I have a special spot that gets extremely annoyed when I feel I have to spend a necessary time just figuring out what something is. The page suffers from "developer-brain" marketing, where they describe the technology used to build it (cloud-native images) rather than what the product actually is. Why not just lead with that it is a Linux distro/version focused on gaming. In the beginning, I thought it was new hardware, then I actually thought it was a streaming service. the website does a poor job of simply stating what it actually is. Then again, I might be stupid, but the problem is that a lot of people are stupid. And I guess many non-developers are going to have a hard time just figuring out what the hell this thing is. I’m probably being too cranky now, but the page reads like a combination of the worst from developers-speak combined with the rest of marketing-speak.
"The next generation of Linux gaming - Bazzite makes gaming and everyday use smoother and simpler across desktop PCs, handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs."
That could apply to everything from some sort of software service, to a game installer, to a streaming service, to an App Store for cross-platform games. You have to take into account the chaos that is the Internet and the promotional material shit storm of marketing speak. A sentence extremely close to this could easily be found on the top of the Razer Synapse promotional page. Why not lead with a simple description that uniquely describes what THIS is? I work in both development and psychology, and it’s frustrating when tech people make fun of others for not understanding their jargon, but those same people get extremely annoyed when they don’t understand anything outside their area because other fields use unnecessarily indirect and convoluted language. Why don’t we just help each other out and try not to create unnecessary cognitive load, just to understand what something is? It is actually possible without dumping down, it’s just a little framing that is needed.
If you're trying to argue that this snippet should answer the question of "what is Bazzite"... have you looked at marketing-speke websites lately? Think of how many different categories of service / product / platform / technology call themselves "the operating system for the next generation of XYZ".
+1 to jtrn's complaint here; when Bazzite's homepage doesn't own up and immediately say "Bazzite is a Linux distribution", it's being unnecessarily unclear, and it loses my trust.
I believe you are. Or we are. The quoted line tells me nothing. Is it a new game engine? Or something like winetricks to tune wine, maybe more streamlined? Or is it a some kind of app store? App launcher?
It is the site made like a presentation, in my experience they are all suck and like a real presentation are impossible to comprehend without accompanying speech.
It does say very clearly on top of the page that it is an "operating system", what is so unclear about it?
If you want to know more, just scroll down and read more detailed explanation
Not sure in what way some people expect to be fed the information. If you did not understand what it is from the first couple of sentences then maybe it is not for you.
They JUST changed it (probably reading the HN feedback). Now the title on tip reads "The operating system for the next generation of gamers" while just yesterday it was simply "The next generation of Linux gaming".
The change is for the better, but I would still like to have words like "Linux" and "distro/distribution/pack" be used.
I agree with the author. Is that an OS image you put on a machine to make it a game box? Or is it a piece of software you put on your existing Linux? Or a framework for game developers? Not clear.
Then let us understand will it be a separate PC (or mini computer) solely for gaming, or is it still some familiar OS that can be used for other purposes too? Arch? Debian?
Now the title on tip reads "The operating system for the next generation of gamers" while just yesterday it was simply "The next generation of Linux gaming".
The change is for the better, but I would still like to have words like "Linux" and "distro/distribution/pack" be seen somewhere soon after the visitor loads the page.
Gaming on Linux: The Final Frontier.
These are the voyages of the Linux distribution, Bazzite.
Its continuing mission, to support all computer games.
To seek out new gamers and new platforms.
To boldly go where no distro has gone before!
The current version is clearly better than the old one, that's for sure.
Since you are receptive to feedback, I will give my marketer/PR-professional's opinion that hopefully you put in use.
I recommend checking out the "Don't make me think twice. A common sense approach to web usability" book by Steve Krug. It's an old book, but most of the advice is common sense and still applies. I especially want to point out the "Chapter 7. The Big Bang Theory of Web Design".
The basic idea is that:
1. the information you want to tell visitors has priority. You should make a list of all (everything, not only the things that are currently visible) the things you would want to communicate to visitors and rate it ("Linux" before "gaming" before "smoother, simpler" before "next generation", etc).
2. The home page is the most important page. The visible first-view of the home page is the most real estate.
3. The home page and first-view content should be organized according to the priority list. The longer the visitor stays on the page, the more of the more important stuff he should see. The progression should be logical; the 10th item should not come before item-5. All the important things should be read in 5s and the rest of the important things should optimally be read without scrolling at all.
The organization of your website is currently extremely suboptimal. The first view of the main page has hardly any information, even on 1440p screen. The problem lies in both:
1. amount of total information. So much wasted space, instead of engaging/revealing text and compelling/informative images.
2. the importance/uselessness of such information. E.g. "for the next generation of" - what does it even mean? What purpose does it serve? Why is it there? Couldn't valuable space be used better? For sure it can.
You don't need to scroll at all in order to see what the page is about and what are the distros' USP (Unique Selling Proposition).
- "Linux Mint 22.2. The latest version of the friendly operating system is here. Linux Mint is an operating system for desktop and laptop computers. It is designed to work 'out of the box' and comes fully equipped with the apps most people need."
- "Omarchy. Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated Linux by DHH"
- "Tails is a portable operating system that protects against surveillance and censorship."
- "ParrotSec. The ultimate framework for your Cyber Security operations."
- "Manjaro Linux Empowering People and Organizations. Taking the raw power and flexibility of Arch Linux and making it more accessible for a greater audience."
Not all the first-views of distro pages are as good as they could be, but they are way above what Bazzite displays. To be clear: the content of the main page as a whole is fine, it gives the necessary information and is quite well organized. It is only the first-view side is what I have problems with; it is not worthy of the rest of the page.
Before you respond, also check the "The Top Four Plausible Excuses for not Spelling Out the Big Picture on the Home Page" in the same Chapter7. :-)
It does not matter what you want to call Bazzite. It only matters what words people (your visitors, your potential "clients") know and have associations with. I haven't seen you complain when you are featured in the "Best Linux distros for gamers" lists. :-) And that's how it should be. Don't fight the society, go with the current.
Communication is about clear positioning through clarity, not about muddling through obfuscation.
Your website has a good core (base under the first-view), but the first-view needs A LOT of work. Just a little effort would go a long way. Let me try to make quick changes to the first-view:
1. Add tag line at the top. Part of the logo, instead of "Become a Supporter" (this is not a correct place to ask for that)?. If not in logo, then separately to the right/bottom of it. What kind of tag line? E.g. "Gaming in Linux? Easy-Bazzizy!". Sounds corny, but it works. Honestly! This is something I came up with in under 1 minute, but even this is better than not having anything.
2. Make site og title/description something useful/searchable/identifiable.
3. Get rid of "load/show/animate pics only after scrolling". This is highly irritating for people who want to quickly find out about Bazzite.
4. Change "The operating system for the next generation of gamers" to "The operating system for X gamers". X stands for 1 or even better 3 (3 word rule) words like: serious, no-nonsense, busy, dedicated, passionate.
5. Change "Bazzite makes gaming and everyday use smoother and simpler across desktop PCs, handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs." to "Linux distribution made safe, easy and efficient. Focus on games and gamers. On desktop PCs, handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs."
6. On the right make list of main USP ("Play your favorite games", "Take your game library anywhere", "Upgrade and rollback fearlessly", "Secure by default", "Hardware compatibility out of the box", "Supporting Handheld PC and couch gaming setups", "Run your favorite containers") with headers that jump to appropriate parts of the main page.
7. Make a list of usual complaints/opinions of OS switchers, so visitors could associate and see themselves switching. In form of questions: "Are you tired of watching ads in your OS?", "Do you enjoy all the AI Microsoft is trying to push down your throat?", "Want an Operating System working for you, instead of against you?", "Tired of unnecessary hassle and slowness of OS and simply want to live and play?", "Don't want to be a slave anymore?", "Desire to be treated as an adult instead of a child?", "Make play, not fray?", "Linux-curious, but afraid?", "Want an easy and safe way to play on Linux?". You can come up with a lot of stuff that resonates with visitors, who are thinking of switching OSs (imo you should mainly target switchers from Mac/Win instead of linux distro hoppers). These questions can be rotating, adding animation/liveness to the first-view. Make clickable to take to Testimonials.
8. Add some small images/screenshots as well.
One can always argue with the specific details, but I think I managed to demonstrate the overall point of these changes making the website and the experience of visitors much better.
I hope you will put my friendly feedback to use. Best wishes.
My thoughts exactly, linux gaming really doesn't tell me much, beyond that I might be able to use it if I was using Linux. Could be some controller or a Proton-something for all I can tell reading the phrase.
Yes they did. Now the title on tip reads "The operating system for the next generation of gamers" while just yesterday it was simply "The next generation of Linux gaming".
The change is for the better, but I would still like to have words like "Linux" and "distro/distribution/pack" be visible somewhere on the first visible page.
That's not "developer brain" but marketing speak! Lots of websites for technical products are like this - generalities galore. Usually the open source ones just say what they are.
Often the person being marketed to is an investor, not an actual user. "XYZ is what's next for [huge market]" may not sound like a product you can buy, but it does sound like something that can make lots of money.
They JUST changed it (probably due to the HN feedback). Now the title on tip reads "The operating system for the next generation of gamers" while just yesterday it was simply "The next generation of Linux gaming".
The change is for the better, but I would still like to have words like "Linux" and "distro/distribution/pack" be used.
As much as I love Bazzite at end of the day it's still a custom distro and every single day there is a chance they just close the project down and move on. Happened to so many distros in the past, this is not out of question. I’m not saying “big corporate” distros are better but personally I'd rather stick to something more mainline.
Hopefully Valve will release a general version of SteamOS with Steam Machine coming (and even they are questionable with their track record)
While what you're saying isn't impossible, it's unlikely. In the event it did happen, Bazzite is a fork, a signing key, and a couple forked Fedora Copr repos away from being made completely in someone else's control.
> As much as I’d like this change to happen, it’s too soon. This change would kill off projects like Bazzite entirely right as Fedora is starting to make major headway in the gaming space.
> I’m speaking as it’s founder, if this change is actually made as it is written the best option for us is to just go ahead and disband the project.
Now, whenever you would've actually shut down the project is a different story, but your messaging was very clear.
What is the point of this line of questioning? They stated that the proposal as-written would make maintaining projects like Bazzite untenable. That's a valid thing to say and not that much of a "threat", but even if it were, most people involved here is effectively unpaid and can do whatever they want with their time.
The point is the original commenter said there’s a risk of these kinds of projects getting shut down. The creator chimed in and claimed there wasn’t much risk, and then someone posted comments from the same creator in the recent past talking about shutting the project down if an upstream change was made, validating the original comment and making the creator sound less valid.
I totally get that and personally would never hold that against him. Nor did I interpret it as a threat.
However, this comment chain was of how vulnerable non commercial projects like it are to outside factors making causing exactly this issue, making further maintenance on the project infeasible... Consequently ending it, effectively.
There is no blame in play here. haunter merely quoted this as a reason for why theyre worried about it longevity - and considering there was a discussion about an upstream change which would've realized his worry... It seems not at all misrepresented?
Fwiw, I personally don't share the same worry as haunter, because I don't see the chosen distribution nor OS as a significant investment. I feel comfortable switching things around occasionally
No that appears to be directly in line with what I said. What's missing here is your understanding of a proposal vs an actual change Fedora is going to make.
Oh no I didn't mean as a personal attack or anything so thanks for taking your time and for the reply! I know the chances are miniscule but there is that 1% in the back of my brain because it happened in the past with some distros I've really liked
The quality of games on Google Play is much worse than what is available on Steam and the variety of titles are much greater on Valve's platform too, with far less in the way of microtransactions and other exploitative behaviours (though Steam isn't free of this) and a back catalogue stretching as far back to the mid 2000s.
Both Microsoft and Sony AAA titles, most third parties publish there and most indie games release there first. Steam's library is unparalleled in the industry, the only thing it's truly missing is Nintendo's games.
Ok, but the market is absolutely flooded with exploitative stuff, laden with micro transactions and a trickle of miniscule rewards, in attempt to addict the user, rather than genuinely provide enjoyment.
How do you even discover the good games that are worth being played on Android?
I don't doubt it, but I actually really hate that the build system is a bunch of bash scripts, github actions and assuming the previous stage builds fine. Especially when the custom image forkable repo has an action commented out to squeeze more temporary storage out of GHA hosted runners because some images don't even fit on those (like the gnome-deck). I wish the entire setup was a little more decoupled and maybe allowed you to build multiple stages in one go so the entire system was more "forkable" and less spread out. I went on a bit of a wild goose chase trying to build Bazzite without the Firefox RPM removed (rpm-ostree doesn't like adding and removing and then adding packages again).
I did voice that concern in some Bazzite-related spaces before and it felt like it got brushed off with a weird undertone.
is the link to the file as it exists on "main" currently, or at a specific revision, so in three years, it will still refer to that version of the file?
Always a possibility with any distro, but the tooling around it is flexible and repeatable. If another group of people wanted to continue off where they left off it would be far more possible than a lot of the Ubuntu forks.
Just need the Atomic Fedora base to still be around and everything else is already pre-setup to run on GitHub infrastructure neither of which I anticipate going away soon. (Famous last words)
Calling it a superset of Fedora rather than just being its own bespoke distro can be a fine line, but really there's nothing stopping anyone from forking it and continuing on, a good few people run their own forks already to meet their own needs a bit more specifically.
Bazzite is a part of the Universal Blue family, which is more of a repackaging of Fedora Atomic.
I'm a fan of my Steam Deck and SteamOS, but I'd like that experience to eventually be available via community supported distros, which Valve/Igalia can rebase from, and instead focus on Proton.
Bazzite is the closest to that that we have so far.
SteamOS is Arch based, and can be replicated on Arch by installing Steam if you don't care for the "game console" UI trimmings. Based on another comment thread about past stupid proposals on Fedora, Arch seems like a much more reliable base than Fedora.
Isn't every distro a custom distro, by definition?
Anyways, I get that this is a "risk" to consider, but installing a new distro isn't so bad that it should prevent one from trying and using a currently extant distro if it works for them.
I'm not sure I'd define the atomic Fedora variants as "distros" in the traditional sense.
This is a bit of an oversimplification, but Bazzite, Bluefin, etc, are basically just Dockerfiles that use Atomic Fedora as the base image.
So you are basically getting a pre-built docker container that is "Fedora + various configs added on top", and then you are booting that docker image.
Since it's just a container file, anyone could theoretically just fork the Bazzite repo, make some changes to the Dockerfile, then push it to github + let github actions build a custom docker image.
So is that custom docker image a distro? Some would say yes, others would say no.
Ironically, I'm considering installing Bazzite alongside NixOS because it's proven to be nearly impossible to run SteamVR properly with how Steam is packaged
From what I’ve seen so far from people I know who run Valve Indexes, Linux SteamVR performance is pretty poor compared with Monado+OpenComposite. Hopefully this situation changes with the release of the Frame, in which case I (and likely others) will be revamping the SteamVR package and NixOS modules as Monado may not fully support it for some time.
Tl;dr: Run Monado w/ OpenComposite for the Index, it runs way better.
They mean "custom" as "pre-configured to do <X>" where X is gaming. Generally most distributions are not pre-configured outside of a general suite of standard applications.
I don't know why people bring this up so much whenever a new Linux distro shows up. I think one of the coolest things about Linux is that normal people can feasibly roll a useful distro. How much of a longevity guarantee do you need from a distro that is used for gaming, of all things?
> How much of a longevity guarantee do you need from a distro that is used for gaming, of all things?
Games are something I do to relax. I want as little friction to play the games as possible. For tech projects and work stuff having to mess with the OS and move away from deprecated stuff isn’t such a big deal, it’s part of the work. But for games I want them to just work as much as possible, I don’t want to have to find a new distro and install it and set everything up again on my gaming PC.
Despite Windows sucking in so many ways, it is the OS with the most assurance that a game will work without fuss. I am happy to see Linux closing this gap.
I’ve been running the same gaming setup for almost 10 years. Having to upgrade or change OS is a major thing. Don’t minimize longevity.
Currently I literally can’t find the time to convert my drive from master boot record to GPT for Windows 11. I can’t imagine having to completely switch operating systems/distros because it just disappeared. Worrying if it will still be around is legitimate.
Sounds like you might be the perfect audience for consoles then. And here's the good news, that's the same audience SteamOS and Bazzite targets.
I am/was a big PC enthusiast but could no longer keep up with all the stuff due to real-life, eventually even gave up gaming for a few years as I just did not have the time.
The Nintendo Switch bought me back into (limited) gaming. I liked that I could just play from anywhere in short bursts, or could just hook it up to my TV and pick up the controller for longer sessions. The best part, I never had to worry about updates breaking things, or doing system maintenance - I could just power it on and jump straight into gaming. But I still missed my old PC games, especially playing games like Diablo II and Age of Empires.
When the Steam Deck came along, it changed everything. Well, technically I didn't get the Deck, I got a GPD Win Mini instead, and installed Bazzite on to it... but same thing. I get the same convenience as I had with the Switch, except now I had the added advantage of being able to play all my PC games (yes, all of them. No, I don't play games with nasty kernel anticheats).
Regarding your concern about Bazzite completely disappearing, the good news it it doesn't really matter. Since everything you customised lives on your home drive, all you need to do is backup your home drive, and that backs up everything you'd care about. You can use this same backup in Windows (Steam allows you to easily import a library from a different drive/folder) and your Pictures/Documents etc are basically the same folder layout as Windows. I actually ended up setting a triple-boot setup of Windows, Bazzite and CachyOS on my handheld, and they all point to the same Steam Library, same Documents etc. So not only do I have tripe redundancy, it shows how portable and migratable this stuff is.
What console line has had several generations of hardware iterations in the past decade? Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have all put out two generations at best, with plenty of games still shipping to the "old" generation even now.
They’ve all had 2-3 models in the last decade-ish. So that’s at least 1 time I would have had to have thrown everything away.
I miscounted though, I’ve been running the same OS since Windows 7. Probably 2014. I’ve been able to upgrade without having to throw away my entire operating system. Consoles aren’t a solution for longevity.
You are aware that old consoles still play games, right? My PS4 still plays all my PS4 games and lets me stream PS5 games to from my living room to my bedroom. My Xbox 360 still plays games just fine last time I checked (last June or so). Getting rid of old consoles doesn’t make sense unless you absolutely have to have the latest tech and also don’t have much storage space.
? That's not the point though? With consoles you just sign-in to your account and you're basically done, you don't Hce the hassle of dealing with migrations like a PC.
SteamOS is only going to support other hardware by coincidence. Valve is unlikely to put in resources beyond the hardware that they want to support. It's also unlikely to change the whole "firmware restore, entire drive" approach. They're not going to put in the resources or support work into making and maintaining a full distro by themselves.
A community distro (be it a console-like gaming focused distro or not) is going to be the way to be the way to go for the foreseeable future. I'm pretty happy with running EndeavorOS w/ KDE, Steam, and Heroic. The Steam client with Proton is where most of the magic happens in Linux anyway. If I wanted to get fancy, I could set up GameScope with Steam Big Picture to take a SteamOS/Bazzite approach.
I don’t see why Valve wouldn’t try to support lots of hardware. Small time outfits like CachyOS can do it, why wouldn’t they? I think their motive with the Steam Box is hardware sales. It seems like they’re trying to shift the gaming ecosystem away from Windows.
Probably for the same reason they don't support every Arch package on the Steam Deck out-of-the-box; it breaks easily and it's not their job to fix it.
Additionally, I think Valve doesn't want to end up over-committed to replacing Windows. They can handle the storefront side and do a decent job with handling the runtime, but actually committing to a desktop alternative to Windows would be spreading their resources thin. It feels like a smart call to not jump into that arena if your hardware products don't need it.
Lots of assumptions that could be totally wrong. Custom distros are not new operating system - majority of hw support is because linux supports it. It would probably be more work for Valve to support only their hw instead of keeping what linux/arch support.
I am also not sure why you think they wouldn't want to end up replacing Windows. Thats exactly what they've been trying to do since microsoft included their store in windows. That is more than a decade long plan in motion which already failed once but they are still at it.
They're not assumptions, I outlined in my comment it was my thoughts and beliefs.
> Custom distros are not new operating system
Nothing is. Windows uses old DOS code, macOS uses BSD code, nobody's OS is truly written "from scratch" in 2025. Just because you can recycle old programs doesn't mean writing an OS is easy.
> majority of hw support is because linux supports it. It would probably be more work for Valve to support only their hw
And much of Linux hardware support is not in-kernel, period. Valve could not flip a switch and start supporting Asahi Macs or Nvidia's proprietary UNIX drivers; they would be committing to patching and maintaining all of their future quirks and surprises. Not even Valve should be wasting their time doing that.
> I am also not sure why you think they wouldn't want to end up replacing Windows.
They do! But "wanting to replace Windows" and "wanting to write the replacement for Windows" are two different things. Valve's current software team has a headcount lower than 500, they aren't equipped to compete with Microsoft even if they wanted to. It's much easier for them to ship all-in-one style devices that keep expectations low and replicate Windows' most desirable features.
> which already failed once
Steam Machine was a home console, it did not replace Windows for anything that wasn't directly ported to Linux. The lesson from this era is simple; supporting Linux is hard. It's hard for developers, hard for consumers and especially hard for Valve.
Universal Blue is under very little risk of just shutting down operations without warning (as opposed to a hype-based BFDL kinda situation like Omarchy). I'm a happy Bluefin user and would wholly recommend people step up to help out with the distro if possible.
I'm a big fan as well, but couldn't some clueless IBM exec decide to ruin all the parts of Fedora that Bazzite relies on? What if IBM/RH throw their financial weight behind something like the proposal to drop multiarch packages (breaks Steam)?
People who are not new Linux users might prefer a distro which is part of the same "family" of distros they are already familiar with.
Steam OS I believe is based on Arch. Bazzite is based on Fedora. Personally I have experience with Debian distros so if I wanted a gaming-focused distro I would pick maybe something like Pop OS.
Pop!_OS isn't good for gaming thanks to being quite behind in package versions. You're better off going with a dedicated gaming distro (which offers recent packages) such as PikaOS if you want a Debian base.
I have both a steamdeck on SteamOS and a pc on Bazzite and they both work exactly the same. They both run literally the same steam UI and both run flawlessly so I couldn’t even tell you which one I’m using if you just showed me a screen and controller.
There is difference in the desktop part. SteamOS has KDE as gui and Bazzite you can pick Gnome. Another major thing is that Bazzite is better prepared for desktop use - it has many ways how to instal packages and dev tools. I run bazzite and webdev on it comfortably.
I tried Pop before Bazzite on my PC back in April and maybe I’m just bad at Linux, but it was a pain in the ass for gaming at first boot. Bazzite ran Expedition 33 out the box. Didn’t have to download drivers, didn’t have to configure anything, it just worked.
There are limitations but if you want a gaming machine, bazzite is a no-brainer to me. Poo is very impressive but I just don’t want to fight my OS constantly when it comes to gaming.
Sadly SteamOS doesn't support full disk encryption, which is inexcusable for an OS used on a portable device, that some also use to remote access their desktop (through Steam Link/Moonlight).
It’s not in a consumer friendly state yet, but I’ve been using my steamdeck with encryption for a month now with zero issues. I guess technically this is not “full” disk encryption since it’s just the home dir, but I only care about protecting my personal info which is all in the home dir anyway.
