebooted. But for rolling releases like Arch, or for a release upgrade like Ubuntu 25.10 to Ubuntu 26.04, a failed update might mean a broken system.
It’s the kind of thing they should have developed to release-ready state 20 years ago - when hard drives were already absurdly large vs needs of the OS and data.
It’s the kind of thing they should have developed to release-ready state 20 years ago -
That did happen btw! The project is called the android open source project
A htpc in which you just need to launch media
A steam Deck like handheld in which you just want your game launcher
A PC for a kid whom you don’t want messing around with system files
A PC for your technologically inept family members to just use as an email/browser/word processor
I honestly think the kid example is a counter example. Kids now don’t understand technology, because we try to keep them so far away from how it actually works. I’m very technologically literate because I was messing around with my system as a kid.
It’s the same as how older generations can take apart an engine, and most people now can’t even change their own oil. We try to “protect” users from the technology, and they never learn how it works. No, they should be given access to break it. That’s how you learn how it functions.
Because when I finish my 10 hour shift, get home from my 2 hour commute, to my 6 year old kid crying because she managed to fuck her Minecraft machine up somehow, I don’t want to spend my only free half hour that day trying to work or what she did.
That’s not a learning opportunity for her. Even if she had the patience to sit there and watch me try to fix it, she won’t r get what I’m doing. And after getting up at 5.30, getting home at 7.30 watch how good I am at not just swearing at the thing instead.
Rsync each week changes to a network share with an A/B layout, switching backup targeted back and forth each week. Something breaks? Remote in, rsync back, by the time you get home from work it’ll be back as it was and running already.
What if you have a system that just works and you can’t break?
No rsync, no remoting from work (vpn or other software et al), no “i gotta be on alert for when my kid breaks my computer again”
Also, why do we have to shame people for just wanting to use their computer?
I’m not shaming. I’m offering a simple Solution. The backups can be automated and you can NetBoot the restore process off that rsync target so you don’t have to be distracted at work. You can have a simple plan to execute if you get these calls while you are at work so there is no problem you can’t instantly reverse. It takes no time to pull off after you’ve set it up.
That’s a wholly different problem right there. Namely the shitty wages and unaffordable housing. With proper wages, you would have the time for your kid since it would then be sufficient that only one of the parent works full time whereas the other takes care of the kid and the house and stuff like that.
Yeah, the problem might be that you’re doing it. For me, it would have been on me to fix it.
You think I should tell a You think I should tell a 6 year old kid to fix a broken Linux system? I’m sorry this has turned from discussion into bullshit.
You’re underestimating children. When I was around that age I had to fix my broken PC because nobody around me knew how to (parents didn’t care for Computers) and the next repair shop was far away.
My only support was some of the IT staff from School and books. I was setting up Windows 95 and making my own DOS boot floppies before I hit my teens, and I’m just the average working class person.6yo? Maybe not, although they probably could. My point was they will learn if they have to. 6yos are capable of far more than people give them credit for. They just need an incentive. They probably won’t understand the system, but they can probably fix simple issues, which is also probably the only issues they’d create. They probably won’t be using the terminal. At least by 10 they’re capable of it.
The problem of the convo is that the other commenter talked without knowing the kid age, i agree that it’s unrealistic to make a 6 years old kid fix any system at all, thought i can see a 11 years old learning that
I still miss the advantages for these cases.
I can understand the kid example, but I feel that’s easily solved by not giving them root access.
A htpc in which you just need to launch media
Setup the system and install whatever media software. Update it every once in a while or setup auto updates. I do not see any difference between traditional os and immutable. You’re likely not modifying any system files anyway.
A steam Deck like handheld in which you just want your game launcher
The producing company controls software and updates, it should be immutable anyway as users likely do not have root access. Were users to have root access this may make sense. I’m not sure, maybe the immutability would make updates easier for the company?
A PC for your technologically inept family members to just use as an email/browser/word processor
Are they really going to brick their system? That would require opening the terminal. But I mean, fair.
What I do not understand is why there are users swearing by bazzite and other immutable distributions. These examples you make is basically for users who just do the most basic operations with their systems. Fair, if this makes it easier for non technical people to use Linux I’m all for it. What I do not understand is why technically adept people are so excited for these kinds of distributions?
