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.
My experience with Bazzite was good but far from perfect. It worked out of the box, but was really slow compared to a Fedora Kinoite installed on a lower-spec laptop. Then I have some issues with flatpaks, but that was my fault for not understanding the system and being to used to a traditional linux (I’m coming from Slackware and Debian). But the last straw was the driver/kernel combo which broke some of my games: they work day 1, starts to crash after an update and no load at all after another upgrade. It was because my PC was really old and the hardware and the drivers are not supported anymore on the main kernel, so it’s kind of a ME problem and one which I would have with other modern distros, but is also a problem that is harder to fix on Bazzite then other distros. Not impossible, but harder beyond what was my available patience.
So I switched to Debian stable, everything works, my PC is faster then ever and I have no fear of broken updates.
Bazzite is really great, but it’s not for everyone.
My daughter’s computer programming classes (Year/Grade 11) use Bazzite. Asked her teachers about the choice, and their selling point was old/low end laptops would run it - making it easier for parents cost wise. A nice change from previous years needing Windows or Chromebook.
“wHy NoT jUsT uSe fEdOra?” or “iTs LInuX for PeOple ThAt dOnT kNoW HoW to UsE LiNuX”
shut up.
it’s an easy and straight forward introduction to linux OR simply an easy to install distro for people who simply want to game and not tinker.
I have my main machine as a dual partition. my main daily driver is FreeBSD. for gaming my other partition is Bazzite and that’s all it’s for. gaming. I don’t want to install fedora and do more tinkering. I just need a distro that I install and forget about so I can open steam and play something. that’s it. Bazzite achieves that for me.
I daily drive bazzite
I just treat it like an atomic distro that happens to be good for gaming
I use it for development and other general use cases
I can use disposable distroboxes without worrying about updating or breaking my base system it’s nice
Yup! I’ve been running Linux on my machines in some way or another for 20 years. I’ve worked as a systems administrator and in ops teams. So I’m not a Linux beginner, and I’m not afraid of a shell.
But I play steam games online with friends. I had a Windows 10 PC in my house specifically to be the gaming PC, I would turn it on, play a game, then turn it off. I didn’t do anything else with the machine, but when I was running it I wasn’t at work, I wasn’t tinkering, I was relaxing.
So anyway Microsoft botched Windows 11, big surprise, and people were talking about the Linux gaming revolution, and I was like “Hot Damn, if there’s a Linux gaming revolution I want to be part of it!”, so I installed Bazzite and… yup. I’m part of it.
I haven’t had a single issue since, at least with my machine and the games my friends play. I’ve been able to basically treat the system like it’s a console. I boot it, navigate it with a controller, then I turn it off. Delightful!
So thanks to everyone involved in making it a great experience!
Exactly. I do the same thing.
I even put bazzite with KDE on my mothers computer because she started complaining about windows being slow and seeing ads on her start menu. My mother isn’t very tech saavy, but bazzite was perfect for her use case and it just works. So far no complaints at all in about 6 months.
Yeah… this is exactly why: Wayland-only, systemd, potential for digital ID. Yes, it’s got some decent merit, but Wayland combined with systemd (which are linked) kinda turn me off.
This is one of the reasons I switched to Gentoo in early May. The way systemd managed that userfield situation wasn’t nice at all. There is no reason to assume they will not do the same when asked to implement something worse. On the other hand, if they declined that change, it would mean they would most definitely decline a worse change. It is a great motivation to move away. There are way more reasons to move away from systemd, yet I wasn’t aware before this happened, so it was also a trigger to do some deeper research on other technical concerns as well.
I read that Gentoo was completely compromised by Google moles, since ChromeOS is based upon Gentoo, just proprietary slop.
This was part of the reason why I switched to Artix, just because it fits my needs.
This issue is keeping me from installing it on my dual-AMD gaming laptop. Bazzite installs fine but boots to a black screen because it can’t find any displays.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/1469
Does anyone know whether any progress has been made?
SteamOS runs fine but is limited to only the iGPU (I think)
anyone got a lazy tldr? new distro?
It’s Linux for people who don’t know how to use Linux. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way either.
What about the people who already have many computers for other purposes, and they just don’t feel like using the gaming machine for any of the purposes. What if they already get to tinker and tweak the other computers to such an extent that there’s no need for them to do any of that with the gaming system.
I’m a Linux user since the age of Slackware diskette installs.
I tried Bazzite, or Aurora, rather, and found that it wasn’t for me. Having to spin up distro boxes or VMs to do things that are pacman -Syu some-random-app in my current distro, is just not for me.