I personally don't keep anything sensitive on steam deck or heck, any device related to "gaming". Modern games are nothing but spyware and even more reasons if you are pirating
It doesn't need to, if your disk supports OPAL2 - just set the password in BIOS and encrypt the drive, it's fully transparent to the OS and as a bonus, there's virtually no performance hit unlike software-based encryption like LUKS.
You are relying on every single ssd to have a secure implementation of encryption which is just never going to be true.
I’m not familiar with how the process works, but if you are setting the password somewhere, it’s exposed to being extracted. You want the password to be something you type in on boot.
Unless your threat model includes state-sponsored attacks, the encryption is good enough for most people, especially considering its primary use-case (gaming). And there's nothing stopping you from using a secondary secure container if you do intend to store that level of sensitive data (eg: VeraCrypt volume for plausible deniability).
Also, the password isn't stored anywhere, you get prompted by the BIOS upon every boot to unlock the drive.
Luks can use hardware offload description via opal if configured accordingly. You are also at the vendors firmware implementation in terms of security.
I wonder if people would be willing to pay 10€/$ for a yearly update so that there could be some commercial force behind a distribution that would provide security and stability for desktop users. with windows, you pay one large amount upfront. with macos, you get it with hardware. so having something like this, i think, has a potential to succeed and a place in commercial market.
I don’t see what the point is of bringing this up.
1. It’s not exactly some fly by night thing at this point, it’s extremely popular, which means the likelihood of having maintainers and sponsors step up with, at the very least, an easy migration path is high.
2. You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?
3. Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)
> You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?
In 2009 the CentOS maintainers was AWOL and nobody had any idea where they went and had no access. This caused issues with releases obviously.
There been quite a number of times where people have died, just got bored, had health issues and a project just stops and sometimes people don't access to things.
> Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)
That sounds all horribly complicated.
I have a dotfiles, 5 bash scripts and a ~/bin folder for anything outside of package manager. I migrated my laptop to Arch recently from Debian and fixing the scripts was literally copy the script, and do a find and replace (I literally put pacman instead of apt install and most of it worked).
It not that much of a big deal to move between distros.
It’s not horribly complicated. I have a single 3 line script capturing the current state of my homebrew, flatpak, and rpm-ostree state that runs before Pika Backup backs up my entire home directory.
You have 5 bash scripts and various dotfiles. That sounds a lot more complicated.
Bazzite is really not much different to any of the atomic fedora distributions.
The only thing more complicated about immutable Linux is that you have to rethink how you install packages a little bit, as you’re generally using installation methods that offer isolation from your base operating system.
The big upside of this is that essentially all of your modifications are confined to your home directory, and of course system updates and rollbacks are trivial.
The complexity is hidden. I don't require all the gumph. I just gave bash and a Debian install. Pretending the rube goldberg machine isn't one because you've hidden it behind a facia doesn't mean it isn't one.
When all of that complexity doesn't work (which sooner or later it will), it will be more difficult to fix.
I’m confused, how is an immutable system more complex? How is it harder to fix? Can you be specific?
I don’t mean to say “my choice of distro is better than yours” because I know atomic Linux isn’t for everyone. But if we are talking about complexity specifically, this is an advantage to immutable distros.
Your Debian system never exactly matches any specific build that’s been tested and verified by your distro’s contributors.
Even worse when you run dist-upgrade. I think every Debian/Ubuntu user has been burned by that process at least once in their lives, some people avoid it entirely and clean install.
In Atomic Linux anything breaks there is a single command to revert back to the last system image. Rollback reboot and you’re done:
rpm-ostree rollback
There’s also a tool included to list out and revert to any images from the last 90 days.
If I have some kind of issue I have an exact release that every other user has with the exact same set of system and included packages.
I’ve recently moved between two other steamos-like distros and it’s such a non-event. You just log into Steam, pair controllers and download the games. Your saves are managed for you.
SuSE would be a better option then, IMO. Not only have they been around much longer (1994 vs 2004), they offer much better support compared to Canonical. And as a bonus, you don't need to put up with any of the continuous enshittifications Canonical subjects you to (Snaps, increasing poor quality code etc).
The funny thing about SuSE, and admittedly I haven't touched it for over a decade now: Everyone I knew who used it touted that it had great enterprise support as a reason for using it, but everybody I knew that used SuSE used OpenSuSE. This was over ~20 years of providing Linux support, RHEL-based and Ubuntu were by far the distros we dealt with the most.
One issue I had with OpenSuSE was that once a new release drops you have around 6mo to migrate all your machines over to it. Which, for most businesses, is a pretty short timeline, in my experience.
I've always preferred authoring RPMs over debs, but Caninical having basically one distro without the forks, I think is a huge benefit for a business using them.
These days, since it's all about containers, I'd recommend openSUSE microOS, which is a minimal immutable rolling OS that's suitable as a container host. https://microos.opensuse.org/
Weird question probably but outside of the super esoteric distros running a bespoke package manager what stops someone who installs a distro like bazzite from just continuing to update packages? If they use apt for example then they'll still get updates when the repos are updated and most of these distros reuse existing software repositories.
Bazzite works a bit differently as it's an immutable distro. Whilst updates for normal/user-level packages (Steam etc) will continue to work (as these are Flatpaks), your core system packages won't and you can't just change your repo to say Fedora's repos, as system updates are image-based and are pulled directly from Bazzite's github repo (which in turn pulls from Feodra).
The good news is, you can easily rebase to any other uBlue or even Fedora Atomic distro with just one or two commands, or if you're technical, you can even fork Bazzite's repo and build your own Bazzite (they even provide instructions on how to do this, it's very very simple, relatively speaking).
It is a fork of Fedora, one of the most stable distros out there. It is more geared towards regular users when compared to Arch on which SteamOS is based.
I am a long time Arch user but I totally understand why they went with Fedora for Bazzite.
Well, the idea of Linux was "a better minix" and "I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones".
Not necessarily a corporate distro, but there is somewhat more sustainability in a project based on Debian or Arch than an individual with a bunch of organically handmade scripts.
Any operating system could close down and move on. I'm 100x more concerned that Windows is going to become a cloud service than I'm worried about Bazzite shutting down.
Great distro ! I have been using it for the last 2 years on my Framework laptop 16 without any issues. I even have a "fork" of sorts that adds Hyprland + all of my "desktop" config, which I think as being part of the OS.
I really think immutable distributions are the future of linux desktop, and maybe distributions that use OCI images, beacause they are a lot easier to work with than say, NixOS for example.
If you want to have your custom bazzite, you just do a "FROM bazzite:<whatever-version-you-want-to-pin" and add stuff you want.
Of course, you loose a bit of the reproducibility, since usually container images do not pin packages (and maybe other reproducibility issues I am not aware of) but it is way easier to work with.
I learned about Aurora from a HN comment some weeks ago, and it has been so awesome. I really haven't been as impressed with a distro since the first ubuntu. Its just a rock solid base, awesome defaults, and kde being delightful.
I will offer a second positive but more reserved data point. It took me closer to a day to get my custom Bazzite build working.
Switching over to my images using bootc failed because of what I eventually tracked down to permissions issues that I didn't see mentioned in any of the docs. In short, the packages you publish to Github's container registry must be public.
Another wrinkle: The Bazzite container-build process comes pretty close to the limits of the default Github runners you can run for free. If you add anything semi-large to your custom image, it may fail to build. For example, adding MS's VSCode was enough to break my image builds because of resource limits.
Fortunately, both of these issues can be fixed by improving the docs.
The actual process for the image is really just what I said. In the video he sets up a github actions automatic build, and adds signing with cosign (which are also all steps you really want to do) but to have custom stuff in your base os is really as easy as a Dockerfile (or should I say Containerfile ?)
Immutable is very good for new linux users but I personally don't like the restriction and find rpmostree extremely slow to install literally anything. It does make sense to use immutable distros in routers, firewall, etc
I try not to use rpmostree to install anything (only steam-input, codecs and nvidia drivers), and rely on homebrew, appimages, flatpaks and toolbox for my app needs. It works so far...
There is something about immutable linuxes that feels right, and I cannot pinpoint why exactly, but it's like things are segregated correctly.
For anyone interested in some gaming benchmarks, Gamer's Nexus (a reputable source with good methodology) has some numbers here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOx4_8ajZ8
Based on their results, it sounds like there's still quite a way to go Linux gaming/Proton (ie: very inconsistent frametimes on Nvidia hardware), but it's definitely been taking steps in the right direction.
Do note that they make it very, very, very clear that their results are preliminary, and while they've put a whole lot of work into setting up benchmarking on Linux, they're not at all sure that they've got it all correct.
> ie: very inconsistent frametimes on Nvidia hardware
Yeah, Nvidia on Linux for non-"compute" use has always been a terrible, godawful shitshow. Given Nvidia's recent and fairly-clear disinterest in the "selling graphics cards for people to play video games with" market, [0] I can't imagine things will get consistently better anytime in the near future. [1]
[0] Why sell that silicon to video gamers when you can sell it to cryptominers and -these days- "AI" companies for a much, much, much higher profit?
[1] I mean, it took them how many Windows driver revisions for them to release somewhat-non-garbage drivers for their spanking-new fancy-ass 5000-series cards? And Windows is the only consumer OS that they care about! For video game use, the Linux drivers are gonna be starved for development resources, and -unlike ATi/AMD's drivers- noone in the world can work on them but Nvidia.
> Do note that they make it very, very, very clear that their results are preliminary,
Yeah, I'm not entirely convinced some of the results they're seeing aren't caused by their methodology. I don't think they are either.
I moved a gaming pc with a 4070Ti from Win10 to Cachy 3 weeks ago and have been purposefully testing out various games to see if it's workable; I'm about 50 hours and 15 games deep now and the only thing that doesn't work reliably is HDR. Outside of that I haven't run into any issues I haven't seen on Windows as well.
I've never run into any issues with my GTX 1070 and proprietary drivers. It's ran perfectly well for almost a decade. Like when people complain about nvidia drivers I don't even know what they mean. Do you run into artifacts, or crashes, or kernel panics, or what?
What’s with the Nvidia on Linux FUD like this is the mid-00s? I’ve run Nvidia cards on Linux for the better part of the last decade and it has been a pretty similar experience to when I was on Windows prior to that.
Nvidia’s Open Kernel Modules are good so far and the in-kernel Nova driver project also seems promising though some way off. I’m running a 5000 series card with Nvidia OKMs and so far it has been a really smooth experience.
I actually get higher FPS in graphically demanding games due to vulkan producing more optimized shaders, most of the lag actually comes from context switching and translation for directx, it's absolutely GREAT one dx12 due to how little translation there is.
I'm currently working on few very targeted optimizations for several hotspots I've found out from messing around so it will be interesting if I can solve those horrible stutter issues on cyberpunk since if I can fix it (in a ghetto and janky way), so can valve.
I can also achieve higher fps in games like overwatch (dx12) out of the box on nvidia on proton experimental which is surprising as 4 years ago the input latency was unbearable and I had drops as low as 30 fps, now I can achieve consistent 600 fps with minimums of 450 whereas on windows I get as low as 220fps and averages of 500ish. I do have anticheat related drops to <300fps due to the amount of translation happens when they decide to scan memory, registry and whatnot although it lasts <1s and doesn't happen during games it seems.
That just isn't true. While it is very good now, it is not faster and more stable than Windows. I have performance issues on Linux that just don't happen on Windows.
Well that is the issue. The experience varies quite a lot depending on a number of factors. Whereas on Windows it doesn't really vary.
I have an all AMD machine and almost all the games will run the same or better on Windows. I have friends that have tried gaming on Linux and all of them have found the experience worse.
I did run a win debloat script from and use a local account so I don't have the Windows Spyware running in the background so that may make a difference.
Just an aside. I've been using Linux for quite a while now (over-20 years) and the biggest issue is that the community constantly misleads new users about the experience of moving from Windows to Linux. The latest iteration of this has been gaming.
Perhaps it’s just evidence that anecdata isn’t some universal truth.
I’ve had the complete opposite experience for the vast majority of games, where in most cases performance for me has been better on Linux than it was on Windows (can’t compare like for like now as I no longer have a Windows install outside of a VM). Friends of mine experience weird mid-session crashes and hangs on Windows that I’ve never had on Linux. I’m running an Nvidia GPU which is supposedly some kind of Linux boogeyman, but have had only one issue with EDID of a specific monitor and that’s it. Just my experience YMMV.
> Perhaps it’s just evidence that anecdata isn’t some universal truth.
This isn't though. I have hard numbers. I've actually measured the performance. You get 5-20 FPS less and often more input latency and stutters (1%, 0.1% lows). If the machines doesn't well with Linux, it can be much worse.
Basically on HN whenever you express an opinion based on a significant amount of experience. You get someone basically saying "this is anecdote". There is a difference between "an anecdote" and "I've actually have a huge amount experience with this stuff.
Have you produced an exhaustive survey across a wide range of hardware and driver and display manager combinations? I’m happy to be an outlier here but my own experience doesn’t match with what you described hence my reply.
If I admit to anything less than doing a gamer nexus style benchmarking suite you will just claim it is an anecdote.
I have actually tested on a number of different distros and display managers and at least two different video card chipset manufacturers. No it isn't exhaustive, but it decent enough sample size to determine that the claim that Linux performs better than Windows isn't true. Even if it is the case,the results are so variable you are better just using Windows because things are more consistent.
I am saying this BTW as someone that first started using Linux in the early 2000s. I think gaming now is really good on Linux. Is it better than Windows? Well I don't have to run Windows now to play games and that is good enough for me.
And I get totally different results. It not just the distro. It the version of the Kernel, the version of proton, whether you are using X or Wayland etc. Etc. Etc.
The very point I am making is that it is so variable. So posting benchmarks pretending that it proves anything is asinine.
I won't even get into all the other issues with the mouse getting lost on some games, text being too small/to large. Having to fuck around with LD_PRELOAD flags and loads other gumpth that is never mentioned on a YouTube video.
Your claim was that you tested and "You get 5-20 FPS less and often more input latency and stutters (1%, 0.1% lows)", "it decent enough sample size to determine that the claim that Linux performs better than Windows isn't true". That you tested so well, that it can't be considered to be anecdata. You claimed that it is universal truth.
So I provided you with solid data from testers, who found many cases in which Linux was on par or faster than Windows.
There seems to be little evidence of that, at least from a reputable source.
For some games it can be. For some games Proton performs far worse than Windows. It's not steady across the board. And some have stability issues, bugs, major performance problems, or just flat out don't work.
I want Proton to be the future as well, but I think it's important not to oversell it as a drop-in replacement either.
EDIT: GN highly recommends against apples-to-oranges comparisons of the two, but even looking at their own data for AMD cards (with exact same CPU, RAM, and motherboard) it clearly shows Proton being behind on the order of 6-15%. Not a lot, but not ahead either. You can compare the numbers for the AMD cards against this video's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP0axVHdP-U
EDIT 2: Instead of just down-voting because the result makes you unhappy, how about responding with well-sourced proof otherwise?
> I want Proton to be the future as well, but I think it's important not to oversell it as a drop-in replacement either.
Proton needs to be understood as a temporary solution to make the back catalogue on Linux comparable to Windows.
Eventually there is a tipping point and most games will have native Linux binaries. Once that happens all developers will gradually follow suit to avoid being left behind. Perhaps Valve's latest hardware efforts will finally bring this about.
Proton will still exist for older games and as hardware continues to become more powerful, loss of performance won't matter much.
> There seems to be little evidence of that, at least from a reputable source.
I dunno. I remember a little while back some reviewers got a hold of both a Windows version and Linux version of a handheld gaming machine that had exactly the same hardware. The conclusion reached was that the Linux version was better in nearly every way.
As I remember it, a little while after this happened, some muckety-muck in the Gaming Division in Microsoft announced something like "We're making a new committment to consistent, high performance in Windows on handheld gaming devices! We're going to ensure all those little game-spoiling roadblocks are removed!". Which, like, good job making it NOT look like you're spasmodically reacting to bad press, guy.
> Handhelds and desktop PCs can perform differently.
The handhelds we're talking about are -essentially- a low-power [0] laptop in a tiny case. Again, we're talking about exactly the same hardware, that provides substantially worse performance when Windows is the OS than when Linux is the OS.
From personal experience, all of the games that I personally play seem to work at least as well if not better on Linux than Windows. The only exception is FSR4, but that ought to be fixed soon.
FWIW, I wasn't the one who downvoted you. I can't even downvote here as I'm apparently "karmically broke". I have 468 karma, not sure how much I even need to downvote...
I really want to use Bazzite but I also have concerns about their supply chain. Last I checked, they automatically update all packages in their releases. Many of them are from copr, including kernel patches. The release notes do list package version changes, but as far as I can tell there is no human review.
I realize that, in a way, it's no different than installing from AUR or ppa's, but something about both of those (and the fact that package installs are manual) feels safer than copr packages with fewer eyes on them...
Honestly if the point is to run proprietary software like commercial AAA games, the supply chain is already compromised.
I treat my gaming computer as a video game console, it wouldn't occur to me to share passwords, accounts, data or anything sensitive on my gaming machine. And I only connect it to the network if I need to download a game/update.
Considering how many games require literal malware for anti cheat. It’s the only sane way to do gaming. Just let the games and proprietary junk have their own environment with total control. But with none of your sensitive data.
My understanding is that a lot of the games on Steam are actually executed in some kind of sandbox, but I am sure if that is just for compatibility/emulation reasons, and which directories are still accessible in that case.
I wish there was better documentation for this, because "random indie game demo cannot upload my family photos" would be a great selling point for SteamOS/Bazzite.
As it stands, the Steam flatpak is probably the safest way to play games (which does not work on Bazzite).
I used Ubuntu for 8 years constantly fixing issues, from the day I installed it (because it didn't support basic Ryzen), after every distro upgrade, and various other random points, e.g. when installing a package whose dependency overwrote something. Each issue took hours to fix, usually searching forums for arcane command lines and trying everything until something worked (possibly breaking other things in the process).
Last year I tried Bazzite for my kid who like games and realized that it's 100x better than Ubuntu, for both gaming and serious work. It's 100x more stable and virtually unbreakable, far more modern and up-to-date than Ubuntu, and I can still do just about everything I want (just have to do it differently because it's atomic). Since I switched to Bazzite I have had zero issues, because atomic distros are inherently so much more stable. Everyone uses the exact same image, and the state of the OS is always fresh and doesn't deteriorate over time the way mutable distros do. And best of all, if any issue does come up (which is extremely rare), the fix is always the same and it takes 1 minute: boot into the previous version.
I used to avoid using my PC due to constant issues with Ubuntu, now I often switch it on simply because Bazzite makes me so happy.
It frustrates me to no end that people to this day still recommend Ubuntu and its derivatives as "good" and "user friendly" when it literally breaks all the bloody time, and meanwhile there are awesome distros like Bazzite and Aurora that are rock-solid like MacOS and ChromeOS.
Outside of console or handheld like experiences, I am not sure what this distro gives that Mint, proprietary nvidia drivers and Steam dont give me? I basically just download windows games as external applicationd through steam and use proton. Though I suppose a one click like “run this as proton” and “run this in this proton environment” could be useful. But once you learn how to change targets its not super complicated.
The entire point of Bazzite and other immutables is that you get a rock solid system that you never ever have to worry about breaking.
Atomic updates means updates either apply or don't: there's no partial/fail state that can stop your PC from working. And in the rare event that an update has issues, you can instantly boot the previous two images, without typing any commands or using any fancy restore tools. And if you're a bit tech savvy (ie you know how to type a single command), you can even go back upto the last 90 days worth of images (via github).
The best part of atomic updates is OS upgrades, they work flawlessly. In fact since updates are delivered as images, an OS upgrade is no different to any other regular update, unlike regular distros like Mint where you have to cross your fingers and hope that your system still works after a dist-upgrade (and I believe Mint's official stance was that they didn't support dist-upgrades, they recommend you to backup, format, clean-install and restore with every OS release. Not sure if that policy has changed now, but that used to be their stance for a very long time).
Mint does support upgrading the OS, both to minor and major versions.
I personally installed Mint in 2014 and used the upgrade path until a month ago, when my distro finally started showing bad signs of being experimented on (by me, for 11 years) and it was easier to do a fresh install instead.
I know the OS itself does, I meant it wasn't recommended by the team. See these instructions written by the founder Clement himself, especially under section E where they say "We do not even recommend this on the command line, so to have it triggered from the click of a button is just not acceptable to us. It's easy alright, but it's not the right solution."
I know, which is why my original comment stated "and I believe Mint's official stance *was* that they didn't support dist-upgrade" and furthermore, I went on to state "Not sure if that policy has changed now, but that used to be their stance for a very long time".
Would have been better if instead of "that used to be their stance for a very long time" you would have written "that used to be their stance a very long time ago, not sure about currently". Additionally, it would have been nice for you to spend a couple of minutes and check the current official stance.
Like I said, I have been using Mint since 2014 and the upgrade was an official stance at least since then.
I think 3-5 years (let alone 10 years) is a long enough time to pass after which one should check before posting old information. Imagine someone talking about how few games Linux has (pre-Steam) or how impossible installation of Linux is (because one needs to order physical CDs).
Atomic OSs are such a massive improvement. My experience with traditional Linux disros is the major upgrades failed as often as they worked. And always prompted me to merge config files or other insane stuff.
Bazzite just works like I’d expect an iPhone update or a Nintendo switch update to work.
For things like appliances (home theater pcs, gaming consoles etc..) you'd want an immutable rootfs that's resistant to random reboots, power cuts etc..
You'd also want stable, atomic, updates that can go from "one version of system software to the next" without breaking the system.
Recently, i had to reinstall my 7 year old arch install because a system upgrade after a year or so broke it... It's not like i can't sit down and fix what went wrong manually, it's just that i wouldn't want to ever worry about these things on my home theater/"gaming console" pc...
There's nothing any UniversalBlue image tweaks that you couldn't tweak yourself. It's just adding/removing packages, adding/removing drivers, a few configuration scripts, and a bunch of tweaks to fix well-known gaming-related issues.
But the point is that, if you want to game on Linux, you probably want to perform exactly or almost exactly the same tweaks that Bazzite already does. So why bother doing them yourself?
It's not even a linux-from-scratch situation where you'd do it for the sake of learning. Googling "my controller doesn't work right", finding some discussion threads, and copy-pasting a bunch of fixes isn't particularly interesting.
The gamepadui mode that allows you to use the system with only a game controller connected, effectively turning it into a console-style experience, is the main draw.
I don’t really care any desktop environment. I use i3. Otherwise I don’t really have much preference between how Firefox, terminal, and Steam are displayed.
I’ve been using it for a couple of months on my main dev machine (I don’t game much). It’s my first exposure to immutable systems.
I love the idea, but honestly, juggling all these package managers gets annoying really fast; for now what I use is rpm-ostree (which you really shouldn’t touch unless you absolutely have to), Flatpak, Homebrew (some package are mac only or mac first), and distrobox (with arch).
Every now and then I think of going back to arch cause they are the only distro that made it very convenient to install some obscure packages that is only used by handful of people
Like yesterday, I tried setting up Flutter with the Android SDK command-line tools and the rest of the Android dev stack, and it took me almost 2 hours to get everything working; On Arch? That’s just a few packages, all sitting right there in the main repo or the AUR.