I control a htpc with an Xbox gamepad. Bazzite I don’t even think about updates, it just happens instead of saying “should probably update” and unplugging my nose and keyboard from my other PC. Or leaving mouse and keyboard sit on the floor in front of my tv cabinet.
Most handheld suppliers are shipping windows, replacing it with an immutable system is definitely the way to go. On screen keyboards are play I guess, but even my experience just doing a regular distro on a tablet it was a hassle.
Look, I’m not going into detail on this anymore. But I want to say I’m surprised by how much people are pushing back. “Oh instead of using bazzite, you could setup rsync to do an a/b switch with your server if something goes wrong”. (Elsewhere in these comments).
I just didn’t think it would be so much for people to accept there are use cases for why people do things differently to them.
I’m happy there are use cases. Another person told me to look at rpm-ostree and it looks pretty nice.
But for what you’re saying I do not understand: how is an immutable server better than a normal one. You can setup auto updates; I do not see how rsync would help with that.
I imagine safe backup is nice, but for that you still have to connect keyboard and mouse on an htpc. Possibly not into a managed server, but there you have other layers of resilience anyway.
Sure, you likely have to do less things to fix it; but at this point the annoyance of having to move the keyboard to another room is much greater than 15 minutes figuring out what is wrong and how to fix it.,
Sorry, I’m not pushing back because I dislike the idea. I’ve been introduced to the rpm-ostree and It seems a good idea to me, maybe there’s more nice ideas to find out.
easily solved by not giving them root access.
Root vs non-root is, in a nutshell, a tangled mess with millions of opportunities for “oops, didn’t think of that” situations: https://www.cve.org/downloads
Immutable keeps the legacy system confituration basically unchanged, but also restores it “from ROM” every time you power on. (not real ROM, but effectively.) In an immutable system, the attack surface is dramatically reduced, and much more diverse among systems than with a mutable OS.
I reckon this must be true. However I do not see this as a reason for wide adoption of immutable systems. I guess that is a fairly valid use case.
I’d like to understand why some users are enthusiastic about bazzite. As of now I understood two of the reasons:
- updates work and do not break the system
- it is a bit more secure
However I do not understand why these two things make their users so enthusiastic. It’s two things you rarely worry about when using a computer. They are indeed important, but in my opinion not much of a problem in modern distributions.
In the other hand you have to install everything through flatpak, which is something which would really get to my nerves.
I understand there are some good advantages, I just fail to understand which ones those are.
It’s actually quite a lot more than a bit more secure. Think of it as the difference between traversing no-mans land on a bicycle (current systems) vs in an armored personnel carrier with armor thick enough to stop EVERYTHING that the other side can throw at it. Sure, you could just open the door of the APC and take a hit, but if you don’t do that, you’re pretty safe.
I do not understand why these two things make their users so enthusiastic
Are you trying to think logically about that question? Because that would be a huge mistake.
flatpak, which is something which would really get to my nerves.
Yeah, not my favorite either. A BIG part of why I’m not loving the majority of the immutable systems I have investigated is because they all seem to heavily lean on tech like flatpak, snaps, etc. and there are valid logical reasons for that, but I’d really rather not go there…
It requires literally zero work from me to maintain, that’s why I’m enthusiastic and want the project to do well. Saying mutable Linux is zero work is dead wrong. And if you do put work into your system, it actually sticks and doesn’t decide to explode one day over it.
Most of the work in my system is installing software and changing configurations of said software. The rest is using the software. What is the difference in the amount of work here? I guess on an immutable system you will also be installing software and modifying configuration files.
In my system something can malfunction to which I have to change some system configurations: for example past week I had to change some systemd-resolved configuration because on a specific interface it was using some random DNS I didn’t want it to use. I assume this work will also have to be done on an immutable system.
What is the work which you have to do on a normal distribution and not on an immutable system?
I still miss the advantages for these cases.
Zero-maintenance and upgrades.
Update it every once in a while or setup auto updates. I do not see any difference between traditional os and immutable. You’re likely not modifying any system files anyway.
You’re overthinking it, there’s no reason to care if the root disk is readable or not. If it updates reliably out of the box there’s no reason to touch it.
Are they really going to brick their system? That would require opening the terminal. But I mean, fair.
You don’t need to open a terminal to brick a traditional linux system they tend to do that on their own.
