https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg
Graphs can be found here on their github. Since around mid November the active user count for Bazzite has gone up by around 16k active users.
Personally, my only wish for Bazzite is a Cosmic version 👼 I tried it out recently and it seems fairly impressive
I’m one. I set up a Windows/bazzite dual boot situation and I’ve never booted windows since.
I was very happy with Bazzite on my Ally X but version 43 (them or Fedora) broke my WiFi. Then the USBC port has a physical problem as it seems to only deliver power.
My only option without LAN atm was a cloud recovery to Win 11. Uuugh.
I’ve recently dove back into Linux and my last try was on Mint. After a few issues I went back to Windows. With the recent Microsoft news I wasn’t happy using a system that could start spying on me.
It’s been close to a month and aside from some specific game issues likely due to running a nivida GPU I’ve been enjoying my time so far.
Copy paste did take a while to get used to. Also the default screenshot tool doesn’t automatically put the snip on the clipboard.
My main focus is gaming so this has been a solid operating system to use.
Always good to try out a few distros before settling in for the long run. As much as I love Mint, there are always cases where one distro has issues with your hardware where another doesn’t.
Copy paste did take a while to get used to.
Which part, the highlight-middle click part or something else?
Also the default screenshot tool doesn’t automatically put the snip on the clipboard.
In Mint? You’ve made me realize that would be convenient for me so I looked into it, I believe copying straight to clipboard is a default keyboard shortcut option I didn’t know about.
Sometimes ctrl c / v doesn’t work and it’s a combination of ctrl, super and C.
Que confused “what’s the super key”Turns out that’s what the windows key on my keyboard is called. So far only when I was messing with the terminal.
The screenshot tool in Brazzite. I think it’s called spectre.
Ctrl C doesn’t work in the terminal because that’s how you terminate programs. You need to use Ctrl shift c, control shift v etc.
I ended up with CachyOS over Bazzite but I’m looking into the latter for my dad since I’m guessing it’s more stable and easier.
I just… Idk, I like Arch over Fedora. I blame the little pacman eating my progress whenever I install stuff in konsole. Desktop mode to desktop mode it’s the same KDE Plasma I’d be using, though. Are there any other striking differences between Cachy and Bazzite?
Edit: it was good to bring it up here, y’all are very knowledgeable on these things. It sounds to me that I need to get bazzite for my dad mostly because he won’t want to fuss or work on it and that I made the right call for myself since Cachy (and Arch in general) gives more flexibility. Frankly I might not even give him desktop mode default, he strictly wants something to play from bed in full on retirement mode.
AFAIK CachyOS still demands a little involvement in the OS. Like, you have to watch the logs when you update, you need keep context in mind, like knowing you’re running KDE and an Nvidia card and so on. But I feel like Bazzite would be more usable to someone who doesn’t know (and doesn’t need to know) what a filesystem or a discrete GPU are.
But in terms of stability, CachyOS has been rock solid for me. The cadence that Arch + CachyOS devs fix stuff has been utterly perfect.
So I say if your dad is more ‘software curious,’ give him CachyOS. If he doesn’t like messing with computer stuff, give him Bazzite.
It’s unfortunate that years as a tech guy at his job has made him less software curious, so probably bazzite then. Rather, I guess when it’s your job to fix things, tinkering isn’t fun anymore.
I second this, it’s why I went with Bazzite on my main rig - it just needs to work and be reliable. The last thing I want to be doing in my spare time is funking around trying to fix anything that happens to break.
All my other devices run whatever I feel like so I can scratch that curiosity-itch but they get reinstalled if anything major breaks and I can’t fix it in a reasonable amount of time
Ah.
Well one catch I’ve found outside of CachyOS is that if something isn’t working right, it’s easy to create a ton of work for yourself trying to fix it. An example would be fighting your system trying to roll a package forward for a fix, which then gets out of sync with your distro, which requires more manual fixing since you’re the one maintaining it now…
The Arch/Cachy ecosystem, on the other hand, tends to encourage more usage of system packages, and fixes stuff quick. Usually waiting a day or a few days + a
pacman -Syyuufixes what was wrong.If your Dad is a software engineer, it’s possible he might fall into that trap with Bazzite. It kinda just depends on his habits/personality, though from what you describe this may not be a huge danger.