I get what your saying, but it's just a matter of finding the right workflow.
I'm very much like you infact, so I ended up resorting to just using an Arch Distrobox for pretty much everything. I leave rpm-ostree and Flatpaks alone as far as possible, so I only really have to worry about my Arch for updates and everything else takes care of itself.
You may ask then why not just use Arch? Well of course you can, but I like the idea of having a rock solid base where I know for a fact that I can let it happily update without breaking something. Arch still requires manual intervention every now and then (such as package migrations or some dependency conflicts). Not a big deal if you keep up with the Arch News and Discord announcements etc, but sometimes IRL gets in the way and I'm not up-to-speed with what's happening. With my Bazzite+Arch setup, I'm not super bothered with this, plus it's easy to blow my whole container and set it up again, and in fact I've got a bash script to do just that on one of my other PCs that I don't use regularly (because Arch needs to be updated regularly, otherwise you're in for a nasty surprise when you find out your keyring is out-of-date and pacman has been upgraded and nothing works... with a container, just blow it up and fetch the latest version, reinstall your packages and you're up and running in no time).
I tried out Fedora Silverblue a while ago but found immutable OSs to be too inconvenient for development right now. I don’t think it’s an inherent flaw in the design, just all the dev tools are not set up to work with them.
For normal non dev usage it works great. On my steam deck I just get everything through Flatpak or steam and it just works.
Soooo, after having to migrate multiple college campus sites across to Windows 11 in time for the W10 drop dead date. I kinda gave up with trying to get my PC running Windows 11 without bugs and freezes.
Switched to PopOS, was "ok", switched to Arch, performance was awesome.
A few days ago I gave Bazzite a blast and now I'm currently installing it as the primary OS on my gaming rig. Other than a few small tweaks, it just works.
It's quite a bit more performant than PopOS and PopOS came with a myriad of tweaks and issues needed for things like Ubi Connect (I've been going through the first Division game with my kids and PopOS/Lutris hated... Everything...
It all just works on Bazzite.
Plus the Nvidia drivers don't seem as bad, unsure if it's just the RTX5xxx that were having issues ala GamersNexus but the 4090 doesn't seem to have the same frame time issues that were raised (Knock on wood)
Huu. I had the opposite experience almost. I’m a complete Linux noob. Could not get Bazzite to work as expected. Had much better luck with Arch though the install was a bit archaic. Managed to get a desktop and Steam installed with all drivers on the second attempt (which wasn’t to bad since Arch is a fast install.) It has worked flawless since. Absolutely zero bloat.
Will hop over to one of these the day that the AAA multiplayer titles I want to play are supported. I know it's down to the anticheat, but I still wanna play 'em. Hopefully Valve are able to push that forward.
Personally, I hope that corporate rootkits will never be permitted on Linux in any form. Game studios need to learn that anticheat needs to live on the server side where it belongs.
Easier said than done for some genres, unfortunately. To catch things like aim assistance from the server-side you'd have to resort to handwavy statistical analysis and somehow thread the needle between catching well-crafted aimbots, but without accidentally banning legitimate players under any circumstances, even if they're extremely skilled and/or lucky.
It's been tried but I don't think it's ever been very successful. The Battlefield series used to use Fairfight, which is based on server-side heuristics, but they ultimately gave up on it and switched back to client-side detection for the more recent games.
Cheating creates two problems. Obvious cheats aiming to upset other players and subtle cheats that don't want to be noticed as such. Now, I'm not saying it doesn't matter if people cheat as long as nobody notices or that competitive integrity is not important, but the first category is a much more immediate threat for most games and easy to detect. On a server analyzing locally recorded sampled demos.
I used to co-run an online gaming ladder back in the Quake 3 days.
There were aim bots and other client side hacks back then but we requested that folks record and upload demos of themselves for competitive matches. This allowed anyone to replay the game from your exact POV in-game, complete with hearing and seeing exactly what the real player saw at the time.
We all survived back then without kernel level anti-cheat tools with a very high certainty that no one was cheating.
Even if you tried to hide it, it was pretty obvious when someone was cheating. I don't recall a single unsolved case where someone was cheating and got away with it while the community really thought otherwise. This was with over 10,000 registered players and tons of active teams playing every day. No where near the scale of gaming today of course, but it's a big enough sample that the method does work for online competitive play.
Nowadays it would be even easier to detect foul play because with live streaming and human announcers, you're under a lot more analysis by the public in real-time.
That statistical analysis with post-facto game recordings could be pretty accurate, and needn't result in bans. In fact, I think banning cheaters is dumb. Instead, we should weight matchmaking algorithms to put cheaters all on the same servers. If they want to cheat, why not let them cheat against each other?
If your definition of "AAA" includes Arc Raiders and Marvel Rivals, then good news, they work.
But if your definition specifically refers to shooters like Fortnite or BF6, then yeah, they're not going to work. Except CS of course, but not sure if CS counts as "AAA" in your books.
We can only hope Valve‘s new „console“ will hit the market strong so they have another levarage to push the studios to implement appropiate, linux compatible anti-cheat.
It has been. It's been server-side for decades. It's common industry knowledge that the client can't have authority. But server-side anti cheat can't stop aimbots or wall hacks. Client side anti cheat isn't about stopping you from issuing "teleport me to here plz server" commands, it's about stopping people from reading and writing the game's memory/address space.
If you wanted to teleport (and the server was poorly implemented enough to let you) you could just intercept your network packets and add a "teleport plz" message. Real cheats in the wild used to work this way. However a wallhack will need to read the game's memory to know where players are.
What modern anti cheat software does is make it difficult for casual cheats to read/write the game's memory, and force more sophisticated cheats down detectable exploit paths. It's impossible to prevent someone from reading the memory on untrusted hardware, but you can make it difficult and detectable so you can minimize the number of cheaters and maximize the number you detect and ban.
Linux is incompatible with client anti-cheat because there is no security boundary that can't be sidestepped with a custom compiled kernel. Windows is Windows, with known APIs and ways to read process memory that can be monitored. Secure boot means only Microsoft's own built kernels can boot and you now have a meaningful security boundary. Monitor what kernel drivers are loaded and you can make it harder for cheaters to find ways in. Sure you can run in a VM, but you can also detect when it happens.
Sure we can just run with no client side anticheat at all (functionally what Linux always is unless you only run approved, signed kernels and distros with secure boot) but wallhacks and aimbots become trivial to implement. These can only really be detected server side with statistical analysis. I hope you don't ban too many innocent people trying to find all the cheaters that way.
> Linux is incompatible with client anti-cheat because there is no security boundary that can't be sidestepped with a custom compiled kernel. Windows is Windows, with known APIs and ways to read process memory that can be monitored. Secure boot means only Microsoft's own built kernels can boot and you now have a meaningful security boundary. Monitor what kernel drivers are loaded and you can make it harder for cheaters to find ways in. Sure you can run in a VM, but you can also detect when it happens.
OK I'll just compile a custom ReactOS build that lets me sidestep that boundary.
Honest question: given all the companies and people working on anti-cheat systems for the last 20+ years of multiplayer video games, don't you think it would all be server-side if it could be, by now?
No, game companies are simply unwilling to pay for the talent and man hours that it takes to police their games for cheaters. Even when they are scanning your memory and filesystem they don't catch people running the latest rented cheat software.
Cheating is a social problem, not a technical issue. Just give the community dedicated server possibility (remember how back in the days games used to ship with dedicated server binaries?) and the community can police for free! Wow!
Yes, I would also prefer that servers were community run as in the hl2 days.
I would still argue that there are technical issues leading to some amount of cheating. In extraction shooters like Hunt Showdown, Escape From Tarkov and a few others, people can run pcie devices that rip player location and other information from the machines memory in order to inject it into an overlay with a 2nd computer, and they do go to these lengths to cheat, giving them a huge advantage. It wouldn't be possible to rip that info from memory for these "ESP cheats" if the server didn't needlessly transmit position information for players that aren't actually visible. IMO this is a technical failure. There are other steps that could be taken as well, which just aren't because they're hard.
Yes, because players want to spend time moderating other players instead of playing the game. Sounds fun!
Community servers literally invented anti-cheat. All current big name anti-cheats started as anti-cheats for community servers. And admins would choose to use them. Game developers would see that and integrate it. Quake 3 Arena even added Punkbuster in a patch.
Modern community servers like FiveM for GTAV, or Face-It and ESEA for CS2 have more anti-cheats, not less.
No, because most companies will make decisions based on time/effort/profitability, and because client-side anticheat is stupid simple and cheap, that's what they go with. Why waste their own server resources, when they can waste the user's?
So it is the company prioritising their bottom line at the expense of their customer's computers. More simply, they move cost from their balance sheet and convert it into risk on the customer's end.
Which is actively customer-abusive behavior and customers should treat it with the contempt it deserves. The fact that customers don't, is what enables such abuse.
This is such a weird take. In an online multiplayer game the cheaters are the risk to the company's bottom line.
If a game is rampant with cheaters, honest paying players stop showing up, and less new players sign up. The relatively small percentage of cheaters cost the company tons of sales and revenue.
It is actively in a company's best interest to do everything they possibly can to prevent cheating, so the idea that intentionally building sub-par anti-cheat is about "prioritising their bottom line" seems totally absurd to me.
Not to mention these abstract "the company" positions completely ignore all the passionate people who actually make video games, and how much most of them care about fair play and providing a good experience to their customers. No one hates cheaters more than game developers.
To the downvoters: client-side anticheat simply cannot stop all the cheaters. Why? Because it's running on hardware that the cheater has full control over.
It has been (and continues to be) an enormous amount of effort, and some cheaters are absolutely going to get through anyway.
Right, you cannot control hardware you do not own and have in your possession. A cheat that uses another computer and a camera to watch the screen and emulate a mouse is an effective aimbot that no client side method will ever detect. The future must be server authoritative net code and behavior-based server-side cheat detection.
> The future must be server authoritative net code and behavior-based server-side cheat detection.
If they actually cared about stopping cheaters (rather than pouring tons of investor money into the appearance of anti-cheat), then yes, the future must be that.
But. I'm a USian and I notice that the TSA is still strip-searching people at airports and -worse- wasting assloads of everyone's time, effort, and tax money. I have zero faith that a sudden attack of common sense will redirect efforts (whether they be in the arena of airport security or eviction of match-damaging video game cheaters) in a more sensible direction within what's left of my lifetime.
Day Z’s authoritative server‑side detection performed so flawlessly, it let me breach the network bubble and force other players to defecate themselves. 10/10, would recommend.
Bazzite fills a SteamOS-sized hole with a decent level of hardware support. Unclear how long that'll be the case - I don't see it surviving the release of a GA SteamOS.
It's snapshotted from Arch, once a year they bump the kernel and include "updated Arch Linux base" as a release note.
SteamOS 3.7 is still on Kernel 6.11 and KDE Plasma 6.2, for example. Bazzite is 6.17 and Plasma 6.5.
This matters if you're using more recent hardware or want the latest driver optimizations. My 9070 XT is supported by Bazzite, SteamOS won't even boot.
Especially on the Beta branch, I'm getting several system updates per week. I check for one every time I wake it up, along with checking for any available game update downloads. Originally moved to the Beta branch to get the new 8BitDo controller features (Mid-July maybe), but it's worked well enough I've never gone back to Stable.
i'm still not sure why anyone wants a GA steamos, the value is in the vertical integration, no? the "console experience" are mostly the bigscreen mode and other things already available in things like bazzite, while being a more general distro...
I've been using Linux forever (back to the mailed Ubuntu CDs days).
I installed this begrudgingly after fighting edge cases with Waydroid on Arch. It's the first "batteries included" distro I've actually liked. I usually hate the "omakase" approach, but the setup here is pretty much how I would've done it myself.
Side note: GNOME + Waydroid is the best experience I've had with a desktop OS on a tablet. Finding tools like scrcpy included out of the box was a nice surprise, too.
I've been using linux since the days of downloading slackware on a stack of 1.44mb floppy disks. I gave up on linux gaming around 2007. I've revisited it this year, but it still sucks. it's just not worth it.
just relax, install windows and late the escapism take over.
I also started my Linux journey with a turn of the century Slackware install. Linux has come a long, long way since then, but I learned a lot back then. Distros like Bazzite are practically "turn-key" now.
In any case, I would rather use those hard earned skills hand configuring Slackware today than to put with the shitshow of Windows pop-ups, forced account creation, telemetry collection, UI changes for the sake of change, advertisements built into the OS, random OS corrupting BSODs, etc..
Ah sorry, it was lutris (the name escaped me). I've done all the combinations of wine and wrappers to wine. All of them have a sort of unstable relationship with the calling environment. alt-tabbing out of games never works, there are freezes and game crashes when you try to switch in and out of games a fluidly as you can on windows.
I believe you that steamos is better, but it's also a single task environment where you're not checking your email between rounds of halo.
I'll give proton a try, though i believe that was in play when i was laddering with lutris.
Known Linux detractor, been sticking with Windows for years because I’ve had one too many ‘apt-get update’ brick my entire system. Decided to try out Bazzite specifically because of the immutable root partition thing.
Overall I will say things are going like 80% smoothly but there are still some very Linux-y problems with it:
The default grub has options for ostree:0 and ostree:1. 0 is the default and if you pick 0 it just hangs and doesn’t boot. I can’t figure out how to change this because the normal grub config files are read-only. So I have to quickly press down arrow when the computer is booting and select the right option.
Installing certain packages is difficult or impossible, for example I had to get pycairo and some other packages to run a Python program and you can’t add them normally. But I think the proper way is to just run everything in a container so maybe that’s on me.
90% of games work fine, but many have weird bugs like crashing when you Alt-Tab out. I could not get modded Skyrim to work after several attempts. Prism, the Minecraft launcher, has some sort of memory leak because if I leave it on in the background it eventually crashes the desktop and I have to hard restart. And of course anti-cheat games like Valorant/League don’t work at all.
KDE has tons of bugs - tooltips randomly scale to the wrong size, Dolphin refusing to copy a file to another drive for no reason, Dolphin freezing when loading a directory with lots of images, detaching a tab in Konsole sticks the window to your mouse until you click something else, Konsole has like 50 themes and none of them are named so you just have to squint and click one that looks good, drag-and-drop into Electron apps like Discord randomly fails, adding a new widget to the panel and suddenly it’s invisible, notifications appearing floating in the middle of the screen, removing an audio output (like unplugging headphones) seems to cause it to randomly choose an alternative, brightness on my monitor randomly shifts even after turning off DCC, GNOME apps have wonky themes, GNOME apps can’t detect light/dark mode so they just pick one… I could go on.
> ...drag-and-drop into Electron apps like Discord randomly fails, adding a new widget to the panel and suddenly it’s invisible, notifications appearing floating in the middle of the screen, removing an audio output (like unplugging headphones) seems to cause it to randomly choose an alternative, brightness on my monitor randomly shifts even after turning off DCC, GNOME apps have wonky themes, GNOME apps can’t detect light/dark mode so they just pick one… I could go on.
Hey, you can't possibly be having these problems! You're using a RedHat-derived distro! That means it uses Wayland! And the Wayland people have been telling us all for years that Wayland is good for daily use for everyone, and that it should be the default everywhere!
(Do note that the above is bitter, bitter sarcasm. I'm so, so disappointed by how the Wayland folks tend to use political pressure (rather than plain declarations of both capabilities and shortcomings) to muster up general support for their project.)
> ...but many have weird bugs like crashing when you Alt-Tab out.
Would it be easy for you to compile a list of like five or ten games that do this? I'm curious to see if I can reproduce this on my Steam-on-xorg-on-Gentoo-Linux machine with an AMD graphics card.
I don't doubt your report, not even a little bit, but -personally- I've found window management on Linux to be light-years better than on Windows. I can put nearly every game I've tried in my huge-ass Steam library on fullscreen on another virtual desktop, flip over to some other desktop (or window) to check something, and flip right back to find the video game still fullscreen and still running happy as a clam. [0] (To say nothing of the total lack of Windows-typical jankiness when changing the screen resolution on an "Exclusive Fullscreen" game.)
Whereas on Windows, it's kinda a crapshoot regarding both what state your desktop will be in when you Alt+Tab out of a fullscreen game and what state that game will be in when you Alt+Tab back. And if that game is "Exclusive Fullscreen" and is not running at your desktop's resolution, all the windows on your secondary monitor are probably going to be rearranged when the game starts, and will definitely be rearranged when you Alt+Tab out and maybe then again when you Alt+Tab back in.
[0] Two very notable exceptions to this are Red Dead Redemption 2 (it notices that its no longer the foreground window and "helpfully" makes itself windowed) and the Linux version of Dead Cells (it "helpfully" minimizes itself when it's no longer the foreground window.).
I run modded Skyrim (SE) via Steam on Bazzite, and it works fine. I just installed Vortex inside the same Proton prefix as Skyrim, installed all my mods via Vortex (and made sure there weren't any conflicts) and it all worked fine. I think I might've had to install .NET as well to get Vortex going, it's been a while so I don't recall, but there should be some update guide somewhere.
RE Anti-cheat, it's not ALL of them, it's only kernel-based ones. For eg, BattlEye, EAC, VAC, and nProtect Gameguard all work just fine, but of course, the game studio will need to enable that support. Arc Raiders, Marvel Rivals, Fall Guys etc all use anticheat and they work fine.
RE KDE, I haven't experienced most of those issues. I don't use Konsole (Ghostty is far better anyways). As for Discord, Equibop is a far better client compared to official.
RE GNOME, unfortunately GNOME and KDE have never really gotten along, personally I avoid GNOME/GTK apps are far as possible.
> 90% of games work fine, but many have weird bugs like crashing when you Alt-Tab out.
This isn't particularly linux-y of an issue. I've had the same sort of behavior in numerous games on Windows, up to and including crashing the graphics driver when alt-tabing out of a full screen game. Seems to be something gamedevs are not commonly testing, and perhaps difficult to defend against when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.
> Seems to be something gamedevs are not commonly testing, and perhaps difficult to defend against when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.
I can guarantee you any gamedev worth his salt will have used alt-tab at some point in the game's development on windows. It's an incredibly common hotkey to use, and the devs very likely have multiple ides, notepads, image editing software running concurrently. You seem to be trying really hard.
> when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.
Most devs are using cross platform graphics APIs. OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan. Alt-tab breaking is likely an OS issue.
> I can guarantee you any gamedev worth his salt will have used alt-tab at some point in the game's development on windows.
Not exactly a repeatable testing framework, that.
> You seem to be trying really hard.
I almost strained a typing finger! /s lol
> Most devs are using cross platform graphics APIs. OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan. Alt-tab breaking is likely an OS issue.
All the OSes seem to suffer from it similarly. More likely an issue that even the cross-platform graphics APIs rely heavily on shared memory buffers and most games depend on code written in languages which aren't strictly memory safe. Sharing a memory buffer between CPU and GPU (or even just multiple CPU cores) is quite difficult to do safely under all possible circumstances without proper language support.
Perhaps you're not a software developer. Most devs understand that there's a big difference between "it worked for me a few times on my development workstation" and "it's routinely tested in all possible configurations under a variety of circumstances as part of a test harness or CI/CD process".
In fairness to game devs, alt-tab'ing out of a running game would be a challenge for many testing frameworks as it's not something you can do at compile time, requires running the game for a period of time (CI servers don't typically have GPUs), requires some sort of keyboard/mouse automation, and interaction with the underlying OS in addition to the game.
Issues which aren't added to some sort of test suite/CI tend to creep back in to codebases. Especially rapidly developed codebases like games. And threading issues are notoriously challenging to reproduce. Hopefully that helps you understand the difference.
Many game devs develop on windows and for good reason in that most of their customer base are there, plus the stability of drivers there.
Your assumption of what you've been taught in compsci circles with many resources at their disposal does not hold up in places in which fast iterations are required, and with little time to set up testing frameworks because as you said they're hard to test.
I would say most game devs. That doesn't change a thing I've said.
> plus the stability of drivers there
Driver code for Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are all shared across Windows and Linux these days. Have been for years. AMD's even made a point of pulling improvements from the Linux drivers back into the Windows drivers.
> Your assumption of what you've been taught in compsci circles with many resources at their disposal does not hold up in places in which fast iterations are required
I have developed games. I write libraries useful for gamedev. Every game developer I know uses version control and most use CI. Contrary to your opinion, version control and CI help to iterate faster with greater confidence, and don't require lots of resources, just a GitHub account and 5 minutes.
> Every game developer I know uses version control and most use CI.
Funny because I know game developers who don't use CI. And I've developed games too. It's not as universal as you claim it to be. It was never about arguing the effectiveness of CI.
I'm sure they're out there. A bit like publicly declaring you drive without wearing a seatbelt.
> It was never about arguing the effectiveness of CI.
The original point was that alt-tab'ing out of a game can result in unexpected behavior on any OS. Shared memory buffers in graphics APIs are the most likely culprit. And all graphics APIs on all OSes use them. I'm still not sure what exactly you're trying to argue about that.
While I understand the point of Linux distros overall, because they allow very specific usage like embedded, etc., I really don't get the point of those generalist but slightly specialized distributions focused on a single aspect that consumers use a computer for.
I'm far from a Linux super-user, I only use it for my servers and Raspberry Pis, but even I would rather pick Debian and install the necessary stuff by hand. This feels like opting-in to bloat on your newly installed OS.
I'll happily listen if anyone has a good selling point for those, but I can't think of any OS less attractive than something tailored for a single use-case on my generalist PC build.
The reason I use Bazzite is very simple: I only use my desktop computer for gaming and when I turn it on, I want it to work immediately without issues.
With previous distros I always had issues configuring something or another with games/drivers. Bazzite has been the closest to Windows/console experience for me wrt Linux pc gaming.
If this is a generalist computer, then you are absolutely correct. This is not the distro for you. This is very specifically built for gaming.
Bazzite is actually two levels of specialization away from Debian. Yes, it supports gaming better than other distros, especially on the current wave of handheld devices, and last I heard 2/3 of its users were using the handheld/HTPC version of Bazzite.
But it is also part of the Universal Blue family, which means that updates are atomic and can be rolled back. SteamOS, GNOME OS, and KDE Linux are all trying the atomic distro thing, but you don't get it out of the box on the mainstream distros (yet).
But not necessarily in the right form factor. My generalist PC build is a laptop, my gaming machine is tucked away under the TV and doesn't have a mouse or keyboard.
At this point, I have almost 30 years of daily driving Linux desktop experience, and several decades of professional Linux experience. I have tried and kind of liked NixOS and although I prefer the simplicity of Arch Linux, I see how it would be useful in a professional scenario with lots of servers to upkeep.
But Fedora Atomic confuses the hell out of me. To recommend it to potential Linux newbies and as the great next thing feels bizarre to me.
Yep, I run NixOS on everything but no way in hell am I recommending it to complete newbies to Linux who also have no programming experience.
I help run a small Linux gaming community and at least once a day on the Discord (yes it’s a problematic service but that’s another rant) there is someone trying to install a mod or set up some piece of sim hardware, having recently switched from Windows, and being confused by FlatPak or by system immmutability.