I lived in ultrastable Debianland for years, and recently tried Script Kiddie Arch (CachyOS). I have my at-least-for-now forever home.
I have a fairly bleeding edge distro that is slick, fast, polished, friendly, and If something goes boom, I have snapper and pika backing up, so in a few minutes all is back to normal, so the main selling point of atomic/immutable distro is kind of irrelevant to me, and I don’t have to live in a system where the important decisions are made for me.
I have an old iMac for that.
CachyOS is friendlier and less problematic than W11, and if you need help, it’s wiki + Arch’s legendary wiki + community is way more useful than your average Windows “run DISM” bullshit.
I have snapper and pika backing up, so in a few minutes all is back to normal, so the main selling point of atomic/immutable distro is kind of irrelevant to me
FWIW, openSUSE literally pioneered the above workflow with Tumbleweed. But that didn’t prevent them from developing openSUSE MicroOS (and its desktop-adjacent siblings). So, unless openSUSE has absolutely no clue on what they’re doing, there is more to it than that. Even if ‘that something’ isn’t relevant for you (yet).
Hi, I use Bazzite and is fantastic. You can you use your PC just as a console or dedicate big part of it to games. Immutable means that it takes a lot of work to mess it up. If you want a distro that just works Bazzite is the best, I’ve had zero problem with it and I love how simple it is.
I plan on trying out SteamOS pretty soon. I have a desktop with all the most compatible bits of hardware for it. I do wonder if I’ll be able to get my Intel wifi\bluetooth and my old brother laser printer to work with it.
I just swapped my steam deck to bazzite :p
Lol. Do you miss out on all the shader pre caching by doing that? I’ve played the same game on my steam deck with shader pre caching and without, and there’s a pretty noticeable difference in gameplay quality.
No steam still downloads the precache info, at least I’ve seen it show up the same way in the downloads window in gamescope.
I would definitely recommend trying Bazzite first. It’s basically SteamOS but targeted towards general hardware instead of just the steam deck and steam machine.
For a long time SteamOS didn’t have printer drivers because why would a steam deck need printer drivers.
Out of all the users I’ve recommended Bazzite to generally people waiting for SteamOS or people wanting to escape Windows 11 with a Linux distro that “just works” are the happiest with it.
I’m sure I’d be happy with it. My desktop is like 95% just a gaming and Internet video viewing system. I have a laptop for work stuff and it’s been on Linux mint for quite a while. My desktop is still rocking windows 10. I’ve avoided 11 completely. I’m sure bazzite would do great and it’s going to get more popular due to what you’ve mentioned and that gamers Nexus uses bazzite for their Linux gaming testing rig. But I believe SteamOS will ultimately end up a better choice for gaming and usage between my PC and steam deck.
Also, steamos didn’t have printer drivers for the longest time… Well yeah, but up until like a month or so ago people weren’t even supposed to be installing it on a desktop. It wasn’t “released” for a desktop PC yet.
I agree 100 percent.
It’s Fedora for gamers.
Immutable Fedora for gamers.
It’s a distro that is intended to play Steam games well. Terrible if you like tinkering or hate flat pack software. Less than an ideal development environment
its great for dev. It encourages you to use distroboxes to isolate your dev environments from each other and the host system, or even better use devcontainers for reproducible dev environments
I kinda agree, but it can also be pain in the ass. For example, using flatpak VS Code is massive pain in the ass. You end up needing to do tons of tricky workarounds for all kinds of language server/formatter/etc addons to work properly. It’s okay when you only need to do it once for a single language (Rust, for example), but it becomes very annoying when every new addon you install is highly likely to need you to write some flatpak-spawn based wrapper scripts in ~/.local/bin or whatever extra userspace bin folder you added to your PATH.
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It’s great for tinkering. It’s just done differently than you’re used to.
You can write your own systemd services and you can customize your Plasma using panel colorizer. You can go a bit further and rpm-ostree install kvantum and get even more ricing freedom. You can’t however make it use other init system or other DE/WM. It’s still quite good for what it is.
You can’t however make it use other init system
or other DE/WM.You’re AFAIK correct on the bold part. But definitely not on the strike-through part. You’re probably only limited by your creativity and the effort you’re willing to put into it:
- Bazzite, but with Hyprland
- Bazzite, but with niri
- Bazzite, but Windows-themed | It’s basically KDE Plasma, but you get the point.