Him 20-30 years ago probably would have. This is a man who, when I was a kid, made a custom UI for msdos so my brother and I could play games easier. He wouldn’t just tinker, he’d probably be contributing.
Old age and alcoholism has kind of robbed him of that, though. At this point he’ll probably just ask me to fix it if it goes wrong, lol
I went from Arch to Fedora idk, I think over a decade ago and haven’t looked back, not sure how things are nowadays, but I switched again this year from Fedora to Bazzite and I love it. Sure, you’ve got to learn to do things a little differently, but so far it’s been great. And it forced me to use distrobox, which honestly I should have done sooner, it’s absolutely great.
I’m in the same boat, my main gaming pc is still bazzite for now (I use it like a HTPC) but eventually when i can be bothered I’ll be on cachy os as I’ve really enjoyed being able to use the arch-iness on my other devices that have it.
Honestly it’s pretty easy to decide if you should use cachy or bazzite.
Do you use your PC for anything more then office PC or console? If yes pick cachy. If no pick bazzite.
Atomic is great till you have to do fucking anything then it’s more effort then it’s worth basically instantly. And iv seen more people break bazzite trying to do basic shit then iv seen cachy randomly explode because “arch is unstable”.
Bazzite is not a home user desktop os, no atomic os is. The entire concept is basically designed for locked down office PCs and consoles where you don’t actually do anything with the PC but use it.
If your giving a PC to a elderly family member, a child, you do actual business on it that’s mission critical. Bazzite is fucking fantastic, so long as you also never give the admin password to the user.
Seriously the entire atomic concept really is… Baffling tho… Its best use case is one that doesn’t really exist in the same context as gaming unless it’s a console. It’s baffling that bazzite is as popular as it is. If not for the simple fact there is an absurd amount of misinformation around arch and really Linux in general.
Because people cling to out of date knowledge from a decade ago because of memes.
Really 9 times out of 10 normal fedora is better for most avg users then cachy or bazzite.
I think the most important advice is to use a separate disk/SSD for your home directory so if you screw something up or if you want to change directions, you don’t lose your files. Some of my vendor contracts actively require that I do just this.
I’m no expert but I didn’t have any trouble compiling and running a native Linux FPS game in an Arch distrobox on bazzite to test a bugfix.
I’m just good enough with Linux to know my way around and to break stuff when I have unfettered access to mess with the base system. Bazzite saves me from myself.
If someone has to try and break into Bazzite to do anything (if they’re not a developer) then they’re doing something very wrong.
What the hell were they even trying to do!?
HTPCs are why bazzite is as popular as it is
handhelds are really great with it too. i use it on my main pc tho because bazzite-dx simplifies a lot for me
I’ve been using Fedora for while but I decided to try Bazzite and for the most part it’s been a great out of the box experience. I didn’t have to mess with NVidia and Wayland as much as I did with vanilla Fedora.
It is a little wonky compared to other distros. I don’t like the way some features are managed, but for a new non-Linux user, they won’t know the difference. I highly recommend it for people that just want to jump on Steam and go.
The problem with a new user is they need more documentation and more resources which atomic distros like bazzite have less of. Making them worse.
Bazzite is for knowledgeable users who don’t want to tinker much anymore or children who aren’t allowed to modify their computer.
Most people don’t want to tinker. They just want a machine that works without hassle or need to think much about how everything works, or risk breaking something… But also without the bloat or the walled garden of Apple.
That’s a good point overall and definitely something to consider.
However, I don’t think it applies to Bazzite specifically because they’ve had such a meteoric growth rise in popularity over the last year. They have more resources to make that stuff.
But, I don’t think most people in modern hardware need to do much for Bazzite to get going. I think unless they want to play Windows games, they shouldn’t need to do anything weird.
Bazzite handled all the annoying setup for Wayland and the Nvidia drivers. Bazzite also manages the updates without a user needing to know how the terminal works. (I personally don’t like that, but it’s probably good for new users).
Bazzite also has fairly robust documentation, which is probably not the case for most Atomic Distros. They also have pretty decent support on social media and in their discord server.