It feels like these things are a double edged sword, on the one hand they are less prone to break they system and not under and why, on the other they now have a bunch of new roadblocks they don’t understand nor fully comprehend the purpose of. I can’t think of a better alternative but I sort of feel that the technology isn’t the issue, more like lack of a good FTUE which provides low friction education about how the system works and why that is beneficial. To use a bit of a tired analogy, it seems to me that a certain proportion of users are being thrown a nice big fish but aren’t being helped to understand what a fishing rod is, let alone able to fish for themselves.
I think I’m really just echoing other users’ comments about how a lot of the experience doesn’t really deliberately speak to people who are barely technical and just want things to work. The sort of people who run an iPhone because it’s simple, and whose response to windows acting weird is to just reinstall it.
I'm newish to Linux, so take my opinions with a grain of salt and having a lot of unknown unknowns.
I think the update/os upgrade situation is better, security is better, and frankly my least favorite thing with Linux is going in and making sure the system state is healthy.
When I started using Linux this summer I had to wipe my system twice because I put it in broken states or couldn't figure out how to undo some change. I went through all sorts of issues like managing grub and gnome not working with my studio display or thunderbolt peripherals. Almost all of the fixes required editing arcane files then calling commands which fed them into some subsystem I had no idea about. All that blind faith online sourced stuff felt like a security nightmare too.
Since migrating to atomic fedora and then this weekend Bazzite, that has not happened once. There was initial friction with dev tool setup and toolbox, but things have been completely on the rails since then.
Greatly enjoying bazzite. Grabbed a Radeon 9070xt, hook it up to my 4k projector, and get to couch game. Looks a fair bit nicer than my Xbox, and steam is so much better than the Xbox online store.
I went to bazzite with a 4070ti super, is it worth going to a 9070xt? I've had graphical issues but a reboot always fixes it. The main menu UI is dog slow though (easily a half second of lag).
I can't speak for the 9070XT specifically (I'm on a 7800XT myself), but the thing with Linux in general is that nVidia can be a PITA sometimes and exhibit weird issues like your menu lag. If you want a first-class Linux experience then go all-AMD. I run Linux on four different classes of all-AMD computers (desktop, laptop, mini-PC and handheld) and have literally zero issues. In particular, I've been running Bazzite for about three years on two of my systems (PC and laptop) and it's been rock solid. Three years of updates and upgrades, with only one hiccup this one time on my PC (which wasn't a big deal either since I had pinned a good image versions to my boot menu, so I always have a good image I could boot into).
They need to work on their messaging if someone has to scroll five to seven times just to figure out that it is an OS, and even then it still is not that clear.
I really wanted to give this a legitimate try but even following the installation instructions to the letter, it bricked my Windows install and I had to spend a few hours fixing the MBR, Bootloader, etc. I'm sure it would be a breeze using a separate physical drive but that'll be a project for another day.
Bazzite does look very promising and happy to see innovation in the Linux gaming world!
Bazzite has a command, `ujust setup-boot-windows-steam`, which when run adds an entry to Steam-in-Bazzite that causes a Windows boot.
It also has a command `ujust regenerate-grub` which adds a Windows entry to the bootloader.
Each of these is a single command which only must be run one time after install. I suppose it could take a few hours to either do it by hand, or to discover one of these options, but they are both documented and in particular the guide at https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/Installation_Guide/dual_boot... (which you implied you followed) mentions the latter command.
It works on each of my Bazzite machines without any manual tinkering/intervention. Not sure why it would not Work On Your Machine (TM).
- Additional hardware support (like proprietary nVidia drivers, several game controllers, laptop-specific stuff (like some ASUS sensors etc))
- Newer core packages (kernel, graphics drivers, desktop environment). This often translates to better hardware support (especially if it's recent hardware), and often better game compatibility (newer graphics drivers often include fixes for games), and often better performance as well.
- More suitable as a general purpose OS. SteamOS heavily leans into the gaming use-case (naturally), and whilst you can use it as a regular PC, its immutable nature can make it a bit annoying depending on your workflow. Bazzite includes a bunch of useful defaults (apps/config/shortcuts) that makes it much more conducive for regular PC usage, or advanced gaming usage (like if you want to install an overclocking utility or do something more "advanced", it's far more easier and convenient).
It's also the best distribution for jellyfin media player because it's trivially easy to get the jellyfin client to autostart in kde and it's not that hard to get it auto updating and rebooting nightly. This distro plus an intel n150 mini pc (aoostar n1 pro is decent) and a flir dongle and the flir remote is a big win.
HDR can be a hit-or-miss even on Windows though, thanks to the myriad combinations of monitors, cable versions and standards. So hard to give a definite answer besides "YMMV".
In my case though, it works fine without any hiccups. My main setup is a 7800XT, connected to an AOC CQ32G3SE using a DisplayPort 2.1 cable. HDR works fine both in Steam game mode as well as in desktop mode (KDE).
bazzite supports it I believe but I am not sure my n150 based mini pcs that I'm using on my tvs does. This was running on six your old tvs until this month when I bought a lg g5 for the basement. It looks great but I couldn't say if it looks the greatest it could look with HDR on or not... My previous tv frontend was a custom nixos setup that was a pain to maintain over the years. bazzite just works and the setup is simple for my needs (basically autologging in to kde and autostarting jellyfin media player in full screen plus a systemd timer to ensure the system updates and reboots overnight while I'm sleeping.
I mostly use Ubuntu for my gaming PCs but I put Bazzite on my living room PC and it works a treat. It’s much more of a console-like experience and kind of gets out of the way. It also works better with Steam Remote Play.
I see this project being an OS distribution with image update approach. It basically has some programs used for gaming on Linux preinstalled and probably preconfigured.
I wish the project would exist in 2 variants: an OS (as it currently is) and as an installer that would allow the user to select parts to install and configure on their current Linux distro.
Because I am using debian, this is my home PC and gaming is not the sole thing that I do on this PC.
Switching to a Fedora distro is not an option for me.
So, as nice as this project is - I say farewell to it.
How does it compare to CachyOS? I'm not too familiar with how immutable OS actually works or what is the deal with flatpacks.
I have a system that I kind of want to have Linux forward with Windows on secondary m.2 drive to dual boot if I need something there. Following protonDB, I see all the games that I play work just fine and are either gold or platinum status.
Would you recommend Bazzite or Cachy? I main do gaming, development and web stuff. I tend to run multiple dockers, multiple different versions of python and other packages. How would immutible OS affect me here?
If you have an NVIDIA GPU CachyOS performs significantly better at the moment, so I would go with that. For AMD GPUs it's more of a preference question.
Personally for dev work I tend to use things like Nix to keep the development packages out of the host, that sort of approach works regardless of distro.
Technically its performance is a bit slower than CachyOS, and some of the package versions can be a bit behind as well (like Mesa or the kernel), which can contribute to the slowness. Flatpaks work fine though for the most part.
I would recommend CachyOS if you're after raw performance and you're technically inclined, and don't mind ocassionally going into the terminal to fix something or do some maintenance (maybe once or twice a year).
Bazzite on the other hand is great if you don't care much about minor FPS improvements, but value your time and system stability more. I have both installed, and use Bazzite when I want stuff to "just work" and not think about updates and maintenance. I use it for work, and for braindead gaming (ie I'm back from work and just want to dive into gaming without needing to worry about any PC stuff).
Both OSes are fine for docker/dev workflow. Multiple versions of python isn't an issue on ANY Linux system, as you would never be installing them across the system, you'd be installing them in a container or a sandboxed environment. I'd also recommend checking out Flox[1] as a fast and lightweight alternative to containers, it's great for working with Python in particular.
I just reinstalled my NixOS gaming thing with Jovian from scratch. Not much of a reason, other than I wanted to do things a bit more "correct" this time (e.g. tmpfs root).
I did briefly consider Bazzite, but the thing that stopped me was that I wasn't sure how well it would work with an eGPU. With Jovian and NixOS, it is ultimately still just NixOS minimal under the covers, and that is low-level enough for me to play with boot parameters and kernel modules to get the eGPU working, and it wasn't clear to me that it would be that straightforward with Bazzite.
Its a nice distro, though personally I've been using EndeavourOS (Arch based but easier, think of it as the Ubuntu to Debian but for Arch). I wanted to try one of the Fedora Atomic distros but it just didn't boot correctly no matter what I tried, Endeavour just booted and worked and I havent looked back for over a year now...
One insanely underrated Linux software is Lutris, if you have non-steam games, it is phenomenal at helping you wire them up for Wine, especially when Steam itself behaves weird (like installing third party things is not exactly done intelligently by Steam).
> It will give you a good idea how everything fits together.
The actual user does not give any shits. And while I love tinkering around and understand my OS/distro/$software I can absolutely relate. Linux should be at last so accessible that most of the things just work and a broad audience can just use their computer.
It isnt so much tinkering vs learning how it works.
Part of the reason new users struggle so much is because they forget they have spent 10 years or whatever using windows / macos and linux is definitely not those.
As much as Linux has become far more user friendly in the last couple years it still has its warts and a quick boot camp like installing arch can be very beneficial.
The site could make it clear that Bazzite is an operating system (it is right?). It wasn't until I scrolled to the bottom and saw built on Gnome and Fedora that I understood what Bazzite is.
I was using Bazzite, but they started talking about potentially shutting it down due to a removal of 32-bit support. It seems a bit safer to choose one of the mainline Fedora spins. Maybe Kinoite or Silverblue if you're into atomicity, though there's still some rough edges to be aware of.
They were going to shut it down due to upstream Fedora considering ending 32-bit support. Sticking to upstream wouldn't have helped you avoid that issue.
Why do you say that? If they drop 32-bit support, maybe I won't be able to play games for a time - at least until somebody rigs up a fix - but at least my operating system will still be supported.
If Bazzite goes poof overnight, though, that's a major problem. At least Fedora's official spins will continue to receive necessary updates.
The Steam client is 32-bit, the majority of games on Steam are 32-bit, and very popular titles like Left 4 Dead 2 are 32-bit.
The last time a distro tried to do this Ubuntu caved and continued supporting it with an extra repo. Fedora has no chance of winning that argument.
The good news is the incident you're talking about was a change proposal proposed by a single person and never even voted on. It did not survive the comment stage.
No offense, but they're about as similar as apples are to oranges: yes they're both fruits, but they're very different kind of fruits.
Zorin is a more "traditional" OS, where things work like most PC operating systems, whereas Bazzite is an immutable OS with atomic updates. Immutable means the core system files are read-only, which makes it less susceptible to corruption and breakage (due to user error or malware). Atomic updates means updates either apply or don't: there's no partial/failed state that can break your PC.
Updates are also image-based, where your entire OS image gets updated in one go, kinda like how mobile OS's work - this means there's no chance of package conflict/version/dependency issues that can sometimes plague regular Linux distros like Zorin. This also means that major OS upgrades are trivial - they're treated like any other update. In Zorin and even Windows for that matter, major OS upgrades are always messy, and there's a chance something can break or get corrupted. You don't have that issue with immutable, image-based distros like Bazzite.
The only area where Zorin would be better is in low-level customisability - like say, you want to switch out your kernel to a custom kernel, or use a different DE, or change login managers etc. You can do that in an immutable system, as these are core components. But most people don't do this, so for regular users, an immutable system like Bazzite would be a much better choice.
Recently I learned about CachyOS, it has custom scheduler to run things smoothly, including games. And SteamOS is also doing the custom scheduler for games. From what I can find, Bazzite doesn't seem to use custom scheduler.
Does these custom scheduler bring noticeable gains during usage? My previous linux desktop was a non-gaming distro, so I'm a bit curious on these fancy stuffs.
Just dumped windows for bazzite with an Nvidia gpu + a 12700k. So far, great. There's definitely some artifacts but a reboot has always fixed it. I mainly installed it to see if I could go full steam machine.
I want to create a "gaming streaming platform" like Stadia as a weekend project, does anyone know where to get started? Basically where the input device and the game are in different machines.
For off the shelf shadow.tech has worked pretty reliably for me, even to the point of being usable for streaming vr using alvr (uk based).
For diy you can use moonlight / sunshine or steam remote play. I find latencies lower than around 30ms perfectly playable for everything except twitch shooters etc.
For true diy look into leveraging nvenc or equivalent hw encoder using a “zero latency” profile and build on top of UDP. TCP could be feasible for client input -> remote traffic, but even then building a minimal custom reliable layer on top of UDP probably makes sense to avoid nagle type issues. If you want to support arbitrary input devices (joysticks, wheels etc) that can’t be represented as an Xbox controller things will get pretty tricky. Especially if those devices require drivers, at that point your into proxying usb.
Sunshine is a great open source game streaming stack, and has client applications for tons of platforms, usually under the name "moonlight". Bazzite makes setting that up on a host (machine running the game) dead simple.
These sort of derivative distros seem to be aimed at Windows 11 Refugees.
I am not a fan of these derivative distros and I would always recommend using one of the mainline distros e.g Debian, Arch, Fedora etc.
I am using Debian 13 for gaming and the most difficult thing I had to install was a backports kernel which improved performance in some games, in other games it made no difference at all.
Installing Steam and Lutris takes about 5 minutes and it yet another distro for what amounts to installing some applications. I find the biggest issues on Linux gaming is the applying individual workarounds in Steam, and getting wireless controllers to behave properly.
I've been dual booting Bazzite and Zorin for the last month it's been working out well. I didn't really like Bazzite as a daily driver, but it worked better for gaming.
I admit didn't spend a lot of time with it, but right after installing it, I needed to work on a project with Platform.io in VSCode. What was a 10 minute process in Zorin (mainly due to not using Flatpaks) didn't work out after over an hour in Bazzite.
Also, Bazzite takes over 2 minutes to boot, while Zorin takes less than 20 seconds.
I'm pretty new to Linux as a daily driver, and need a stable base that I'm familiar with for my non-gaming daily work, and Bazzite isn't that for me yet. On the other hand, Bazzite just worked out of the box for gaming, better than Zorin did.
I have a big enough SSD to split the partition and let each distro do its best work for me.
Bazzite is naturally a bit slower to boot compared to other distros due to the things it bundles in and the ostree system, but 2 minutes is unusually long.
On my 3.5yr old ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1 with the stock SSD, if takes exactly 34 seconds to cold boot to the full desktop (KDE) from the boot menu (I have enabled auto-logon), which I find acceptable. Warm boot is 30 seconds.
So there might me something odd about your setup. Are you using nVidia by any chance?
As for VScode, I'm not familiar with platform.io but you really want to be using dev containers. On uBlue distros, Distrobox makes this easy. Just follow the guide here: https://distrobox.it/posts/integrate_vscode_distrobox/
The comments here are hilarious. Something to go with my morning coffee. We live in the universe where you cannot distinguish between a human or an AI.
The more I read, the more confused I get. Either I live in some bubble, or I truly don't understand the world. It's a Linux distro based on Fedora, for gamers or smth - did all Linux gamers gather on HN today!? I'm not into gaming, hey I'm into Linux, I don't understand why this gets so much traction. Like yeah, I cannot comprehend that.
I spent a lot of time as a kid with Krakout on my c64, which was a horizontal Arkanoid. I could probably handle it. It looks like Atari's got another Breakout remake on Steam that's horizontal-aspect, too.
Personally I've been having fun with BallxPit though (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2062430/BALL_x_PIT/) which is basically what you get when you cross Arkanoid with Vampire Survivors, it gets hilariously chaotic once you have a bunch of upgraded and mutated super-balls to fling at the bricks with monsters sticking out of them. I don't really have an urge to play a more pure riff on Breakout.
Yet another homepage that doesn't tell me what it is. Something something gaming. Is it a lib, piece of hardware..? Too bored to find out after scrolling down. Oh wait, they're addicted to deadlocks. Great.
Why are there so many of these "specialized" hobby project Linux distros that people are using as daily drivers? Are people too lazy to use an operating system that they have to do even a minor amount of configuration to use? Do people really need every program built in?
Projects like this fit all the criteria of what I've nicknamed "Mastodon projects", because they always have either (or both) Mastodon and Discord links on their websites and are primarily developed by people with "alternative" social media accounts. They always implode within a few years due to some form of ridiculous community drama that other FOSS projects don't suffer from (because other open source projects usually have a somewhat serious "community", or lack of a cohesive one altogether).
I use bazzite. I am a software developer at day, working on Unix exclusively. Let me try to give my reason.
I don’t WANT to fiddle around with some random bullshit when all I have in the evening are 1-2 hours. I want to boot the system and just get cracking with a game. Even the 1-2 hours of installation time are already a hard sell to me. It’s ~20% of my weekly gaming time.
And it’s never usually just „a minor amount of configuration“, is it? Depending on what game you are playing, what hardware you have, you can easily spend hours getting a game to work properly, and that’s with bazzite.
I want something that just works, I don’t want to spend hours figuring out magic incantations.
Though admittedly, with AI it’s gotten easier to figure out magic incantations.
I'm not understanding this OS and I'm extremely confused that this post got so much traction on HN. Gosh, either I'm too young, or too old, or too nerdy.
I'm not critiquing the project itself, more like, I'm surprised [very surprised], that it got so much traction on HN, not usual news
Same feeling here. Realistically, what is this distro doing that couldn't just be done with a quick bash script on whatever the current 'new user distro' is?
The wording is weird too : "Comes with Lutris preinstalled!". Would Windows users switch to a different hypothetical "Windows Distro" that was optimised for gaming?
as far as i understand, it is about specific game and performance related tweaks in the kernel. so it goes beyond just a distribution where you just string together few programs, desktop environment and some config files and call it a day.
this is why linux, after all, is still where it was 20 years ago. all those endless distributions and fragmentation make it non-competitive against the mainstream desktop operating systems. ubuntu was doing good work by becoming the de facto desktop linux by sheer branding. but they dropped the ball really hard and that opportunity to make linux desktop a serious competition is gone. now games are leading the way so maybe steam os or one of these gaming-tuned distros might pick up the momentum.
I have a special spot that gets extremely annoyed when I feel I have to spend a necessary time just figuring out what something is. The page suffers from "developer-brain" marketing, where they describe the technology used to build it (cloud-native images) rather than what the product actually is. Why not just lead with that it is a Linux distro/version focused on gaming. In the beginning, I thought it was new hardware, then I actually thought it was a streaming service. the website does a poor job of simply stating what it actually is. Then again, I might be stupid, but the problem is that a lot of people are stupid. And I guess many non-developers are going to have a hard time just figuring out what the hell this thing is. I’m probably being too cranky now, but the page reads like a combination of the worst from developers-speak combined with the rest of marketing-speak.
"The next generation of Linux gaming - Bazzite makes gaming and everyday use smoother and simpler across desktop PCs, handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs."
Are we reading the same website?
That could apply to everything from some sort of software service, to a game installer, to a streaming service, to an App Store for cross-platform games. You have to take into account the chaos that is the Internet and the promotional material shit storm of marketing speak. A sentence extremely close to this could easily be found on the top of the Razer Synapse promotional page. Why not lead with a simple description that uniquely describes what THIS is? I work in both development and psychology, and it’s frustrating when tech people make fun of others for not understanding their jargon, but those same people get extremely annoyed when they don’t understand anything outside their area because other fields use unnecessarily indirect and convoluted language. Why don’t we just help each other out and try not to create unnecessary cognitive load, just to understand what something is? It is actually possible without dumping down, it’s just a little framing that is needed.
The first text on the page says:
> The operating system for the next generation of gamers
If you're trying to argue that this snippet should answer the question of "what is Bazzite"... have you looked at marketing-speke websites lately? Think of how many different categories of service / product / platform / technology call themselves "the operating system for the next generation of XYZ".
+1 to jtrn's complaint here; when Bazzite's homepage doesn't own up and immediately say "Bazzite is a Linux distribution", it's being unnecessarily unclear, and it loses my trust.
This was a very recent change. Just yesterday the same line read "The next generation of Linux gaming". So it's good someone is taking feedback!
Now it does. It didn't when the original comment was made.
Paragraphs, my dude.
His comment isn't exactly a wall of text, it's perfectly fine as it is.
I'm reading it on my computer, and it's perfectly fine; yet, how would it look like on a smartphone?
I shrunk my window's width and it still looked fine.
<p> here you go.
I believe you are. Or we are. The quoted line tells me nothing. Is it a new game engine? Or something like winetricks to tune wine, maybe more streamlined? Or is it a some kind of app store? App launcher?
It is the site made like a presentation, in my experience they are all suck and like a real presentation are impossible to comprehend without accompanying speech.
It does say very clearly on top of the page that it is an "operating system", what is so unclear about it?
If you want to know more, just scroll down and read more detailed explanation
Not sure in what way some people expect to be fed the information. If you did not understand what it is from the first couple of sentences then maybe it is not for you.
They JUST changed it (probably reading the HN feedback). Now the title on tip reads "The operating system for the next generation of gamers" while just yesterday it was simply "The next generation of Linux gaming".
The change is for the better, but I would still like to have words like "Linux" and "distro/distribution/pack" be used.
I agree with the author. Is that an OS image you put on a machine to make it a game box? Or is it a piece of software you put on your existing Linux? Or a framework for game developers? Not clear.
How about "the operating system for the next generation of gamers" replacing the first line?
Yes, would be a major upgrade
Then let us understand will it be a separate PC (or mini computer) solely for gaming, or is it still some familiar OS that can be used for other purposes too? Arch? Debian?
Awesome, I'll probably workshop it a touch but I appreciate the input.
Now the title on tip reads "The operating system for the next generation of gamers" while just yesterday it was simply "The next generation of Linux gaming".
The change is for the better, but I would still like to have words like "Linux" and "distro/distribution/pack" be seen somewhere soon after the visitor loads the page.
We don't consider ourselves a distribution and linux is mentioned all over the rest of the page.
It said Linux before but apparently that wasn't clear that it's an operating system, less is more sometimes.
The current version is clearly better than the old one, that's for sure.
Since you are receptive to feedback, I will give my marketer/PR-professional's opinion that hopefully you put in use.
I recommend checking out the "Don't make me think twice. A common sense approach to web usability" book by Steve Krug. It's an old book, but most of the advice is common sense and still applies. I especially want to point out the "Chapter 7. The Big Bang Theory of Web Design".
The basic idea is that: 1. the information you want to tell visitors has priority. You should make a list of all (everything, not only the things that are currently visible) the things you would want to communicate to visitors and rate it ("Linux" before "gaming" before "smoother, simpler" before "next generation", etc). 2. The home page is the most important page. The visible first-view of the home page is the most real estate. 3. The home page and first-view content should be organized according to the priority list. The longer the visitor stays on the page, the more of the more important stuff he should see. The progression should be logical; the 10th item should not come before item-5. All the important things should be read in 5s and the rest of the important things should optimally be read without scrolling at all.
The organization of your website is currently extremely suboptimal. The first view of the main page has hardly any information, even on 1440p screen. The problem lies in both: 1. amount of total information. So much wasted space, instead of engaging/revealing text and compelling/informative images. 2. the importance/uselessness of such information. E.g. "for the next generation of" - what does it even mean? What purpose does it serve? Why is it there? Couldn't valuable space be used better? For sure it can.
Compare the first view of your website with products: https://rubyonrails.org https://www.hey.com https://basecamp.com Most of the examples are by the same people/company because they mastered the art.