What I do not understand is why there are users swearing by bazzite and other immutable distributions. These examples you make is basically for users who just do the most basic operations with their systems.
I can’t speak for “immutable distributions” but for bazzite it’s to ensure working upgrades.
What I do not understand is why technically adept people are so excited for these kinds of distributions?
I’m technically adept at Linux I expect software to work. (system upgrades should work, app installation shouldn’t break the PC, etc.)
So, the main advantage is that it is ensured that an update will not brick the system?
That is pretty neat, but it’s been quite a while since the last update which broke something for me. And that was either on arch of switching Debian version.
I reckon it is nice that you ensure updates won’t break anything, even though I’m not sure that can be ensured, in most cases I had it was the repo itself which made mistakes in packaging the software who broke it and I don’t think there’s solution for that. Either way, I myself do not see this such an advantage as to displace the pain of having everything run in flatpak.
Updates can be ensured and broken repositories go away entirely that’s the entire point. I don’t think it’s “nice” I would consider that a basic feature in Linux. If you like Linux your way then that doesn’t go away.
What do you mean? How can it be possible to eliminate a packaging error? If the packaging team makes a mistake you get a broken software, regardless whether you download a binary through a repository or through flatpak.
Yes exactly, my potentially hot take is that twenty years from now we’ll look at immutability as the tipping point that sent Linux mainstream on desktop.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an update on a mutable system fuck my shit up to a point I just reinstalled the distro. Not having to worry about that is my primary reason for moving to immutable system. While malware and viruses are still mostly prevalent in the windows world, Linux isn’t immune to it. That is, unless it’s an immutable distro.
I had that happen many times, but that was on arch. On other distributions getting updates which break the system is quite rare in my experience.
How does an immutable distribution make the system immune to virus? I’d imagine flatpak can have upstream attacks as well as opening stuff in vulnerable software. You still have access to all your personal files, which is likely what the malware will go after.
Immutable means: every time you power it on, it’s the same.
So, if you get infected by a virus, power cycle and it’s like it never happened.
That, like everything you read on the internet, is a gross oversimplification, caveats apply, etc. etc. but for the most part, that’s what immutable means: the running system has no ability to persist changes (except in very specific, controlled, secure, easier to protect circumstances…)
“Today I played this awesome hacker game called “terminal” and when I put in the “lbu commit” cheat code, I unlocked an ass-beating!”
“Dad says we can’t play at your house anymore, Jake.”
I guess a virus can, and often does, live in plain data. Moreover, can you not have scripts and executables in your personal directory? Can you not schedule a cronjob or a systemd service?
Everything is possible. The point of immutability is the ability to restore to “factory fresh” state with a power cycle.
In theory, the data section is treated as data only, not executable. Software (games) can, and will, improperly store and execute code there, but at least they can be identified when they do and disabled/removed without breaking the underlying system.
I swapped to it in May from Endeavour OS as I happened to be doing a clean install, and 90% of my PC usage nowadays is gaming, and I have never looked back, even though I thought Endeavour OS would have been the end of my Distro hopping.
Is the massive jolt in the room with us?
I have a tens unit attached to my ass that has its voltage increase as bazzite gets more users
Have documentation for getting this set up?
I believe it’s plug and play.
I am not the RTFM kind of guy, but just read the libjolt and check how to interface it with the ass-api. I believe there are examples in the man pages.
Kinky
I hope most are migrating from windows, and not from other distros!
Im thinking of switching to Bazzite from Fedora. I was on Nobara, but team of developers vs solo project… Unfortunately, a couple of games don’t run as smooth now.
I recently switched from nobara to bazzite, and 99% of games worked with no tinkering.
That’s what I did after many years on Fedora. Honestly both Bazzite and Fedora are good, I don’t miss Fedora but if I ever had problems with Bazzite that’s where I’d go back to.
I feel like it may not overtake KDE, from the graphs the trend seems to somewhat be following there too recently. Like a bump in number of downloads because of popularity, but not a linear trend. Does that even make sense?
Yeah, I could see that. It’d be very interesting if it did, though
I assume it has to do with it kind of directly competing with steamos and eating into the user share?
I guess competing is correct, but I don’t see it overtaking steamOS any time soon or even coming close since the steamdeck is an actual product marketed by a for-profit company.