Very cool. I am still running Bazzite as my reintroduction into Linux as a daily and it’s been great for gaming but I will say that as more and more familiarity rolls in, I do get frustrated with it being an immutable distro and having to jump through hoops to get it do what I want.
Still I think it’s a great distro for those who don’t want to deal with MS bullshit anymore and a great friendly, works right out of the box while you learn or relearn Linux, and gets you gaming without a lot of hassle and having to deal with less than friendly Linux users.
I found, as an experienced Linux user, that with Bazzite you’ve got to forget the complicated approaches you’re used to, and go for the easy one, it usually works. Lots can be done from KDE’s system settings, or from the bundled utilities. Also I disagree with the order they chose for the application installation methods on their wiki, I think distrobox should be right after Flatpak.
Bazzite is also a bit unique in the way that it’s mostly Windows users jumping ship, and not Linux users distro-hopping. At least from what I can tell online.
I’ve been using Linux since the 90s. My main is Bazzite.
Straight from Windows 10, right here.
I used it to jump ship from Playstation but my PC is also bazzite already.
As a normie, I love Bazzite because it’s as intuitive as Microsoft without the intrusive and monopolistic proprietary features, and Bazzite is also built for gaming.
Sample size of 1, here.
Bazzite was my initial entry-point into Linux, but I bounced off it within 48 hours as its immutable nature made it impossible for me to install the native PIA VPN client and for the life of me I couldn’t get the OpenVPN to play nice.
Currently on CachyOS, and seems to run just fine - giving an end user just enough rope 😅
Plus it’s Arch underneath the hood too, so I can still cheekily say that I run Arch!
ETA: I wonder if/how long I would count as part of this Bazzite cohort?
PIA has OpenVPN or IPsec profiles (I forget which) that can be imported into NetworkManager. You just have to put in your account info.
I don’t think every location has one…but a lot do.
There are apparently OpenVPN profile you can import, but as I said in my earlier comment - I just couldn’t get it to work (connection attempts would just time out).
I still have like ~18 months of PIA left (joined under a 100% cashback offer), but will likely switch to Proton or Mullvad afterwards - as they both seem to work better under Linux from what I’ve read.
I’m sure over time I’ll tinker more under the hood over time, but for now - I’m just trying to ease myself into Linux with pre-configured installers when particular apps aren’t available through the Cachy Package Manager.
30-odd years of Windows usage has dulled my IT skills!
PIA VPN
Holy mother of blob, Batman
I barely know what I’m looking at! 😅
Pretty sure I tried poking around that file on Bazzite also to see if I could locate the RPM to try and do a manual terminal install - but gave up after a few minutes.
Yeah, getting PIA running without the native client has been a bit rough. These days I’ve just gotten use to starting a terminal as soon as I log-in, but I probably need a more permanent solution. maybe it’ll be switching to cachy as well.
Yeah I struggled with reading my rom library over SMB so also had to install something else.
you can layer vpns via rpm-ostree install [.rpm location]
I don’t think PIA uses RPMs
mullvad is a better choice anyways. you can also download a wireguard config and load it directly into the network manager
While I agree, it’s a pretty lame thing to say “This doesn’t work for your use case? That’s because your use case is wrong” If the distro doesn’t support PIA, then that is an issue with the distro, not the user.
I think its a new shiny thing but I expect most users to go back to ordinary Linux, and in a year there wont be many still using bazzite. But thats fine. I love playing with new tools myself. But most of them are just temporary and then its back to what works the easiest.
But this is what makes Linux fun. Its not just one system. Tons of desktops, tons of apps, tons of configs.
Long time Debian user, short time Arch user, even shorter Fedora user.
I Switched a few devices over to Bazzite this year, and it’s genuinely game changing. A distro that just works, and stops me from breaking core system stability? But also allows me to install stuff using rpm-ostree and add other distros using distro shelf?
Don’t get me wrong I love compiling from source on Arch, but god damnit, sometimes I need an OS with guard rails, and it won’t be Windows or MacOS for damn sure.