Or with other distros: https://www.linuxmint.com https://omarchy.org https://tails.net https://www.parrotsec.org https://manjaro.org
You don't need to scroll at all in order to see what the page is about and what are the distros' USP (Unique Selling Proposition). - "Linux Mint 22.2. The latest version of the friendly operating system is here. Linux Mint is an operating system for desktop and laptop computers. It is designed to work 'out of the box' and comes fully equipped with the apps most people need." - "Omarchy. Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated Linux by DHH" - "Tails is a portable operating system that protects against surveillance and censorship." - "ParrotSec. The ultimate framework for your Cyber Security operations." - "Manjaro Linux Empowering People and Organizations. Taking the raw power and flexibility of Arch Linux and making it more accessible for a greater audience."
Not all the first-views of distro pages are as good as they could be, but they are way above what Bazzite displays. To be clear: the content of the main page as a whole is fine, it gives the necessary information and is quite well organized. It is only the first-view side is what I have problems with; it is not worthy of the rest of the page.
Before you respond, also check the "The Top Four Plausible Excuses for not Spelling Out the Big Picture on the Home Page" in the same Chapter7. :-)
It does not matter what you want to call Bazzite. It only matters what words people (your visitors, your potential "clients") know and have associations with. I haven't seen you complain when you are featured in the "Best Linux distros for gamers" lists. :-) And that's how it should be. Don't fight the society, go with the current.
Please check DHH (Ruby on Rails, Omarchy) interview about distros: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCcTSAhvj-s (from 22:30-33:35)
Communication is about clear positioning through clarity, not about muddling through obfuscation.
Your website has a good core (base under the first-view), but the first-view needs A LOT of work. Just a little effort would go a long way. Let me try to make quick changes to the first-view: 1. Add tag line at the top. Part of the logo, instead of "Become a Supporter" (this is not a correct place to ask for that)?. If not in logo, then separately to the right/bottom of it. What kind of tag line? E.g. "Gaming in Linux? Easy-Bazzizy!". Sounds corny, but it works. Honestly! This is something I came up with in under 1 minute, but even this is better than not having anything. 2. Make site og title/description something useful/searchable/identifiable. 3. Get rid of "load/show/animate pics only after scrolling". This is highly irritating for people who want to quickly find out about Bazzite. 4. Change "The operating system for the next generation of gamers" to "The operating system for X gamers". X stands for 1 or even better 3 (3 word rule) words like: serious, no-nonsense, busy, dedicated, passionate. 5. Change "Bazzite makes gaming and everyday use smoother and simpler across desktop PCs, handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs." to "Linux distribution made safe, easy and efficient. Focus on games and gamers. On desktop PCs, handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs." 6. On the right make list of main USP ("Play your favorite games", "Take your game library anywhere", "Upgrade and rollback fearlessly", "Secure by default", "Hardware compatibility out of the box", "Supporting Handheld PC and couch gaming setups", "Run your favorite containers") with headers that jump to appropriate parts of the main page. 7. Make a list of usual complaints/opinions of OS switchers, so visitors could associate and see themselves switching. In form of questions: "Are you tired of watching ads in your OS?", "Do you enjoy all the AI Microsoft is trying to push down your throat?", "Want an Operating System working for you, instead of against you?", "Tired of unnecessary hassle and slowness of OS and simply want to live and play?", "Don't want to be a slave anymore?", "Desire to be treated as an adult instead of a child?", "Make play, not fray?", "Linux-curious, but afraid?", "Want an easy and safe way to play on Linux?". You can come up with a lot of stuff that resonates with visitors, who are thinking of switching OSs (imo you should mainly target switchers from Mac/Win instead of linux distro hoppers). These questions can be rotating, adding animation/liveness to the first-view. Make clickable to take to Testimonials. 8. Add some small images/screenshots as well.
One can always argue with the specific details, but I think I managed to demonstrate the overall point of these changes making the website and the experience of visitors much better.
I hope you will put my friendly feedback to use. Best wishes.
Here's a thought experiment. What hypothetical piece of technology am I describing?
> Next generation of construction - gezzite makes construction smoother and simpler across various commercial and residential projects.
The problem with your thought experiment is intentional obfuscation - where is the Linux equivalent?
"Next generation of construction bricks" is already obvious
Well, "next generation of Linux gaming" is not specific. "Next generation of Linux operating system" would be specific.
My thoughts exactly, linux gaming really doesn't tell me much, beyond that I might be able to use it if I was using Linux. Could be some controller or a Proton-something for all I can tell reading the phrase.
How about this:
> Next generation of construction cranes - gezzite makes construction smoother and simpler across various commercial and residential projects.
Too much noun, needs to be vaguer.
How about "next generation of Nordic construction".
Still too specific.
How about "next generation of sheltering" or "next generation of the essential element in the hierarchy of needs"?
Did they change the website in the last hour? It now says "The operating system for the next generation of gamers".
Haha, yes! https://web.archive.org/web/20251130082805/https://bazzite.g...
Great victory.
But it's much worse now, they've lost the name of the OS!!!
Yes they did. Now the title on tip reads "The operating system for the next generation of gamers" while just yesterday it was simply "The next generation of Linux gaming".
The change is for the better, but I would still like to have words like "Linux" and "distro/distribution/pack" be visible somewhere on the first visible page.
Ah so it’s a usb C key that adds a Linux friendly GPU for which the drivers are in the kernel?
Or it’s some gaming smoothening software.
Hmm runs on tablets, so it’s an App then… that also runs on htpcs… hmmm…
So it’s some sort of an application you install on your PC to make game runs smoother?
And/or something like Moonlight/Remote Play?
That could describe a special "gaming-optimized" router.
That’s says nothing about what it actually is.
That's not "developer brain" but marketing speak! Lots of websites for technical products are like this - generalities galore. Usually the open source ones just say what they are.
No, marketing starts with the person being marketed to. Engineers thinking they are doing marketing state technical terms with colourful fonts.
Often the person being marketed to is an investor, not an actual user. "XYZ is what's next for [huge market]" may not sound like a product you can buy, but it does sound like something that can make lots of money.
this is what developers think marketing is
It says on the main page: "The operating system for the next generation of gamers"
The one fault perhaps is saying "operating system" when it's a distro. Linux is the operating system
They JUST changed it (probably due to the HN feedback). Now the title on tip reads "The operating system for the next generation of gamers" while just yesterday it was simply "The next generation of Linux gaming".
The change is for the better, but I would still like to have words like "Linux" and "distro/distribution/pack" be used.
Linux is a kernel, it doesn't have a stable and rich enough set of userspace services to be considered an operating system on its own.
stupidity != ignorance
It literally begins with "The operating system for".
The page clearly states that it's an operating system. It's the very first words.
They've edited it due to HN.
I mean the sort of user you are describing sounds like they’d struggle with PC gaming in general.
As much as I love Bazzite at end of the day it's still a custom distro and every single day there is a chance they just close the project down and move on. Happened to so many distros in the past, this is not out of question. I’m not saying “big corporate” distros are better but personally I'd rather stick to something more mainline.
Hopefully Valve will release a general version of SteamOS with Steam Machine coming (and even they are questionable with their track record)
Hi, I'm the founder.
While what you're saying isn't impossible, it's unlikely. In the event it did happen, Bazzite is a fork, a signing key, and a couple forked Fedora Copr repos away from being made completely in someone else's control.
Weren’t you threatening to shutdown Bazzite just a few months ago?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381265
No, my statement was Fedora was about to shoot itself in the foot and that it'd be easier for Bazzite to not exist than for us to clean up their mess.
Note that this was in a change proposal which was rescinded without a vote by it's proposer.
Mmh, you definitely misremember that
> As much as I’d like this change to happen, it’s too soon. This change would kill off projects like Bazzite entirely right as Fedora is starting to make major headway in the gaming space.
> I’m speaking as it’s founder, if this change is actually made as it is written the best option for us is to just go ahead and disband the project.
Now, whenever you would've actually shut down the project is a different story, but your messaging was very clear.
What is the point of this line of questioning? They stated that the proposal as-written would make maintaining projects like Bazzite untenable. That's a valid thing to say and not that much of a "threat", but even if it were, most people involved here is effectively unpaid and can do whatever they want with their time.
The point is the original commenter said there’s a risk of these kinds of projects getting shut down. The creator chimed in and claimed there wasn’t much risk, and then someone posted comments from the same creator in the recent past talking about shutting the project down if an upstream change was made, validating the original comment and making the creator sound less valid.
Comments it seems taken in bad faith
It's a legitimate concern.
> Now, whenever you would've actually shut down the project is a different story, but your messaging was very clear.
The messaging was very clear that the upstream change would make Bazzite almost untenable.
It was a criticism of Fedora, not a threat to quit.
I totally get that and personally would never hold that against him. Nor did I interpret it as a threat.
However, this comment chain was of how vulnerable non commercial projects like it are to outside factors making causing exactly this issue, making further maintenance on the project infeasible... Consequently ending it, effectively.
There is no blame in play here. haunter merely quoted this as a reason for why theyre worried about it longevity - and considering there was a discussion about an upstream change which would've realized his worry... It seems not at all misrepresented?
Fwiw, I personally don't share the same worry as haunter, because I don't see the chosen distribution nor OS as a significant investment. I feel comfortable switching things around occasionally
No that appears to be directly in line with what I said. What's missing here is your understanding of a proposal vs an actual change Fedora is going to make.
For those of us who aren’t seeing the threat as clearly as you are, are you possibly misinterpreting things?
I don’t interpret “an upstream change would make this project impossible to maintain” as a “threat”.
Mmh, you definitely like to cause drama by putting words in someone's mouth
Do you claim his quotes are not real?
The issue isn’t that the quotes aren’t real, rather that they’re very much misrepresented.
He literally did not put words in someones mouth, he used the exact quotes, his exact words.
About their interpretation (threat or not threat) we can argue.
Someone on HN really ought to know the difference between a request for comment / change proposal and a dictat.
If nothing else, the only way these problems ever get solved is by bringing them up, surfacing the issues and providing an impetus to get them solved.
difference between a request for comment / change proposal and a dictat.
Did you mean diktat?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/diktat
No? Clearly outlining the pitfalls of a proposal is not a threat.
Where’s the threat? Be specific.
Oh no I didn't mean as a personal attack or anything so thanks for taking your time and for the reply! I know the chances are miniscule but there is that 1% in the back of my brain because it happened in the past with some distros I've really liked
You're good -- didn't take it as one.
It's an important question to ask.
Can happen to corporate projects as well. As one example, look at how many projects Google has killed.
Android will be around for much longer than Bazzite, that I can assure you.
Also, if you’re into gaming, google play (android) has a lot more games than steam, it’s not even close.
The quality of games on Google Play is much worse than what is available on Steam and the variety of titles are much greater on Valve's platform too, with far less in the way of microtransactions and other exploitative behaviours (though Steam isn't free of this) and a back catalogue stretching as far back to the mid 2000s.
Both Microsoft and Sony AAA titles, most third parties publish there and most indie games release there first. Steam's library is unparalleled in the industry, the only thing it's truly missing is Nintendo's games.
Ok, but the market is absolutely flooded with exploitative stuff, laden with micro transactions and a trickle of miniscule rewards, in attempt to addict the user, rather than genuinely provide enjoyment.
How do you even discover the good games that are worth being played on Android?
I'm aware of https://nobsgames.stavros.io/ , but I'm afraid it might not be extremely up-to-date
And also, I think that Google Play has a much bigger problem than Steam, when it comes to old games being made unavailable (think EA's zzSunset stuff)
Total sum of complexity and quality is comparable.
Just want to say big fan of bazzite! Been running it on my 9800x3d / 9070 rig since April and I have very few complaints
Thank you! Glad you're enjoying it
I don't doubt it, but I actually really hate that the build system is a bunch of bash scripts, github actions and assuming the previous stage builds fine. Especially when the custom image forkable repo has an action commented out to squeeze more temporary storage out of GHA hosted runners because some images don't even fit on those (like the gnome-deck). I wish the entire setup was a little more decoupled and maybe allowed you to build multiple stages in one go so the entire system was more "forkable" and less spread out. I went on a bit of a wild goose chase trying to build Bazzite without the Firefox RPM removed (rpm-ostree doesn't like adding and removing and then adding packages again).
I did voice that concern in some Bazzite-related spaces before and it felt like it got brushed off with a weird undertone.
Fork and remove this line: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile#...
Note that we remove rpm Firefox for security reasons. You do not want your browser to only update with your entire operating system.
Press "y" before linking to a Github file/line to ensure it stays accurate https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/5e8f61a56ca3da02778...
I had no idea there was a hotkey for that. Thank you!
Even better, doing so allows GitHub to insert a source snippet if you paste a link like that into an issue or comment.
Yeah, I just always used the context windows to set permalink. Saves me a step now!
What do you mean by "to ensure it stays accurate"? Why wouldn't it be accurate if you're just copy-pasting the link?
is the link to the file as it exists on "main" currently, or at a specific revision, so in three years, it will still refer to that version of the file?
@KyleGospo, Any plans for an arm64 version?
Yes, it'll happen eventually. I can't promise it'll be a good gaming experience anytime soon though.
With the upcoming Steam Frame relying on FEX, Valve will be throwing a bunch of money making it work well
Always a possibility with any distro, but the tooling around it is flexible and repeatable. If another group of people wanted to continue off where they left off it would be far more possible than a lot of the Ubuntu forks.
Just need the Atomic Fedora base to still be around and everything else is already pre-setup to run on GitHub infrastructure neither of which I anticipate going away soon. (Famous last words)
Calling it a superset of Fedora rather than just being its own bespoke distro can be a fine line, but really there's nothing stopping anyone from forking it and continuing on, a good few people run their own forks already to meet their own needs a bit more specifically.
Bazzite is a part of the Universal Blue family, which is more of a repackaging of Fedora Atomic.
I'm a fan of my Steam Deck and SteamOS, but I'd like that experience to eventually be available via community supported distros, which Valve/Igalia can rebase from, and instead focus on Proton.
Bazzite is the closest to that that we have so far.
SteamOS is Arch based, and can be replicated on Arch by installing Steam if you don't care for the "game console" UI trimmings. Based on another comment thread about past stupid proposals on Fedora, Arch seems like a much more reliable base than Fedora.
Afaik Valve is hiring/sponsoring people that were already making the projects. So much of the work is outsourced to codeweavers and KDE.
Exactly. And Bazzite is crushing the numbers compared to the other ublue distros https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global....
The nice thing about atomic distros is switching operating systems is as easy as typing 'ostree rebase', and registering a secure boot key.
So if Bazzite did go that way you could have fedora running in under an hour and with flatpak most thing will just work.
I want to bear witness that I did exactly that when I downmoted one of my computers from 'gaming machine' to 'closet server'.
One `rpm-ostree rebase` from Bazzite to a server-oriented flavour of Fedora Silverblue and it's been running and updating flawlessly since then.
As I understand 'ostree rebase' between KDE and Gnome will lead to broken system.
Kinda, the config files of each other break stuff and those are kept by default
You can still fix them manually though, although that's probably not worth the effort in most cases
Isn't every distro a custom distro, by definition?
Anyways, I get that this is a "risk" to consider, but installing a new distro isn't so bad that it should prevent one from trying and using a currently extant distro if it works for them.
I'm not sure I'd define the atomic Fedora variants as "distros" in the traditional sense.
This is a bit of an oversimplification, but Bazzite, Bluefin, etc, are basically just Dockerfiles that use Atomic Fedora as the base image.
So you are basically getting a pre-built docker container that is "Fedora + various configs added on top", and then you are booting that docker image.
Since it's just a container file, anyone could theoretically just fork the Bazzite repo, make some changes to the Dockerfile, then push it to github + let github actions build a custom docker image.
So is that custom docker image a distro? Some would say yes, others would say no.
Interesting. So Bazzite could be, theoretically, remade as just a NixOS configuration file.
Ironically, I'm considering installing Bazzite alongside NixOS because it's proven to be nearly impossible to run SteamVR properly with how Steam is packaged
From what I’ve seen so far from people I know who run Valve Indexes, Linux SteamVR performance is pretty poor compared with Monado+OpenComposite. Hopefully this situation changes with the release of the Frame, in which case I (and likely others) will be revamping the SteamVR package and NixOS modules as Monado may not fully support it for some time.
Tl;dr: Run Monado w/ OpenComposite for the Index, it runs way better.
They mean "custom" as "pre-configured to do <X>" where X is gaming. Generally most distributions are not pre-configured outside of a general suite of standard applications.
haha, is Windows a custom distro? is it going away anytime soon?
I don't know why people bring this up so much whenever a new Linux distro shows up. I think one of the coolest things about Linux is that normal people can feasibly roll a useful distro. How much of a longevity guarantee do you need from a distro that is used for gaming, of all things?
> How much of a longevity guarantee do you need from a distro that is used for gaming, of all things?
Games are something I do to relax. I want as little friction to play the games as possible. For tech projects and work stuff having to mess with the OS and move away from deprecated stuff isn’t such a big deal, it’s part of the work. But for games I want them to just work as much as possible, I don’t want to have to find a new distro and install it and set everything up again on my gaming PC.
Despite Windows sucking in so many ways, it is the OS with the most assurance that a game will work without fuss. I am happy to see Linux closing this gap.
I’ve been running the same gaming setup for almost 10 years. Having to upgrade or change OS is a major thing. Don’t minimize longevity.
Currently I literally can’t find the time to convert my drive from master boot record to GPT for Windows 11. I can’t imagine having to completely switch operating systems/distros because it just disappeared. Worrying if it will still be around is legitimate.
Sounds like you might be the perfect audience for consoles then. And here's the good news, that's the same audience SteamOS and Bazzite targets.
I am/was a big PC enthusiast but could no longer keep up with all the stuff due to real-life, eventually even gave up gaming for a few years as I just did not have the time.
The Nintendo Switch bought me back into (limited) gaming. I liked that I could just play from anywhere in short bursts, or could just hook it up to my TV and pick up the controller for longer sessions. The best part, I never had to worry about updates breaking things, or doing system maintenance - I could just power it on and jump straight into gaming. But I still missed my old PC games, especially playing games like Diablo II and Age of Empires.
When the Steam Deck came along, it changed everything. Well, technically I didn't get the Deck, I got a GPD Win Mini instead, and installed Bazzite on to it... but same thing. I get the same convenience as I had with the Switch, except now I had the added advantage of being able to play all my PC games (yes, all of them. No, I don't play games with nasty kernel anticheats).
Regarding your concern about Bazzite completely disappearing, the good news it it doesn't really matter. Since everything you customised lives on your home drive, all you need to do is backup your home drive, and that backs up everything you'd care about. You can use this same backup in Windows (Steam allows you to easily import a library from a different drive/folder) and your Pictures/Documents etc are basically the same folder layout as Windows. I actually ended up setting a triple-boot setup of Windows, Bazzite and CachyOS on my handheld, and they all point to the same Steam Library, same Documents etc. So not only do I have tripe redundancy, it shows how portable and migratable this stuff is.
No consoles are an even worse solution. They’ve been through several generations of hardware iterations in the same amount of time.
What console line has had several generations of hardware iterations in the past decade? Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have all put out two generations at best, with plenty of games still shipping to the "old" generation even now.
They’ve all had 2-3 models in the last decade-ish. So that’s at least 1 time I would have had to have thrown everything away.
I miscounted though, I’ve been running the same OS since Windows 7. Probably 2014. I’ve been able to upgrade without having to throw away my entire operating system. Consoles aren’t a solution for longevity.
They’ve each had one new generation release since 2013.
Yeah that’s 2 different models and at least 1 time that I have to toss my entire system.
Nintendos had 3 generations in that time and Xbox has had countless churn in its hardware.
You are aware that old consoles still play games, right? My PS4 still plays all my PS4 games and lets me stream PS5 games to from my living room to my bedroom. My Xbox 360 still plays games just fine last time I checked (last June or so). Getting rid of old consoles doesn’t make sense unless you absolutely have to have the latest tech and also don’t have much storage space.
? That's not the point though? With consoles you just sign-in to your account and you're basically done, you don't Hce the hassle of dealing with migrations like a PC.
Switching my hardware and having to buy all new games isn’t the point???
How is that longevity?
SteamOS is only going to support other hardware by coincidence. Valve is unlikely to put in resources beyond the hardware that they want to support. It's also unlikely to change the whole "firmware restore, entire drive" approach. They're not going to put in the resources or support work into making and maintaining a full distro by themselves.
A community distro (be it a console-like gaming focused distro or not) is going to be the way to be the way to go for the foreseeable future. I'm pretty happy with running EndeavorOS w/ KDE, Steam, and Heroic. The Steam client with Proton is where most of the magic happens in Linux anyway. If I wanted to get fancy, I could set up GameScope with Steam Big Picture to take a SteamOS/Bazzite approach.
I don’t see why Valve wouldn’t try to support lots of hardware. Small time outfits like CachyOS can do it, why wouldn’t they? I think their motive with the Steam Box is hardware sales. It seems like they’re trying to shift the gaming ecosystem away from Windows.
Probably for the same reason they don't support every Arch package on the Steam Deck out-of-the-box; it breaks easily and it's not their job to fix it.
Additionally, I think Valve doesn't want to end up over-committed to replacing Windows. They can handle the storefront side and do a decent job with handling the runtime, but actually committing to a desktop alternative to Windows would be spreading their resources thin. It feels like a smart call to not jump into that arena if your hardware products don't need it.
Lots of assumptions that could be totally wrong. Custom distros are not new operating system - majority of hw support is because linux supports it. It would probably be more work for Valve to support only their hw instead of keeping what linux/arch support.
I am also not sure why you think they wouldn't want to end up replacing Windows. Thats exactly what they've been trying to do since microsoft included their store in windows. That is more than a decade long plan in motion which already failed once but they are still at it.
They're not assumptions, I outlined in my comment it was my thoughts and beliefs.
> Custom distros are not new operating system
Nothing is. Windows uses old DOS code, macOS uses BSD code, nobody's OS is truly written "from scratch" in 2025. Just because you can recycle old programs doesn't mean writing an OS is easy.
> majority of hw support is because linux supports it. It would probably be more work for Valve to support only their hw
And much of Linux hardware support is not in-kernel, period. Valve could not flip a switch and start supporting Asahi Macs or Nvidia's proprietary UNIX drivers; they would be committing to patching and maintaining all of their future quirks and surprises. Not even Valve should be wasting their time doing that.
> I am also not sure why you think they wouldn't want to end up replacing Windows.
They do! But "wanting to replace Windows" and "wanting to write the replacement for Windows" are two different things. Valve's current software team has a headcount lower than 500, they aren't equipped to compete with Microsoft even if they wanted to. It's much easier for them to ship all-in-one style devices that keep expectations low and replicate Windows' most desirable features.
> which already failed once
Steam Machine was a home console, it did not replace Windows for anything that wasn't directly ported to Linux. The lesson from this era is simple; supporting Linux is hard. It's hard for developers, hard for consumers and especially hard for Valve.
Valve are actively funding NVK.
Universal Blue is under very little risk of just shutting down operations without warning (as opposed to a hype-based BFDL kinda situation like Omarchy). I'm a happy Bluefin user and would wholly recommend people step up to help out with the distro if possible.
I'm a big fan as well, but couldn't some clueless IBM exec decide to ruin all the parts of Fedora that Bazzite relies on? What if IBM/RH throw their financial weight behind something like the proposal to drop multiarch packages (breaks Steam)?
People who are not new Linux users might prefer a distro which is part of the same "family" of distros they are already familiar with.