Well they basically forked Bazzite DX image and customized that… The hyprland fork author stopped maintaining it 8 months ago so it’s not gonna work anymore with any recent Bazzite versions. So what they did is how Bazzite itself was created in the first place - by forking Fedora Atomic image and customizing it. I wouldn’t really count this as “Bazzite supports other DE/WM”, but yeah, if someone decided to go this far and make a fork like this then great, you can use it and hope they’ll keep maintaining it.
will never get why not just use Fedora
Because if I want to game I dont want to troubleshoot. Bazzite just works and updates itself. I got other machines for experementing
Bazzite will have you troubleshooting a lot more than regular fedora.
I’ve been running Bazzite as my gaming PC for maybe a year now, and have done literally no configuring or troubleshooting since I installed it. I went to Desktop Mode to install Discord once, and otherwise have just treated it as a gaming console. Works great!
Thats great but not unique to bazzite. The reason I say its extra troubleshooting required from bazzite is because gaming on linux for people requires configuring for certain games not everything is one click out of the box. When you need to do this on a normal distro its easy because you can do things the intended way by running whatever install script it has but on Bazzite you need to convert the instructions into bazzite specific steps. I see a ton of posts of Bazzite users getting stuck trying to do basic things because bazzite is blocking them I also see a ton of bazzite users having hardware issues because bazzite is blocking it and they dont know how to add a line in the config the bazzite way. Maybe this will get better once more people are using bazzite and more bazzite specific documentation and help threads are available online. unfortunately a lot of the troubleshooting is done in discord so its not searchable which really sucks.
Bazzite is the only OS on my desktop, and I use it as a regular PC (meaning not game console), and everything works great.
And no, I didn’t have to tinker with anything to play.
Unless you consider mounting drives in Steam the first time around, tinkering.
Ok? You dont have to “tinker with anything to play” on other distros either.
You said there’s extra troubleshooting, which has not been my experience whatsoever.
I’ve been running bazzite for 5 years on my main desktop, I know that you’re lying.
I’ve been running bazzite for over 2 years on 3 computers with vastly different hardware, and I also know he’s lying.
It’s a fedora atomic distro. I like the isolation of apps and it being “almost impossible to break”, and I want to give a serious try to what looks like the future of OSs.
I tend to fiddle with the OS a lot, and this isolation limits me to flatpak and distrobox. It is a big limitation, but is perfect if you want to have a reproducible, isolated environments to develop code, but installing a system package is just too easy. Basically you need to spend time and know what you are doing to workaround this isolation, which makes sense to me.
Bazzite tweaks everything to be gaming-focused (it also ships with steam preinstalled, for example). The other fedora atomics (silverblue/kinoite) are just more “generic” and not gaming-focused compared to bazzite, but they have a similar setup. I think bazzite just customizes them.
You can also switch your entire system between them, with just a CLI command, with the ability to rollback too. So once you are in an atomic distro, you can switch without too much pain (in theory, at least).
I really want to make it or fedora kinoite my main distro at some point
That’s why I grabbed it. Gaming focused and immutability was interesting. I’ve been running Linux for a long time and honestly the immutable restrictions are really nice once you adjust to them. I do quite a lot of development on my bazzite box and I don’t see any reason for anything else now.
Easy setup to be a HTPC with (usually) no fuss. Gaming focused to be a Steam Machine before the Steam Machine. I’m definitely looking at an immutable distro for my HTPC when I get around/afford to building one. I’m still hopeful that content providers will make native interfaces for both Steam Big Picture and KDE Plasma Big Screen.
If you plan on gaming on atomic Fedora it is basically just that with everything already preconfigured. I chose it because it came with Nvidia drivers, codecs, a bunch of tweaks and gaming utilities preinstalled (protonqt, distrobox, lutris, etc)
You could install all of this on Fedora but IMO it’s convenient to just have everything already configured for you if you were going to do it anyways
I also like that it is atomic. Builds on the same image tag guarantee an identical build, which completely fixes the “works on my machine” problem when helping my friends. Two users on the same release will never have mismatched shared libraries or rogue packages, everyone on the same tag has the exact same environment. Plus, it makes rolling back bad upgrades incredibly easy
Codecs, the avarage user doesn’t know what they are, let alone figure out how to install them on fedora
This is the reason i have a hard time recommending Fedora to new users, they can’t even play youtube videos until they’ve pulled in rpmfusion and ffmpeg.
If you try it you will understand how simple and amazing it is.
it’s poop
So then bazzite is poop with some sprinkles on top?
Possibly. I looked at it again earlier this year, and it had weird install restrictions going on, can’t remember what exactly, but it didn’t appear to be multi os friendly.
The fedora codec thing always turned me away from it.