This isn’t your average Glupshitto Linux
You act like arch is gentoo :P compiling on arch is like a blue moon event. You complie on arch about as much as you would on fedora.
Don’t tell me how to use Arch!
People have been saying this for a year, and the line only keeps going up.
Yeah ok. Well we will see. Im sometimes wrong. :)
Personally I tried Bazzite because it was the recommended distro for a gaming device, and I liked it so much that it quickly became my main.
Bazzite may present a bit more friction if you want to do something “advanced” that would otherwise be trivial on other distros perhaps with just a couple terminal commands, but it makes all the “simple” things super-duper easy, and the system is almost impossible to break.
I would say this model makes sense for “ordinary” users that just need a computer to read email, view cat videos, open office documents, and in the specific case of Bazzite also gaming. In my specific case I also needed to write code (I use VSCode + Godot), besides the initial friction of learning to work with containers and SELinux, Bazzite seems to be fit for coding.
Thus, I hope immutable distros will stay and thrive. I hope that one day someone will make a distro that you can just set and forget on your grandma’s laptop, and I think this distro should be immutable, like Bazzite.
For development there’s also Bazzite-dx
I’m in this picture. Installed bazzite on steam deck and it’s fucking awesome!
What does it do better than SteamOS on the Steam Deck itself?
Genuinely asking as I didn’t really see any need to switch even as the compulsive tinkerer that I am…
Generally no… Cachyos steam deck version is better in basically every test iv seen them compared head to head in.
Bazzite is more or less the default choice cause it’s a flavor of the month more then it makes any kind of actual sense.
If your going to bazzite your typically better off staying on the stock OS.
Being able to install it yourself on any device seems like a big advantage :P
Got it, thank you.
I don’t have any device, I specifically own a Steam deck and if that’s the main benefit, I probably don’t want it on my other devices (I use Arch, btw).
Should’ve added “on the Steam Deck” in the first place, sorry 😅
Haha yeah, I’m not super up-to-date on Bazzite, but I believe it doesn’t add much on a Steam deck. (And if you don’t want your other devices to boot up into Steam, you probably don’t want it there either.)
I’m three of those new installs. Bazzite has surpassed every expectation I had.
What’s so special about this? Aside from the immutable thingy, of course.
Literally just the immutable thing. Otherwise it’s either worse or equal to every other flavor of the month option.
So it just comes down to do you consider immutability a positive. If you do it’s the top of the stack since other options are not immutable.
It just works. It works better than Windows 11 in my experience. I can’t break it. I forget it’s there. I just do computer stuff. Like video editing, gaming, web browsing.
Probably the fact that they have many ISOs tailored for each supported hardware configuration, and they point the user to the right ISO with a clear wizard in their download page.
Also basically it is an unbreakable gaming focused OS very close to SteamOS, that you don’t have to maintain, and it comes preconfigured with Steam and the right drivers for your setup. I’m not the target audience, but I see the appeal.
This, so much. I tried pop_os, mint, ubuntu, and more, but all had the problem that when I had an hour to play games, It became 55min of troubleshooting some random issue and not playing because of it.
With Bazzite i can finally use linux and just boot, play a game, shutdown. No hassle.
I think this is one of the big steps that make Linux gaming more accessible to the general public. Proton was clearly the first major step and Bazzite might be the second one.
Agreed, when SteamOS gets more general hardware supporty things will get interesting, but Bazzite is a desktop with superlative Steam support, while SteamOS is more a steam console with desktop support. When people, especially newbs, want to do desktop things with their general purpose machines, on SteamOS they’re using Arch (bleeding edge, lower stability), while Bazzites get Fedora (sharp edge, higher stability and security) which should be a less painful and frustrating experience. Of course if there’s a flatpak (possibly the third step) it’ll be painless on either, and hey, everybody wins (except winblows) in either case.
Cachy/endeavour is literally more stable from updates than other options at this point.
Every distro is equally breakable by the user so that’s a moot point to compare them.
Which is the whole point of atomic distros to fix that point.
You literally should basically be going bazzite if you don’t want immutable go arch. In the context of gaming.
Like 90% of the problems over the last 3 years I see new users have is that they try a Ubuntu family distro and run head first into the shit show of how out of date they are and how shitty ppas are.