Steam OS I believe is based on Arch. Bazzite is based on Fedora. Personally I have experience with Debian distros so if I wanted a gaming-focused distro I would pick maybe something like Pop OS.
Pop!_OS isn't good for gaming thanks to being quite behind in package versions. You're better off going with a dedicated gaming distro (which offers recent packages) such as PikaOS if you want a Debian base.
I have both a steamdeck on SteamOS and a pc on Bazzite and they both work exactly the same. They both run literally the same steam UI and both run flawlessly so I couldn’t even tell you which one I’m using if you just showed me a screen and controller.
There is difference in the desktop part. SteamOS has KDE as gui and Bazzite you can pick Gnome. Another major thing is that Bazzite is better prepared for desktop use - it has many ways how to instal packages and dev tools. I run bazzite and webdev on it comfortably.
I tried Pop before Bazzite on my PC back in April and maybe I’m just bad at Linux, but it was a pain in the ass for gaming at first boot. Bazzite ran Expedition 33 out the box. Didn’t have to download drivers, didn’t have to configure anything, it just worked.
There are limitations but if you want a gaming machine, bazzite is a no-brainer to me. Poo is very impressive but I just don’t want to fight my OS constantly when it comes to gaming.
That typo at the end was unfortunate
Sadly SteamOS doesn't support full disk encryption, which is inexcusable for an OS used on a portable device, that some also use to remote access their desktop (through Steam Link/Moonlight).
Encrypted home directories are coming to the Steam Deck, using the same kernel API that Android uses. https://lwn.net/Articles/1038859/
FDE would be nice though.
It actually does in the upstream dev builds https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/holo/dirlock/-/wikis/Enabling-d...
It’s not in a consumer friendly state yet, but I’ve been using my steamdeck with encryption for a month now with zero issues. I guess technically this is not “full” disk encryption since it’s just the home dir, but I only care about protecting my personal info which is all in the home dir anyway.
I personally don't keep anything sensitive on steam deck or heck, any device related to "gaming". Modern games are nothing but spyware and even more reasons if you are pirating
It doesn't need to, if your disk supports OPAL2 - just set the password in BIOS and encrypt the drive, it's fully transparent to the OS and as a bonus, there's virtually no performance hit unlike software-based encryption like LUKS.
You are relying on every single ssd to have a secure implementation of encryption which is just never going to be true.
I’m not familiar with how the process works, but if you are setting the password somewhere, it’s exposed to being extracted. You want the password to be something you type in on boot.
Unless your threat model includes state-sponsored attacks, the encryption is good enough for most people, especially considering its primary use-case (gaming). And there's nothing stopping you from using a secondary secure container if you do intend to store that level of sensitive data (eg: VeraCrypt volume for plausible deniability).
Also, the password isn't stored anywhere, you get prompted by the BIOS upon every boot to unlock the drive.
Luks can use hardware offload description via opal if configured accordingly. You are also at the vendors firmware implementation in terms of security.
The question is, does the stock SSD support OPAL2?
I wonder if people would be willing to pay 10€/$ for a yearly update so that there could be some commercial force behind a distribution that would provide security and stability for desktop users. with windows, you pay one large amount upfront. with macos, you get it with hardware. so having something like this, i think, has a potential to succeed and a place in commercial market.
"Custom Distro"? That's every distro mate
I don’t see what the point is of bringing this up.
1. It’s not exactly some fly by night thing at this point, it’s extremely popular, which means the likelihood of having maintainers and sponsors step up with, at the very least, an easy migration path is high.
2. You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?
3. Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)
> You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?
In 2009 the CentOS maintainers was AWOL and nobody had any idea where they went and had no access. This caused issues with releases obviously.
There been quite a number of times where people have died, just got bored, had health issues and a project just stops and sometimes people don't access to things.
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/07/30/130249/CentOS-Proj...
> Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)
That sounds all horribly complicated.
I have a dotfiles, 5 bash scripts and a ~/bin folder for anything outside of package manager. I migrated my laptop to Arch recently from Debian and fixing the scripts was literally copy the script, and do a find and replace (I literally put pacman instead of apt install and most of it worked).
It not that much of a big deal to move between distros.
It’s not horribly complicated. I have a single 3 line script capturing the current state of my homebrew, flatpak, and rpm-ostree state that runs before Pika Backup backs up my entire home directory.
You have 5 bash scripts and various dotfiles. That sounds a lot more complicated.
Bazzite is really not much different to any of the atomic fedora distributions.
The only thing more complicated about immutable Linux is that you have to rethink how you install packages a little bit, as you’re generally using installation methods that offer isolation from your base operating system.
The big upside of this is that essentially all of your modifications are confined to your home directory, and of course system updates and rollbacks are trivial.
The complexity is hidden. I don't require all the gumph. I just gave bash and a Debian install. Pretending the rube goldberg machine isn't one because you've hidden it behind a facia doesn't mean it isn't one.
When all of that complexity doesn't work (which sooner or later it will), it will be more difficult to fix.
Your comments read like you aren’t actually familiar or have any experience with using what you’re criticising.
I’m confused, how is an immutable system more complex? How is it harder to fix? Can you be specific?
I don’t mean to say “my choice of distro is better than yours” because I know atomic Linux isn’t for everyone. But if we are talking about complexity specifically, this is an advantage to immutable distros.
Your Debian system never exactly matches any specific build that’s been tested and verified by your distro’s contributors.
Even worse when you run dist-upgrade. I think every Debian/Ubuntu user has been burned by that process at least once in their lives, some people avoid it entirely and clean install.
In Atomic Linux anything breaks there is a single command to revert back to the last system image. Rollback reboot and you’re done:
There’s also a tool included to list out and revert to any images from the last 90 days.If I have some kind of issue I have an exact release that every other user has with the exact same set of system and included packages.
I’ve recently moved between two other steamos-like distros and it’s such a non-event. You just log into Steam, pair controllers and download the games. Your saves are managed for you.
That sounds awesome!
Since I primarily use bazzite to play Steam games it honestly doesn’t remotely concern me. I can just redownload the games on another distro.
What you just said is the reason why I use Ubuntu for my company and not something else. It is about risk of lack of support obviously.
SuSE would be a better option then, IMO. Not only have they been around much longer (1994 vs 2004), they offer much better support compared to Canonical. And as a bonus, you don't need to put up with any of the continuous enshittifications Canonical subjects you to (Snaps, increasing poor quality code etc).
The funny thing about SuSE, and admittedly I haven't touched it for over a decade now: Everyone I knew who used it touted that it had great enterprise support as a reason for using it, but everybody I knew that used SuSE used OpenSuSE. This was over ~20 years of providing Linux support, RHEL-based and Ubuntu were by far the distros we dealt with the most.
One issue I had with OpenSuSE was that once a new release drops you have around 6mo to migrate all your machines over to it. Which, for most businesses, is a pretty short timeline, in my experience.
I've always preferred authoring RPMs over debs, but Caninical having basically one distro without the forks, I think is a huge benefit for a business using them.
These days, since it's all about containers, I'd recommend openSUSE microOS, which is a minimal immutable rolling OS that's suitable as a container host. https://microos.opensuse.org/
When it’s all about containers, you run rancher.
Weird question probably but outside of the super esoteric distros running a bespoke package manager what stops someone who installs a distro like bazzite from just continuing to update packages? If they use apt for example then they'll still get updates when the repos are updated and most of these distros reuse existing software repositories.
Bazzite works a bit differently as it's an immutable distro. Whilst updates for normal/user-level packages (Steam etc) will continue to work (as these are Flatpaks), your core system packages won't and you can't just change your repo to say Fedora's repos, as system updates are image-based and are pulled directly from Bazzite's github repo (which in turn pulls from Feodra).
The good news is, you can easily rebase to any other uBlue or even Fedora Atomic distro with just one or two commands, or if you're technical, you can even fork Bazzite's repo and build your own Bazzite (they even provide instructions on how to do this, it's very very simple, relatively speaking).
Steam is not a flatpak on Bazzite.
It is a fork of Fedora, one of the most stable distros out there. It is more geared towards regular users when compared to Arch on which SteamOS is based.
I am a long time Arch user but I totally understand why they went with Fedora for Bazzite.
Right, because the idea of Linux has always been about sticking to big corporate distros whenever possible
Well, the idea of Linux was "a better minix" and "I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones".
The idea behind unix was a single user operating system. Hence the name.
Not necessarily a corporate distro, but there is somewhat more sustainability in a project based on Debian or Arch than an individual with a bunch of organically handmade scripts.
Any operating system could close down and move on. I'm 100x more concerned that Windows is going to become a cloud service than I'm worried about Bazzite shutting down.
I get what you're saying in this comment. And separate from that concept I'm adding on: "Going to?"
We all know how this ends: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365
Thanks, I hate it. But also, I'm afraid that this is what many people will think of when they hear "cloud native" in Bazzite's marketing.
Great distro ! I have been using it for the last 2 years on my Framework laptop 16 without any issues. I even have a "fork" of sorts that adds Hyprland + all of my "desktop" config, which I think as being part of the OS.
I really think immutable distributions are the future of linux desktop, and maybe distributions that use OCI images, beacause they are a lot easier to work with than say, NixOS for example.
If you want to have your custom bazzite, you just do a "FROM bazzite:<whatever-version-you-want-to-pin" and add stuff you want.
Of course, you loose a bit of the reproducibility, since usually container images do not pin packages (and maybe other reproducibility issues I am not aware of) but it is way easier to work with.
I'm an https://getaurora.dev user and I agree uBlue is awesome. I'd like to create a custom image too, but it doesn't seem quite as easy as you say: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IxBl11Zmq5w
I learned about Aurora from a HN comment some weeks ago, and it has been so awesome. I really haven't been as impressed with a distro since the first ubuntu. Its just a rock solid base, awesome defaults, and kde being delightful.
While the video is long, the actual process of setting everything up only took me about 20 minutes. The template they offer is extremely convenient.
I will offer a second positive but more reserved data point. It took me closer to a day to get my custom Bazzite build working.
Switching over to my images using bootc failed because of what I eventually tracked down to permissions issues that I didn't see mentioned in any of the docs. In short, the packages you publish to Github's container registry must be public.
Another wrinkle: The Bazzite container-build process comes pretty close to the limits of the default Github runners you can run for free. If you add anything semi-large to your custom image, it may fail to build. For example, adding MS's VSCode was enough to break my image builds because of resource limits.
Fortunately, both of these issues can be fixed by improving the docs.
There's also BlueBuild [1] which abstracts the process of building your own images away further into yaml configurations.
It takes away a tad bit of the direct control of the process, but covers the majority of things you would want to configure.
[1] https://blue-build.org/
The actual process for the image is really just what I said. In the video he sets up a github actions automatic build, and adds signing with cosign (which are also all steps you really want to do) but to have custom stuff in your base os is really as easy as a Dockerfile (or should I say Containerfile ?)
Immutable is very good for new linux users but I personally don't like the restriction and find rpmostree extremely slow to install literally anything. It does make sense to use immutable distros in routers, firewall, etc
I try not to use rpmostree to install anything (only steam-input, codecs and nvidia drivers), and rely on homebrew, appimages, flatpaks and toolbox for my app needs. It works so far...
There is something about immutable linuxes that feels right, and I cannot pinpoint why exactly, but it's like things are segregated correctly.
It’s probably that they’re near impossible to break or end up with an unusable system.
I have disabled read-only mode and I use pacman like you would in a normal Arch system. Makes it a lot easier to install packages
For anyone interested in some gaming benchmarks, Gamer's Nexus (a reputable source with good methodology) has some numbers here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOx4_8ajZ8
Based on their results, it sounds like there's still quite a way to go Linux gaming/Proton (ie: very inconsistent frametimes on Nvidia hardware), but it's definitely been taking steps in the right direction.
> Based on their results...
Do note that they make it very, very, very clear that their results are preliminary, and while they've put a whole lot of work into setting up benchmarking on Linux, they're not at all sure that they've got it all correct.
> ie: very inconsistent frametimes on Nvidia hardware
Yeah, Nvidia on Linux for non-"compute" use has always been a terrible, godawful shitshow. Given Nvidia's recent and fairly-clear disinterest in the "selling graphics cards for people to play video games with" market, [0] I can't imagine things will get consistently better anytime in the near future. [1]
[0] Why sell that silicon to video gamers when you can sell it to cryptominers and -these days- "AI" companies for a much, much, much higher profit?
[1] I mean, it took them how many Windows driver revisions for them to release somewhat-non-garbage drivers for their spanking-new fancy-ass 5000-series cards? And Windows is the only consumer OS that they care about! For video game use, the Linux drivers are gonna be starved for development resources, and -unlike ATi/AMD's drivers- noone in the world can work on them but Nvidia.
> Do note that they make it very, very, very clear that their results are preliminary,
Yeah, I'm not entirely convinced some of the results they're seeing aren't caused by their methodology. I don't think they are either.
I moved a gaming pc with a 4070Ti from Win10 to Cachy 3 weeks ago and have been purposefully testing out various games to see if it's workable; I'm about 50 hours and 15 games deep now and the only thing that doesn't work reliably is HDR. Outside of that I haven't run into any issues I haven't seen on Windows as well.
I've never run into any issues with my GTX 1070 and proprietary drivers. It's ran perfectly well for almost a decade. Like when people complain about nvidia drivers I don't even know what they mean. Do you run into artifacts, or crashes, or kernel panics, or what?
What’s with the Nvidia on Linux FUD like this is the mid-00s? I’ve run Nvidia cards on Linux for the better part of the last decade and it has been a pretty similar experience to when I was on Windows prior to that.
Nvidia’s Open Kernel Modules are good so far and the in-kernel Nova driver project also seems promising though some way off. I’m running a 5000 series card with Nvidia OKMs and so far it has been a really smooth experience.
I actually get higher FPS in graphically demanding games due to vulkan producing more optimized shaders, most of the lag actually comes from context switching and translation for directx, it's absolutely GREAT one dx12 due to how little translation there is.
I'm currently working on few very targeted optimizations for several hotspots I've found out from messing around so it will be interesting if I can solve those horrible stutter issues on cyberpunk since if I can fix it (in a ghetto and janky way), so can valve.
I can also achieve higher fps in games like overwatch (dx12) out of the box on nvidia on proton experimental which is surprising as 4 years ago the input latency was unbearable and I had drops as low as 30 fps, now I can achieve consistent 600 fps with minimums of 450 whereas on windows I get as low as 220fps and averages of 500ish. I do have anticheat related drops to <300fps due to the amount of translation happens when they decide to scan memory, registry and whatnot although it lasts <1s and doesn't happen during games it seems.
That's mainly an nVidia issue. On AMD, Linux is actually faster and more stable compared to Windows.
That just isn't true. While it is very good now, it is not faster and more stable than Windows. I have performance issues on Linux that just don't happen on Windows.
That's not been my experience on my GPD Win Mini 2024, an all-AMD machine. The difference between Linux and Windows 11 has been night and day.
Well that is the issue. The experience varies quite a lot depending on a number of factors. Whereas on Windows it doesn't really vary.
I have an all AMD machine and almost all the games will run the same or better on Windows. I have friends that have tried gaming on Linux and all of them have found the experience worse.
I did run a win debloat script from and use a local account so I don't have the Windows Spyware running in the background so that may make a difference.
Just an aside. I've been using Linux for quite a while now (over-20 years) and the biggest issue is that the community constantly misleads new users about the experience of moving from Windows to Linux. The latest iteration of this has been gaming.
Perhaps it’s just evidence that anecdata isn’t some universal truth.
I’ve had the complete opposite experience for the vast majority of games, where in most cases performance for me has been better on Linux than it was on Windows (can’t compare like for like now as I no longer have a Windows install outside of a VM). Friends of mine experience weird mid-session crashes and hangs on Windows that I’ve never had on Linux. I’m running an Nvidia GPU which is supposedly some kind of Linux boogeyman, but have had only one issue with EDID of a specific monitor and that’s it. Just my experience YMMV.
> Perhaps it’s just evidence that anecdata isn’t some universal truth.
This isn't though. I have hard numbers. I've actually measured the performance. You get 5-20 FPS less and often more input latency and stutters (1%, 0.1% lows). If the machines doesn't well with Linux, it can be much worse.
Basically on HN whenever you express an opinion based on a significant amount of experience. You get someone basically saying "this is anecdote". There is a difference between "an anecdote" and "I've actually have a huge amount experience with this stuff.
Have you produced an exhaustive survey across a wide range of hardware and driver and display manager combinations? I’m happy to be an outlier here but my own experience doesn’t match with what you described hence my reply.
If I admit to anything less than doing a gamer nexus style benchmarking suite you will just claim it is an anecdote.
I have actually tested on a number of different distros and display managers and at least two different video card chipset manufacturers. No it isn't exhaustive, but it decent enough sample size to determine that the claim that Linux performs better than Windows isn't true. Even if it is the case,the results are so variable you are better just using Windows because things are more consistent.
I am saying this BTW as someone that first started using Linux in the early 2000s. I think gaming now is really good on Linux. Is it better than Windows? Well I don't have to run Windows now to play games and that is good enough for me.
Here are good videos with benchmarks: https://youtu.be/u4a2pDMXLAE https://youtu.be/77LBtP3nZwY
And I get totally different results. It not just the distro. It the version of the Kernel, the version of proton, whether you are using X or Wayland etc. Etc. Etc.
The very point I am making is that it is so variable. So posting benchmarks pretending that it proves anything is asinine.
I won't even get into all the other issues with the mouse getting lost on some games, text being too small/to large. Having to fuck around with LD_PRELOAD flags and loads other gumpth that is never mentioned on a YouTube video.
Your claim was that you tested and "You get 5-20 FPS less and often more input latency and stutters (1%, 0.1% lows)", "it decent enough sample size to determine that the claim that Linux performs better than Windows isn't true". That you tested so well, that it can't be considered to be anecdata. You claimed that it is universal truth.
So I provided you with solid data from testers, who found many cases in which Linux was on par or faster than Windows.
And now you are trying to change the goal.
There seems to be little evidence of that, at least from a reputable source.
For some games it can be. For some games Proton performs far worse than Windows. It's not steady across the board. And some have stability issues, bugs, major performance problems, or just flat out don't work.
I want Proton to be the future as well, but I think it's important not to oversell it as a drop-in replacement either.
EDIT: GN highly recommends against apples-to-oranges comparisons of the two, but even looking at their own data for AMD cards (with exact same CPU, RAM, and motherboard) it clearly shows Proton being behind on the order of 6-15%. Not a lot, but not ahead either. You can compare the numbers for the AMD cards against this video's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP0axVHdP-U
EDIT 2: Instead of just down-voting because the result makes you unhappy, how about responding with well-sourced proof otherwise?
> I want Proton to be the future as well, but I think it's important not to oversell it as a drop-in replacement either.
Proton needs to be understood as a temporary solution to make the back catalogue on Linux comparable to Windows.
Eventually there is a tipping point and most games will have native Linux binaries. Once that happens all developers will gradually follow suit to avoid being left behind. Perhaps Valve's latest hardware efforts will finally bring this about.
Proton will still exist for older games and as hardware continues to become more powerful, loss of performance won't matter much.
> There seems to be little evidence of that, at least from a reputable source.
I dunno. I remember a little while back some reviewers got a hold of both a Windows version and Linux version of a handheld gaming machine that had exactly the same hardware. The conclusion reached was that the Linux version was better in nearly every way.
As I remember it, a little while after this happened, some muckety-muck in the Gaming Division in Microsoft announced something like "We're making a new committment to consistent, high performance in Windows on handheld gaming devices! We're going to ensure all those little game-spoiling roadblocks are removed!". Which, like, good job making it NOT look like you're spasmodically reacting to bad press, guy.
Handhelds and desktop PCs can perform differently. It's very possible for Proton to perform better for handhelds but worse for desktop PCs.
> Handhelds and desktop PCs can perform differently.
The handhelds we're talking about are -essentially- a low-power [0] laptop in a tiny case. Again, we're talking about exactly the same hardware, that provides substantially worse performance when Windows is the OS than when Linux is the OS.
For reference, here's one instance of the original coverage of the phenomenon about which I spoke: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q>
[0] But higher power than one might naively expect!
Another video showing the difference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqIjUddUSo0
Here are good videos with benchmarks: https://youtu.be/u4a2pDMXLAE https://youtu.be/77LBtP3nZwY
From personal experience, all of the games that I personally play seem to work at least as well if not better on Linux than Windows. The only exception is FSR4, but that ought to be fixed soon.
FWIW, I wasn't the one who downvoted you. I can't even downvote here as I'm apparently "karmically broke". I have 468 karma, not sure how much I even need to downvote...
I really want to use Bazzite but I also have concerns about their supply chain. Last I checked, they automatically update all packages in their releases. Many of them are from copr, including kernel patches. The release notes do list package version changes, but as far as I can tell there is no human review.
I realize that, in a way, it's no different than installing from AUR or ppa's, but something about both of those (and the fact that package installs are manual) feels safer than copr packages with fewer eyes on them...
Honestly if the point is to run proprietary software like commercial AAA games, the supply chain is already compromised.
I treat my gaming computer as a video game console, it wouldn't occur to me to share passwords, accounts, data or anything sensitive on my gaming machine. And I only connect it to the network if I need to download a game/update.
Considering how many games require literal malware for anti cheat. It’s the only sane way to do gaming. Just let the games and proprietary junk have their own environment with total control. But with none of your sensitive data.
My understanding is that a lot of the games on Steam are actually executed in some kind of sandbox, but I am sure if that is just for compatibility/emulation reasons, and which directories are still accessible in that case.
I wish there was better documentation for this, because "random indie game demo cannot upload my family photos" would be a great selling point for SteamOS/Bazzite.
As it stands, the Steam flatpak is probably the safest way to play games (which does not work on Bazzite).
Why does the Steam Flatpak not work on Bazzite? Because it's already installed by rpm-ostree? I wouldn't think this matters.
I totally agree and I have done likewise for many years now.
Consider setting up a VLAN or additional WiFi SSID if you find the network situation a hassle.
Bazzite is an insanely awesome distro!
I used Ubuntu for 8 years constantly fixing issues, from the day I installed it (because it didn't support basic Ryzen), after every distro upgrade, and various other random points, e.g. when installing a package whose dependency overwrote something. Each issue took hours to fix, usually searching forums for arcane command lines and trying everything until something worked (possibly breaking other things in the process).
Last year I tried Bazzite for my kid who like games and realized that it's 100x better than Ubuntu, for both gaming and serious work. It's 100x more stable and virtually unbreakable, far more modern and up-to-date than Ubuntu, and I can still do just about everything I want (just have to do it differently because it's atomic). Since I switched to Bazzite I have had zero issues, because atomic distros are inherently so much more stable. Everyone uses the exact same image, and the state of the OS is always fresh and doesn't deteriorate over time the way mutable distros do. And best of all, if any issue does come up (which is extremely rare), the fix is always the same and it takes 1 minute: boot into the previous version.
I used to avoid using my PC due to constant issues with Ubuntu, now I often switch it on simply because Bazzite makes me so happy.
It frustrates me to no end that people to this day still recommend Ubuntu and its derivatives as "good" and "user friendly" when it literally breaks all the bloody time, and meanwhile there are awesome distros like Bazzite and Aurora that are rock-solid like MacOS and ChromeOS.
100% this.
Also, to anyone who recommends Ubuntu (or derivatives), I point them to this page: https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/02/05/done-with-ubuntu/
Outside of console or handheld like experiences, I am not sure what this distro gives that Mint, proprietary nvidia drivers and Steam dont give me? I basically just download windows games as external applicationd through steam and use proton. Though I suppose a one click like “run this as proton” and “run this in this proton environment” could be useful. But once you learn how to change targets its not super complicated.
The entire point of Bazzite and other immutables is that you get a rock solid system that you never ever have to worry about breaking.
Atomic updates means updates either apply or don't: there's no partial/fail state that can stop your PC from working. And in the rare event that an update has issues, you can instantly boot the previous two images, without typing any commands or using any fancy restore tools. And if you're a bit tech savvy (ie you know how to type a single command), you can even go back upto the last 90 days worth of images (via github).
The best part of atomic updates is OS upgrades, they work flawlessly. In fact since updates are delivered as images, an OS upgrade is no different to any other regular update, unlike regular distros like Mint where you have to cross your fingers and hope that your system still works after a dist-upgrade (and I believe Mint's official stance was that they didn't support dist-upgrades, they recommend you to backup, format, clean-install and restore with every OS release. Not sure if that policy has changed now, but that used to be their stance for a very long time).
Mint does support upgrading the OS, both to minor and major versions.
I personally installed Mint in 2014 and used the upgrade path until a month ago, when my distro finally started showing bad signs of being experimented on (by me, for 11 years) and it was easier to do a fresh install instead.
I know the OS itself does, I meant it wasn't recommended by the team. See these instructions written by the founder Clement himself, especially under section E where they say "We do not even recommend this on the command line, so to have it triggered from the click of a button is just not acceptable to us. It's easy alright, but it's not the right solution."
https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2
This was 9 years ago...
Read the official blog with installation instructions. https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4882
I know, which is why my original comment stated "and I believe Mint's official stance *was* that they didn't support dist-upgrade" and furthermore, I went on to state "Not sure if that policy has changed now, but that used to be their stance for a very long time".
Would have been better if instead of "that used to be their stance for a very long time" you would have written "that used to be their stance a very long time ago, not sure about currently". Additionally, it would have been nice for you to spend a couple of minutes and check the current official stance.
Like I said, I have been using Mint since 2014 and the upgrade was an official stance at least since then.
I think 3-5 years (let alone 10 years) is a long enough time to pass after which one should check before posting old information. Imagine someone talking about how few games Linux has (pre-Steam) or how impossible installation of Linux is (because one needs to order physical CDs).
Atomic OSs are such a massive improvement. My experience with traditional Linux disros is the major upgrades failed as often as they worked. And always prompted me to merge config files or other insane stuff.
Bazzite just works like I’d expect an iPhone update or a Nintendo switch update to work.
For things like appliances (home theater pcs, gaming consoles etc..) you'd want an immutable rootfs that's resistant to random reboots, power cuts etc..
You'd also want stable, atomic, updates that can go from "one version of system software to the next" without breaking the system.
Recently, i had to reinstall my 7 year old arch install because a system upgrade after a year or so broke it... It's not like i can't sit down and fix what went wrong manually, it's just that i wouldn't want to ever worry about these things on my home theater/"gaming console" pc...
A few points from the website:
- Out-of-the-box support for Xbox, Wii, Switch, PS3, PS4, PS5, and numerous other controllers.
- Nvidia drivers and the latest Mesa for AMD & Intel pre-installed, with tweaks applied as needed
- Bazzite ships with support for additional Wi-Fi adapters, display standards like DisplayLink, and more
- Out of the box support for not only desktop PCs, but handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs.
There's nothing any UniversalBlue image tweaks that you couldn't tweak yourself. It's just adding/removing packages, adding/removing drivers, a few configuration scripts, and a bunch of tweaks to fix well-known gaming-related issues.
But the point is that, if you want to game on Linux, you probably want to perform exactly or almost exactly the same tweaks that Bazzite already does. So why bother doing them yourself?
It's not even a linux-from-scratch situation where you'd do it for the sake of learning. Googling "my controller doesn't work right", finding some discussion threads, and copy-pasting a bunch of fixes isn't particularly interesting.
The gamepadui mode that allows you to use the system with only a game controller connected, effectively turning it into a console-style experience, is the main draw.
It'd give you Plasma, for one. Even if I'm a proponent of uBlue I'd consider Mint if there was a Plasma version. Seems like a great distro.
I don’t really care any desktop environment. I use i3. Otherwise I don’t really have much preference between how Firefox, terminal, and Steam are displayed.
I’ve been using it for a couple of months on my main dev machine (I don’t game much). It’s my first exposure to immutable systems.
I love the idea, but honestly, juggling all these package managers gets annoying really fast; for now what I use is rpm-ostree (which you really shouldn’t touch unless you absolutely have to), Flatpak, Homebrew (some package are mac only or mac first), and distrobox (with arch).
Every now and then I think of going back to arch cause they are the only distro that made it very convenient to install some obscure packages that is only used by handful of people
Like yesterday, I tried setting up Flutter with the Android SDK command-line tools and the rest of the Android dev stack, and it took me almost 2 hours to get everything working; On Arch? That’s just a few packages, all sitting right there in the main repo or the AUR.
I get what your saying, but it's just a matter of finding the right workflow.
I'm very much like you infact, so I ended up resorting to just using an Arch Distrobox for pretty much everything. I leave rpm-ostree and Flatpaks alone as far as possible, so I only really have to worry about my Arch for updates and everything else takes care of itself.
You may ask then why not just use Arch? Well of course you can, but I like the idea of having a rock solid base where I know for a fact that I can let it happily update without breaking something. Arch still requires manual intervention every now and then (such as package migrations or some dependency conflicts). Not a big deal if you keep up with the Arch News and Discord announcements etc, but sometimes IRL gets in the way and I'm not up-to-speed with what's happening. With my Bazzite+Arch setup, I'm not super bothered with this, plus it's easy to blow my whole container and set it up again, and in fact I've got a bash script to do just that on one of my other PCs that I don't use regularly (because Arch needs to be updated regularly, otherwise you're in for a nasty surprise when you find out your keyring is out-of-date and pacman has been upgraded and nothing works... with a container, just blow it up and fetch the latest version, reinstall your packages and you're up and running in no time).
I tried out Fedora Silverblue a while ago but found immutable OSs to be too inconvenient for development right now. I don’t think it’s an inherent flaw in the design, just all the dev tools are not set up to work with them.
For normal non dev usage it works great. On my steam deck I just get everything through Flatpak or steam and it just works.
Soooo, after having to migrate multiple college campus sites across to Windows 11 in time for the W10 drop dead date. I kinda gave up with trying to get my PC running Windows 11 without bugs and freezes.
Switched to PopOS, was "ok", switched to Arch, performance was awesome.
A few days ago I gave Bazzite a blast and now I'm currently installing it as the primary OS on my gaming rig. Other than a few small tweaks, it just works.
It's quite a bit more performant than PopOS and PopOS came with a myriad of tweaks and issues needed for things like Ubi Connect (I've been going through the first Division game with my kids and PopOS/Lutris hated... Everything...
It all just works on Bazzite.
Plus the Nvidia drivers don't seem as bad, unsure if it's just the RTX5xxx that were having issues ala GamersNexus but the 4090 doesn't seem to have the same frame time issues that were raised (Knock on wood)
Huu. I had the opposite experience almost. I’m a complete Linux noob. Could not get Bazzite to work as expected. Had much better luck with Arch though the install was a bit archaic. Managed to get a desktop and Steam installed with all drivers on the second attempt (which wasn’t to bad since Arch is a fast install.) It has worked flawless since. Absolutely zero bloat.
Will hop over to one of these the day that the AAA multiplayer titles I want to play are supported. I know it's down to the anticheat, but I still wanna play 'em. Hopefully Valve are able to push that forward.
Personally, I hope that corporate rootkits will never be permitted on Linux in any form. Game studios need to learn that anticheat needs to live on the server side where it belongs.
Easier said than done for some genres, unfortunately. To catch things like aim assistance from the server-side you'd have to resort to handwavy statistical analysis and somehow thread the needle between catching well-crafted aimbots, but without accidentally banning legitimate players under any circumstances, even if they're extremely skilled and/or lucky.
It's been tried but I don't think it's ever been very successful. The Battlefield series used to use Fairfight, which is based on server-side heuristics, but they ultimately gave up on it and switched back to client-side detection for the more recent games.
Cheating creates two problems. Obvious cheats aiming to upset other players and subtle cheats that don't want to be noticed as such. Now, I'm not saying it doesn't matter if people cheat as long as nobody notices or that competitive integrity is not important, but the first category is a much more immediate threat for most games and easy to detect. On a server analyzing locally recorded sampled demos.
I used to co-run an online gaming ladder back in the Quake 3 days.
There were aim bots and other client side hacks back then but we requested that folks record and upload demos of themselves for competitive matches. This allowed anyone to replay the game from your exact POV in-game, complete with hearing and seeing exactly what the real player saw at the time.
We all survived back then without kernel level anti-cheat tools with a very high certainty that no one was cheating.
Even if you tried to hide it, it was pretty obvious when someone was cheating. I don't recall a single unsolved case where someone was cheating and got away with it while the community really thought otherwise. This was with over 10,000 registered players and tons of active teams playing every day. No where near the scale of gaming today of course, but it's a big enough sample that the method does work for online competitive play.
Nowadays it would be even easier to detect foul play because with live streaming and human announcers, you're under a lot more analysis by the public in real-time.
That statistical analysis with post-facto game recordings could be pretty accurate, and needn't result in bans. In fact, I think banning cheaters is dumb. Instead, we should weight matchmaking algorithms to put cheaters all on the same servers. If they want to cheat, why not let them cheat against each other?
Mistakenly hellbanning legitimate players wouldn't be much better than banning them outright. Either way you've got a justifiably angry customer.
[dead]
If your definition of "AAA" includes Arc Raiders and Marvel Rivals, then good news, they work.
But if your definition specifically refers to shooters like Fortnite or BF6, then yeah, they're not going to work. Except CS of course, but not sure if CS counts as "AAA" in your books.
We can only hope Valve‘s new „console“ will hit the market strong so they have another levarage to push the studios to implement appropiate, linux compatible anti-cheat.
Anticheat doesn't need to be Linux compatible, it needs to move server-side.
It has been. It's been server-side for decades. It's common industry knowledge that the client can't have authority. But server-side anti cheat can't stop aimbots or wall hacks. Client side anti cheat isn't about stopping you from issuing "teleport me to here plz server" commands, it's about stopping people from reading and writing the game's memory/address space.
If you wanted to teleport (and the server was poorly implemented enough to let you) you could just intercept your network packets and add a "teleport plz" message. Real cheats in the wild used to work this way. However a wallhack will need to read the game's memory to know where players are.
What modern anti cheat software does is make it difficult for casual cheats to read/write the game's memory, and force more sophisticated cheats down detectable exploit paths. It's impossible to prevent someone from reading the memory on untrusted hardware, but you can make it difficult and detectable so you can minimize the number of cheaters and maximize the number you detect and ban.
Linux is incompatible with client anti-cheat because there is no security boundary that can't be sidestepped with a custom compiled kernel. Windows is Windows, with known APIs and ways to read process memory that can be monitored. Secure boot means only Microsoft's own built kernels can boot and you now have a meaningful security boundary. Monitor what kernel drivers are loaded and you can make it harder for cheaters to find ways in. Sure you can run in a VM, but you can also detect when it happens.
Sure we can just run with no client side anticheat at all (functionally what Linux always is unless you only run approved, signed kernels and distros with secure boot) but wallhacks and aimbots become trivial to implement. These can only really be detected server side with statistical analysis. I hope you don't ban too many innocent people trying to find all the cheaters that way.
> Linux is incompatible with client anti-cheat because there is no security boundary that can't be sidestepped with a custom compiled kernel. Windows is Windows, with known APIs and ways to read process memory that can be monitored. Secure boot means only Microsoft's own built kernels can boot and you now have a meaningful security boundary. Monitor what kernel drivers are loaded and you can make it harder for cheaters to find ways in. Sure you can run in a VM, but you can also detect when it happens.
OK I'll just compile a custom ReactOS build that lets me sidestep that boundary.
Honest question: given all the companies and people working on anti-cheat systems for the last 20+ years of multiplayer video games, don't you think it would all be server-side if it could be, by now?
No, game companies are simply unwilling to pay for the talent and man hours that it takes to police their games for cheaters. Even when they are scanning your memory and filesystem they don't catch people running the latest rented cheat software.
Cheating is a social problem, not a technical issue. Just give the community dedicated server possibility (remember how back in the days games used to ship with dedicated server binaries?) and the community can police for free! Wow!
Yes, I would also prefer that servers were community run as in the hl2 days.
I would still argue that there are technical issues leading to some amount of cheating. In extraction shooters like Hunt Showdown, Escape From Tarkov and a few others, people can run pcie devices that rip player location and other information from the machines memory in order to inject it into an overlay with a 2nd computer, and they do go to these lengths to cheat, giving them a huge advantage. It wouldn't be possible to rip that info from memory for these "ESP cheats" if the server didn't needlessly transmit position information for players that aren't actually visible. IMO this is a technical failure. There are other steps that could be taken as well, which just aren't because they're hard.
Yes, because players want to spend time moderating other players instead of playing the game. Sounds fun!
Community servers literally invented anti-cheat. All current big name anti-cheats started as anti-cheats for community servers. And admins would choose to use them. Game developers would see that and integrate it. Quake 3 Arena even added Punkbuster in a patch.
Modern community servers like FiveM for GTAV, or Face-It and ESEA for CS2 have more anti-cheats, not less.
This is a misunderstanding of what community is, said by someone who doesn't know.
No, because most companies will make decisions based on time/effort/profitability, and because client-side anticheat is stupid simple and cheap, that's what they go with. Why waste their own server resources, when they can waste the user's?
Alright then, sounds like you've got it all figured out.
So it is the company prioritising their bottom line at the expense of their customer's computers. More simply, they move cost from their balance sheet and convert it into risk on the customer's end.
Which is actively customer-abusive behavior and customers should treat it with the contempt it deserves. The fact that customers don't, is what enables such abuse.
This is such a weird take. In an online multiplayer game the cheaters are the risk to the company's bottom line.
If a game is rampant with cheaters, honest paying players stop showing up, and less new players sign up. The relatively small percentage of cheaters cost the company tons of sales and revenue.
It is actively in a company's best interest to do everything they possibly can to prevent cheating, so the idea that intentionally building sub-par anti-cheat is about "prioritising their bottom line" seems totally absurd to me.
Not to mention these abstract "the company" positions completely ignore all the passionate people who actually make video games, and how much most of them care about fair play and providing a good experience to their customers. No one hates cheaters more than game developers.
Agree 100%, client side anti cheat was never going to work.
To the downvoters: client-side anticheat simply cannot stop all the cheaters. Why? Because it's running on hardware that the cheater has full control over.
It has been (and continues to be) an enormous amount of effort, and some cheaters are absolutely going to get through anyway.
Right, you cannot control hardware you do not own and have in your possession. A cheat that uses another computer and a camera to watch the screen and emulate a mouse is an effective aimbot that no client side method will ever detect. The future must be server authoritative net code and behavior-based server-side cheat detection.
> The future must be server authoritative net code and behavior-based server-side cheat detection.
If they actually cared about stopping cheaters (rather than pouring tons of investor money into the appearance of anti-cheat), then yes, the future must be that.
But. I'm a USian and I notice that the TSA is still strip-searching people at airports and -worse- wasting assloads of everyone's time, effort, and tax money. I have zero faith that a sudden attack of common sense will redirect efforts (whether they be in the arena of airport security or eviction of match-damaging video game cheaters) in a more sensible direction within what's left of my lifetime.
Day Z’s authoritative server‑side detection performed so flawlessly, it let me breach the network bubble and force other players to defecate themselves. 10/10, would recommend.
Bazzite fills a SteamOS-sized hole with a decent level of hardware support. Unclear how long that'll be the case - I don't see it surviving the release of a GA SteamOS.
I'm not convinced there will be a GA SteamOS.
Bazzite also has a much more frequent release cadence which is important for the kernel and Mesa. SteamOS only ships a major version every year.
Steam OS is a rolling release (Arch based) with constant small updates. My Steamdeck has had updates several times this year.
It's snapshotted from Arch, once a year they bump the kernel and include "updated Arch Linux base" as a release note.
SteamOS 3.7 is still on Kernel 6.11 and KDE Plasma 6.2, for example. Bazzite is 6.17 and Plasma 6.5.
This matters if you're using more recent hardware or want the latest driver optimizations. My 9070 XT is supported by Bazzite, SteamOS won't even boot.
I think that's changed recently. Recent release notes state it's added support for RDNA4
VKD3D-Proton gained FSR4 support and will ship in a future release of Proton, but RDNA4 requires a newer kernel.
SteamOS release notes are public at https://www.steamdeck.com/en/news, it still uses a 6.11 kernel from September 2024.
SteamOS main is on Kernel 6.16.12 and KDE Plasma 6.4.3
My point exactly, main is SteamOS's alpha state before its frozen into 3.8 beta, and its still months behind Bazzite.
Especially on the Beta branch, I'm getting several system updates per week. I check for one every time I wake it up, along with checking for any available game update downloads. Originally moved to the Beta branch to get the new 8BitDo controller features (Mid-July maybe), but it's worked well enough I've never gone back to Stable.
i'm still not sure why anyone wants a GA steamos, the value is in the vertical integration, no? the "console experience" are mostly the bigscreen mode and other things already available in things like bazzite, while being a more general distro...
I've been using Linux forever (back to the mailed Ubuntu CDs days).
I installed this begrudgingly after fighting edge cases with Waydroid on Arch. It's the first "batteries included" distro I've actually liked. I usually hate the "omakase" approach, but the setup here is pretty much how I would've done it myself.
Side note: GNOME + Waydroid is the best experience I've had with a desktop OS on a tablet. Finding tools like scrcpy included out of the box was a nice surprise, too.
I've been using linux since the days of downloading slackware on a stack of 1.44mb floppy disks. I gave up on linux gaming around 2007. I've revisited it this year, but it still sucks. it's just not worth it.
just relax, install windows and late the escapism take over.
I also started my Linux journey with a turn of the century Slackware install. Linux has come a long, long way since then, but I learned a lot back then. Distros like Bazzite are practically "turn-key" now.
In any case, I would rather use those hard earned skills hand configuring Slackware today than to put with the shitshow of Windows pop-ups, forced account creation, telemetry collection, UI changes for the sake of change, advertisements built into the OS, random OS corrupting BSODs, etc..
True. I think i'm done after windows 10 really runs into the ground. I have a nuc that runs windows 11 and it's kind of a shitshow.
Weird, I’m from the same era, and a predominantly Windows user, but I have zero complaints about Linux gaming on my Steam Deck.
Well, that's apples and oranges. I was playing starcraft on wine earlier this year and there were constant freezes and crashes on new hardware.
Have you tried playing it via Proton or Proton-GE (via Steam or Lutris)?
Vanilla Wine is a bit of a rough experience, I'd only recommend it for advanced users who know what they're doing.
Ah sorry, it was lutris (the name escaped me). I've done all the combinations of wine and wrappers to wine. All of them have a sort of unstable relationship with the calling environment. alt-tabbing out of games never works, there are freezes and game crashes when you try to switch in and out of games a fluidly as you can on windows.
I believe you that steamos is better, but it's also a single task environment where you're not checking your email between rounds of halo.
I'll give proton a try, though i believe that was in play when i was laddering with lutris.
ugh, I remember when the comments here were better than reddit.
I don't.
Known Linux detractor, been sticking with Windows for years because I’ve had one too many ‘apt-get update’ brick my entire system. Decided to try out Bazzite specifically because of the immutable root partition thing.
Overall I will say things are going like 80% smoothly but there are still some very Linux-y problems with it:
The default grub has options for ostree:0 and ostree:1. 0 is the default and if you pick 0 it just hangs and doesn’t boot. I can’t figure out how to change this because the normal grub config files are read-only. So I have to quickly press down arrow when the computer is booting and select the right option.
Installing certain packages is difficult or impossible, for example I had to get pycairo and some other packages to run a Python program and you can’t add them normally. But I think the proper way is to just run everything in a container so maybe that’s on me.
90% of games work fine, but many have weird bugs like crashing when you Alt-Tab out. I could not get modded Skyrim to work after several attempts. Prism, the Minecraft launcher, has some sort of memory leak because if I leave it on in the background it eventually crashes the desktop and I have to hard restart. And of course anti-cheat games like Valorant/League don’t work at all.
KDE has tons of bugs - tooltips randomly scale to the wrong size, Dolphin refusing to copy a file to another drive for no reason, Dolphin freezing when loading a directory with lots of images, detaching a tab in Konsole sticks the window to your mouse until you click something else, Konsole has like 50 themes and none of them are named so you just have to squint and click one that looks good, drag-and-drop into Electron apps like Discord randomly fails, adding a new widget to the panel and suddenly it’s invisible, notifications appearing floating in the middle of the screen, removing an audio output (like unplugging headphones) seems to cause it to randomly choose an alternative, brightness on my monitor randomly shifts even after turning off DCC, GNOME apps have wonky themes, GNOME apps can’t detect light/dark mode so they just pick one… I could go on.
> ...drag-and-drop into Electron apps like Discord randomly fails, adding a new widget to the panel and suddenly it’s invisible, notifications appearing floating in the middle of the screen, removing an audio output (like unplugging headphones) seems to cause it to randomly choose an alternative, brightness on my monitor randomly shifts even after turning off DCC, GNOME apps have wonky themes, GNOME apps can’t detect light/dark mode so they just pick one… I could go on.
Hey, you can't possibly be having these problems! You're using a RedHat-derived distro! That means it uses Wayland! And the Wayland people have been telling us all for years that Wayland is good for daily use for everyone, and that it should be the default everywhere!
(Do note that the above is bitter, bitter sarcasm. I'm so, so disappointed by how the Wayland folks tend to use political pressure (rather than plain declarations of both capabilities and shortcomings) to muster up general support for their project.)
> ...but many have weird bugs like crashing when you Alt-Tab out.
Would it be easy for you to compile a list of like five or ten games that do this? I'm curious to see if I can reproduce this on my Steam-on-xorg-on-Gentoo-Linux machine with an AMD graphics card.
I don't doubt your report, not even a little bit, but -personally- I've found window management on Linux to be light-years better than on Windows. I can put nearly every game I've tried in my huge-ass Steam library on fullscreen on another virtual desktop, flip over to some other desktop (or window) to check something, and flip right back to find the video game still fullscreen and still running happy as a clam. [0] (To say nothing of the total lack of Windows-typical jankiness when changing the screen resolution on an "Exclusive Fullscreen" game.)
Whereas on Windows, it's kinda a crapshoot regarding both what state your desktop will be in when you Alt+Tab out of a fullscreen game and what state that game will be in when you Alt+Tab back. And if that game is "Exclusive Fullscreen" and is not running at your desktop's resolution, all the windows on your secondary monitor are probably going to be rearranged when the game starts, and will definitely be rearranged when you Alt+Tab out and maybe then again when you Alt+Tab back in.