Eh, I did 4 or 5 years on Arch, broke a lot, learned a lot, got tired of that and retired to Fedora, now Bazzite. I would recommend Arch or Cachy to someone with technical chops, which is a surprising amount of PC gamers, who wants to get up to speed fast on linux. I’ll recommend ArchWiki regardless. Then there are the others who just want to game with minimal friction, for them, Bazzite. Horses for courses… Hard agree on Ubuntu.
This is why I chose it. Gaming living room computer that kids can’t easily break. It just worked. Well, except for my idea to dual boot and have games pulling from an ntsf hdd. Bazzite hated that idea. So if you’re using bazzite, make sure your games are on a Linux partition. Even though Linux is ok with ntsf, for some reason beyond my expertise… Games do not like it.
Steam tends to have massive issues with permissions for games on NTFS partitions. You might’ve run into that.
I second this, had the exact same issue but on Arch back in February. But luckily windows can be made to play nice with non-NTFS drives.
The immutable thing is nice, though it takes some getting used to. It’s Fedora which I already love, without any of the hassle. Everything just works. I never realized how much time I was wasting until I didn’t have to do it anymore. Every task I throw at it, it performs beautifully, even things I’m sure aren’t going to work out of the box do. Every time, so far.
I was surprised how well it handles printers. We have an old Brother wireless laser mfp. It was pretty cool when it just saw the printer automatically, but I was really impressed with how easy scanning was.
I started going down the rabbit hole of manually installing and configuring it, but then tested some simple terminal command and it already saw the scanner. Ran skanpage and Bob’s your uncle.
I think you are the first person to ever have had issues with printers on Linux if you are surprised by them working on Bazzite. Printers are one of the things that almost always “just work” on Linux, and are only a driver headache on Windows
To be fair, the he last time I was daily driving Linux was probably 20 years ago. I only came back in the last ~2 years.
You must have uncanny luck with printers then. The printer I have I bought for it’s Linux support and I still have problems.
Across 3 offices and hundreds of PCs literally have never personally seen a issue with printers on Linux that was like I forgot to hook it up to the network or something stupid.
Printers tend to just work.
It’s not really surprising, Bazzite has been the talk of Linux internet for the last 18 or so months.
What I would like to know is what data they use as a reference to produce that graph and whether that data can be audited.
Probably data from their Bazaar or I heard some other Fedora tool. I believe the growth, its actually good and not in a gimmicky way.
Is that 0,0002 % market share?
I actually want to completely undo DirectX and it’s box.
No words can express my disgust for this gaming monopoly infrastructure.
How do you know how many active users?
fedora distros have a thing called countme that pings their servers so they can measure general trends in how many people are using the OS and the various spins, which can be helpful for determining what to focus on. some amount of the userbase opt out of it
And this is on by default?
It is on by default, but can be disabled in your repo config: https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/conf_ref.html
The feature works by adding a flag to one random http request to a fedora repo every week. Fedora then aggregates the http logs that have been flagged to derive their metrics. You can opt out of sending the flag, but if you’re querying fedora repos then you still end up in their http log.
But saying it pings their servers isn’t quite a fair statement as it’s not some background service that opens a network connection, it sounds to me at least like it’s data that is sent to the Fedora repos once a week when you update your system?
Clients (DNF, PackageKit, …) have been modified so they add a countme variable in their requests to mirrors.fedoraproject.org once a week. This ends up in our webserver log data which lets us generate usage statistics.
Would be glad to be corrected on this though as I am a long time Fedora user now and I’m not overly fond of my data being collected by big corpo; it’s why I left Windows in the first place 🙄
I mean fedora is pretty famous for data gathering in the Linux space. It’s kinda what they do. They have ended up in rather sizeable kerfuffles over it.
Fedora is after all one of the two /corpo/ option of the Linux world right next to Ubuntu.
I feel like people lately go a bit overboard when it’s about protecting their “data”.
As far as I see all it does is just send one single number that shows that there is someone using this specific operation system and it does not include any personal or unique to the user information.
In my opinion this does not even qualify as “my data”
That’s cool. I don’t really have a problem with that, just curious.