[0] Two very notable exceptions to this are Red Dead Redemption 2 (it notices that its no longer the foreground window and "helpfully" makes itself windowed) and the Linux version of Dead Cells (it "helpfully" minimizes itself when it's no longer the foreground window.).
I run modded Skyrim (SE) via Steam on Bazzite, and it works fine. I just installed Vortex inside the same Proton prefix as Skyrim, installed all my mods via Vortex (and made sure there weren't any conflicts) and it all worked fine. I think I might've had to install .NET as well to get Vortex going, it's been a while so I don't recall, but there should be some update guide somewhere.
RE Anti-cheat, it's not ALL of them, it's only kernel-based ones. For eg, BattlEye, EAC, VAC, and nProtect Gameguard all work just fine, but of course, the game studio will need to enable that support. Arc Raiders, Marvel Rivals, Fall Guys etc all use anticheat and they work fine.
RE KDE, I haven't experienced most of those issues. I don't use Konsole (Ghostty is far better anyways). As for Discord, Equibop is a far better client compared to official.
RE GNOME, unfortunately GNOME and KDE have never really gotten along, personally I avoid GNOME/GTK apps are far as possible.
> 90% of games work fine, but many have weird bugs like crashing when you Alt-Tab out.
This isn't particularly linux-y of an issue. I've had the same sort of behavior in numerous games on Windows, up to and including crashing the graphics driver when alt-tabing out of a full screen game. Seems to be something gamedevs are not commonly testing, and perhaps difficult to defend against when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.
> Seems to be something gamedevs are not commonly testing, and perhaps difficult to defend against when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.
I can guarantee you any gamedev worth his salt will have used alt-tab at some point in the game's development on windows. It's an incredibly common hotkey to use, and the devs very likely have multiple ides, notepads, image editing software running concurrently. You seem to be trying really hard.
> when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.
Most devs are using cross platform graphics APIs. OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan. Alt-tab breaking is likely an OS issue.
> I can guarantee you any gamedev worth his salt will have used alt-tab at some point in the game's development on windows.
Not exactly a repeatable testing framework, that.
> You seem to be trying really hard.
I almost strained a typing finger! /s lol
> Most devs are using cross platform graphics APIs. OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan. Alt-tab breaking is likely an OS issue.
All the OSes seem to suffer from it similarly. More likely an issue that even the cross-platform graphics APIs rely heavily on shared memory buffers and most games depend on code written in languages which aren't strictly memory safe. Sharing a memory buffer between CPU and GPU (or even just multiple CPU cores) is quite difficult to do safely under all possible circumstances without proper language support.
Yea I don't know how you can consider something as not 'tested' without a testing framework behind it.
Perhaps you're not a software developer. Most devs understand that there's a big difference between "it worked for me a few times on my development workstation" and "it's routinely tested in all possible configurations under a variety of circumstances as part of a test harness or CI/CD process".
In fairness to game devs, alt-tab'ing out of a running game would be a challenge for many testing frameworks as it's not something you can do at compile time, requires running the game for a period of time (CI servers don't typically have GPUs), requires some sort of keyboard/mouse automation, and interaction with the underlying OS in addition to the game.
Issues which aren't added to some sort of test suite/CI tend to creep back in to codebases. Especially rapidly developed codebases like games. And threading issues are notoriously challenging to reproduce. Hopefully that helps you understand the difference.
Many game devs develop on windows and for good reason in that most of their customer base are there, plus the stability of drivers there.
Your assumption of what you've been taught in compsci circles with many resources at their disposal does not hold up in places in which fast iterations are required, and with little time to set up testing frameworks because as you said they're hard to test.
> Many game devs develop on windows
I would say most game devs. That doesn't change a thing I've said.
> plus the stability of drivers there
Driver code for Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are all shared across Windows and Linux these days. Have been for years. AMD's even made a point of pulling improvements from the Linux drivers back into the Windows drivers.
> Your assumption of what you've been taught in compsci circles with many resources at their disposal does not hold up in places in which fast iterations are required
I have developed games. I write libraries useful for gamedev. Every game developer I know uses version control and most use CI. Contrary to your opinion, version control and CI help to iterate faster with greater confidence, and don't require lots of resources, just a GitHub account and 5 minutes.
What an odd thing to argue.
> Every game developer I know uses version control and most use CI.
Funny because I know game developers who don't use CI. And I've developed games too. It's not as universal as you claim it to be. It was never about arguing the effectiveness of CI.
> I know game developers who don't use CI
I'm sure they're out there. A bit like publicly declaring you drive without wearing a seatbelt.
> It was never about arguing the effectiveness of CI.
The original point was that alt-tab'ing out of a game can result in unexpected behavior on any OS. Shared memory buffers in graphics APIs are the most likely culprit. And all graphics APIs on all OSes use them. I'm still not sure what exactly you're trying to argue about that.
Yeah I distinctly remember a time in my life where most of my Source Engine games would explode if I alt-tabbed in Windows Vista.
While I understand the point of Linux distros overall, because they allow very specific usage like embedded, etc., I really don't get the point of those generalist but slightly specialized distributions focused on a single aspect that consumers use a computer for.
I'm far from a Linux super-user, I only use it for my servers and Raspberry Pis, but even I would rather pick Debian and install the necessary stuff by hand. This feels like opting-in to bloat on your newly installed OS.
I'll happily listen if anyone has a good selling point for those, but I can't think of any OS less attractive than something tailored for a single use-case on my generalist PC build.
The reason I use Bazzite is very simple: I only use my desktop computer for gaming and when I turn it on, I want it to work immediately without issues.
With previous distros I always had issues configuring something or another with games/drivers. Bazzite has been the closest to Windows/console experience for me wrt Linux pc gaming.
If this is a generalist computer, then you are absolutely correct. This is not the distro for you. This is very specifically built for gaming.
^ this. I'm in the same boat. I got tired of having to do windows things on my windows pc.
Bazzite is actually two levels of specialization away from Debian. Yes, it supports gaming better than other distros, especially on the current wave of handheld devices, and last I heard 2/3 of its users were using the handheld/HTPC version of Bazzite.
But it is also part of the Universal Blue family, which means that updates are atomic and can be rolled back. SteamOS, GNOME OS, and KDE Linux are all trying the atomic distro thing, but you don't get it out of the box on the mainstream distros (yet).
It's common for people to have both a PC and a game console. Even a PC, an iPad and a game console. Right tool for the right job, not a bad idea.
Yes of course, but if you have a PC that's good enough for gaming, it's also good enough (more than good enough) for all your other PC needs.
But not necessarily in the right form factor. My generalist PC build is a laptop, my gaming machine is tucked away under the TV and doesn't have a mouse or keyboard.
I have separate PCs for gaming and work. The former lives in the living room and the latter by my desk.
At this point, I have almost 30 years of daily driving Linux desktop experience, and several decades of professional Linux experience. I have tried and kind of liked NixOS and although I prefer the simplicity of Arch Linux, I see how it would be useful in a professional scenario with lots of servers to upkeep.
But Fedora Atomic confuses the hell out of me. To recommend it to potential Linux newbies and as the great next thing feels bizarre to me.
Yep, I run NixOS on everything but no way in hell am I recommending it to complete newbies to Linux who also have no programming experience.
I help run a small Linux gaming community and at least once a day on the Discord (yes it’s a problematic service but that’s another rant) there is someone trying to install a mod or set up some piece of sim hardware, having recently switched from Windows, and being confused by FlatPak or by system immmutability.
It feels like these things are a double edged sword, on the one hand they are less prone to break they system and not under and why, on the other they now have a bunch of new roadblocks they don’t understand nor fully comprehend the purpose of. I can’t think of a better alternative but I sort of feel that the technology isn’t the issue, more like lack of a good FTUE which provides low friction education about how the system works and why that is beneficial. To use a bit of a tired analogy, it seems to me that a certain proportion of users are being thrown a nice big fish but aren’t being helped to understand what a fishing rod is, let alone able to fish for themselves.
I think I’m really just echoing other users’ comments about how a lot of the experience doesn’t really deliberately speak to people who are barely technical and just want things to work. The sort of people who run an iPhone because it’s simple, and whose response to windows acting weird is to just reinstall it.
I'm newish to Linux, so take my opinions with a grain of salt and having a lot of unknown unknowns.
I think the update/os upgrade situation is better, security is better, and frankly my least favorite thing with Linux is going in and making sure the system state is healthy.
When I started using Linux this summer I had to wipe my system twice because I put it in broken states or couldn't figure out how to undo some change. I went through all sorts of issues like managing grub and gnome not working with my studio display or thunderbolt peripherals. Almost all of the fixes required editing arcane files then calling commands which fed them into some subsystem I had no idea about. All that blind faith online sourced stuff felt like a security nightmare too.
Since migrating to atomic fedora and then this weekend Bazzite, that has not happened once. There was initial friction with dev tool setup and toolbox, but things have been completely on the rails since then.
FTUE = First Time User Experience
Greatly enjoying bazzite. Grabbed a Radeon 9070xt, hook it up to my 4k projector, and get to couch game. Looks a fair bit nicer than my Xbox, and steam is so much better than the Xbox online store.
I went to bazzite with a 4070ti super, is it worth going to a 9070xt? I've had graphical issues but a reboot always fixes it. The main menu UI is dog slow though (easily a half second of lag).
I can't speak for the 9070XT specifically (I'm on a 7800XT myself), but the thing with Linux in general is that nVidia can be a PITA sometimes and exhibit weird issues like your menu lag. If you want a first-class Linux experience then go all-AMD. I run Linux on four different classes of all-AMD computers (desktop, laptop, mini-PC and handheld) and have literally zero issues. In particular, I've been running Bazzite for about three years on two of my systems (PC and laptop) and it's been rock solid. Three years of updates and upgrades, with only one hiccup this one time on my PC (which wasn't a big deal either since I had pinned a good image versions to my boot menu, so I always have a good image I could boot into).
They need to work on their messaging if someone has to scroll five to seven times just to figure out that it is an OS, and even then it still is not that clear.
You guys are fast. Props to you. lol
Before: https://archive.is/Juqfq
After: https://archive.is/RTePv
I really wanted to give this a legitimate try but even following the installation instructions to the letter, it bricked my Windows install and I had to spend a few hours fixing the MBR, Bootloader, etc. I'm sure it would be a breeze using a separate physical drive but that'll be a project for another day.
Bazzite does look very promising and happy to see innovation in the Linux gaming world!
Bazzite has a command, `ujust setup-boot-windows-steam`, which when run adds an entry to Steam-in-Bazzite that causes a Windows boot.
It also has a command `ujust regenerate-grub` which adds a Windows entry to the bootloader.
Each of these is a single command which only must be run one time after install. I suppose it could take a few hours to either do it by hand, or to discover one of these options, but they are both documented and in particular the guide at https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/Installation_Guide/dual_boot... (which you implied you followed) mentions the latter command.
It works on each of my Bazzite machines without any manual tinkering/intervention. Not sure why it would not Work On Your Machine (TM).
I couldn't even manage to boot into any shell so not sure this would've helped me much...
You are saying that Bazzite failed to install itself?
Kinda seems like they’re relying a lot on all of the work Valve has done with Proton. Difficult to tell what Bazzite per se is bringing to the table.
- Additional hardware support (like proprietary nVidia drivers, several game controllers, laptop-specific stuff (like some ASUS sensors etc))
- Newer core packages (kernel, graphics drivers, desktop environment). This often translates to better hardware support (especially if it's recent hardware), and often better game compatibility (newer graphics drivers often include fixes for games), and often better performance as well.
- More suitable as a general purpose OS. SteamOS heavily leans into the gaming use-case (naturally), and whilst you can use it as a regular PC, its immutable nature can make it a bit annoying depending on your workflow. Bazzite includes a bunch of useful defaults (apps/config/shortcuts) that makes it much more conducive for regular PC usage, or advanced gaming usage (like if you want to install an overclocking utility or do something more "advanced", it's far more easier and convenient).
Bazzite runs on my desktop while SteamOS does not.
It's also the best distribution for jellyfin media player because it's trivially easy to get the jellyfin client to autostart in kde and it's not that hard to get it auto updating and rebooting nightly. This distro plus an intel n150 mini pc (aoostar n1 pro is decent) and a flir dongle and the flir remote is a big win.
Can I ask you whether HDR works without any hiccup? I can't seem to find a definitve answer online.
HDR can be a hit-or-miss even on Windows though, thanks to the myriad combinations of monitors, cable versions and standards. So hard to give a definite answer besides "YMMV".
In my case though, it works fine without any hiccups. My main setup is a 7800XT, connected to an AOC CQ32G3SE using a DisplayPort 2.1 cable. HDR works fine both in Steam game mode as well as in desktop mode (KDE).
bazzite supports it I believe but I am not sure my n150 based mini pcs that I'm using on my tvs does. This was running on six your old tvs until this month when I bought a lg g5 for the basement. It looks great but I couldn't say if it looks the greatest it could look with HDR on or not... My previous tv frontend was a custom nixos setup that was a pain to maintain over the years. bazzite just works and the setup is simple for my needs (basically autologging in to kde and autostarting jellyfin media player in full screen plus a systemd timer to ensure the system updates and reboots overnight while I'm sleeping.
A video shows difference between Bazzite, Nobara and CachyOS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqIjUddUSo0
Why others are better than Bazzite if it's made for gaming?
I mostly use Ubuntu for my gaming PCs but I put Bazzite on my living room PC and it works a treat. It’s much more of a console-like experience and kind of gets out of the way. It also works better with Steam Remote Play.
Give it a shot, not like it costs anything!
Same, it’s been great on living room PC for a console like low maintenance experience
I just learned about this project.
I do play games and I am a Linux user.
I see this project being an OS distribution with image update approach. It basically has some programs used for gaming on Linux preinstalled and probably preconfigured.
I wish the project would exist in 2 variants: an OS (as it currently is) and as an installer that would allow the user to select parts to install and configure on their current Linux distro.
Because I am using debian, this is my home PC and gaming is not the sole thing that I do on this PC.
Switching to a Fedora distro is not an option for me.
So, as nice as this project is - I say farewell to it.
How does it compare to CachyOS? I'm not too familiar with how immutable OS actually works or what is the deal with flatpacks.
I have a system that I kind of want to have Linux forward with Windows on secondary m.2 drive to dual boot if I need something there. Following protonDB, I see all the games that I play work just fine and are either gold or platinum status.
Would you recommend Bazzite or Cachy? I main do gaming, development and web stuff. I tend to run multiple dockers, multiple different versions of python and other packages. How would immutible OS affect me here?
If you have an NVIDIA GPU CachyOS performs significantly better at the moment, so I would go with that. For AMD GPUs it's more of a preference question.
Personally for dev work I tend to use things like Nix to keep the development packages out of the host, that sort of approach works regardless of distro.
Technically its performance is a bit slower than CachyOS, and some of the package versions can be a bit behind as well (like Mesa or the kernel), which can contribute to the slowness. Flatpaks work fine though for the most part.
I would recommend CachyOS if you're after raw performance and you're technically inclined, and don't mind ocassionally going into the terminal to fix something or do some maintenance (maybe once or twice a year).
Bazzite on the other hand is great if you don't care much about minor FPS improvements, but value your time and system stability more. I have both installed, and use Bazzite when I want stuff to "just work" and not think about updates and maintenance. I use it for work, and for braindead gaming (ie I'm back from work and just want to dive into gaming without needing to worry about any PC stuff).
Both OSes are fine for docker/dev workflow. Multiple versions of python isn't an issue on ANY Linux system, as you would never be installing them across the system, you'd be installing them in a container or a sandboxed environment. I'd also recommend checking out Flox[1] as a fast and lightweight alternative to containers, it's great for working with Python in particular.
[1] https://flox.dev/
How do you normally install these dev dependencies on your current setup?
I just reinstalled my NixOS gaming thing with Jovian from scratch. Not much of a reason, other than I wanted to do things a bit more "correct" this time (e.g. tmpfs root).
I did briefly consider Bazzite, but the thing that stopped me was that I wasn't sure how well it would work with an eGPU. With Jovian and NixOS, it is ultimately still just NixOS minimal under the covers, and that is low-level enough for me to play with boot parameters and kernel modules to get the eGPU working, and it wasn't clear to me that it would be that straightforward with Bazzite.
I take it your eGPU is Nvidia-based? My AMD eGPU didn't need any special handling on Linux. I was pretty amazed by it.
Yeah, nvidia.
No kernel modules needed for eGPU, kargs are handled with one command, rpm-ostree kargs --help
Its a nice distro, though personally I've been using EndeavourOS (Arch based but easier, think of it as the Ubuntu to Debian but for Arch). I wanted to try one of the Fedora Atomic distros but it just didn't boot correctly no matter what I tried, Endeavour just booted and worked and I havent looked back for over a year now...
One insanely underrated Linux software is Lutris, if you have non-steam games, it is phenomenal at helping you wire them up for Wine, especially when Steam itself behaves weird (like installing third party things is not exactly done intelligently by Steam).
I have this same issue for a while and it had to deal with secure boot. Was able to install a immutable fedora after disabling.
I personally think everyone should install arch once the manual way. It will give you a good idea how everything fits together.
After that, just use EndeavourOS.
I used Antergos before that and EndevourOS has been great since.
> It will give you a good idea how everything fits together.
The actual user does not give any shits. And while I love tinkering around and understand my OS/distro/$software I can absolutely relate. Linux should be at last so accessible that most of the things just work and a broad audience can just use their computer.
It isnt so much tinkering vs learning how it works.
Part of the reason new users struggle so much is because they forget they have spent 10 years or whatever using windows / macos and linux is definitely not those.
As much as Linux has become far more user friendly in the last couple years it still has its warts and a quick boot camp like installing arch can be very beneficial.
My first Linux distro was Slackware. I think I will be okay.
The site could make it clear that Bazzite is an operating system (it is right?). It wasn't until I scrolled to the bottom and saw built on Gnome and Fedora that I understood what Bazzite is.
“Dad’s old CDs…”. It me. I can’t decide whether to be mad at being called old or glad that someone cares enough to make them run.
I was using Bazzite, but they started talking about potentially shutting it down due to a removal of 32-bit support. It seems a bit safer to choose one of the mainline Fedora spins. Maybe Kinoite or Silverblue if you're into atomicity, though there's still some rough edges to be aware of.
They were going to shut it down due to upstream Fedora considering ending 32-bit support. Sticking to upstream wouldn't have helped you avoid that issue.
Why do you say that? If they drop 32-bit support, maybe I won't be able to play games for a time - at least until somebody rigs up a fix - but at least my operating system will still be supported.
If Bazzite goes poof overnight, though, that's a major problem. At least Fedora's official spins will continue to receive necessary updates.
The Steam client is 32-bit, the majority of games on Steam are 32-bit, and very popular titles like Left 4 Dead 2 are 32-bit.
The last time a distro tried to do this Ubuntu caved and continued supporting it with an extra repo. Fedora has no chance of winning that argument.
The good news is the incident you're talking about was a change proposal proposed by a single person and never even voted on. It did not survive the comment stage.
For gaming, anything rolling release will be good because you want the latest update from the graphic stack.
I think this is a factor for why SteamOS is Arch.
Two distros with fairly similar ideas have showed up for the "replacement for windows" recently[1].
Zorin OS and Bazzite... I was hoping someone who has tried both could enlighten me as to why one is better than the other?
[1] I say recently because I'm not following linux very closely.
No offense, but they're about as similar as apples are to oranges: yes they're both fruits, but they're very different kind of fruits.
Zorin is a more "traditional" OS, where things work like most PC operating systems, whereas Bazzite is an immutable OS with atomic updates. Immutable means the core system files are read-only, which makes it less susceptible to corruption and breakage (due to user error or malware). Atomic updates means updates either apply or don't: there's no partial/failed state that can break your PC.
Updates are also image-based, where your entire OS image gets updated in one go, kinda like how mobile OS's work - this means there's no chance of package conflict/version/dependency issues that can sometimes plague regular Linux distros like Zorin. This also means that major OS upgrades are trivial - they're treated like any other update. In Zorin and even Windows for that matter, major OS upgrades are always messy, and there's a chance something can break or get corrupted. You don't have that issue with immutable, image-based distros like Bazzite.
The only area where Zorin would be better is in low-level customisability - like say, you want to switch out your kernel to a custom kernel, or use a different DE, or change login managers etc. You can do that in an immutable system, as these are core components. But most people don't do this, so for regular users, an immutable system like Bazzite would be a much better choice.
My apologies I got it wrong anyway, I was thinking of Cachy OS, not Zorin.
Anyway thanks for your answer!
Recently I learned about CachyOS, it has custom scheduler to run things smoothly, including games. And SteamOS is also doing the custom scheduler for games. From what I can find, Bazzite doesn't seem to use custom scheduler.
Does these custom scheduler bring noticeable gains during usage? My previous linux desktop was a non-gaming distro, so I'm a bit curious on these fancy stuffs.
- BORE, CachyOS scheduler: https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/why_cachyos/#advanced...
- LAVD, SteamOS scheduler: https://www.igalia.com/2025/11/helpingvalve.html
Bazzite also mention
> improved CPU schedulers for responsive gameplay,
on their homepage https://bazzite.gg/
Oops you're right, I was searching the docs and couldn't find it, maybe it's time to snoop around in their repo...
You can use any sched-ext scheduled on Bazzite.
Just dumped windows for bazzite with an Nvidia gpu + a 12700k. So far, great. There's definitely some artifacts but a reboot has always fixed it. I mainly installed it to see if I could go full steam machine.
I want to create a "gaming streaming platform" like Stadia as a weekend project, does anyone know where to get started? Basically where the input device and the game are in different machines.
For off the shelf shadow.tech has worked pretty reliably for me, even to the point of being usable for streaming vr using alvr (uk based).
For diy you can use moonlight / sunshine or steam remote play. I find latencies lower than around 30ms perfectly playable for everything except twitch shooters etc.
For true diy look into leveraging nvenc or equivalent hw encoder using a “zero latency” profile and build on top of UDP. TCP could be feasible for client input -> remote traffic, but even then building a minimal custom reliable layer on top of UDP probably makes sense to avoid nagle type issues. If you want to support arbitrary input devices (joysticks, wheels etc) that can’t be represented as an Xbox controller things will get pretty tricky. Especially if those devices require drivers, at that point your into proxying usb.
DIY in a weekend? Definitely.
True DIY in a weekend… probably not :)
Haven't tried it much myself, but there's Wolf if you want to do it from Docker containers: https://github.com/games-on-whales/wolf
Sunshine is a great open source game streaming stack, and has client applications for tons of platforms, usually under the name "moonlight". Bazzite makes setting that up on a host (machine running the game) dead simple.
If you already have a gaming pc I can recommend an Apple TV and installing Steam Link.
Moonlight does this if you are just looking for a solution.
I use it for gaming.
It gets updates. Games work. I don't have to spend a bunch of time trying to debug or customize it, but I could if I wanted to.
That's the way I like it.
These sort of derivative distros seem to be aimed at Windows 11 Refugees.
I am not a fan of these derivative distros and I would always recommend using one of the mainline distros e.g Debian, Arch, Fedora etc.
I am using Debian 13 for gaming and the most difficult thing I had to install was a backports kernel which improved performance in some games, in other games it made no difference at all.
Installing Steam and Lutris takes about 5 minutes and it yet another distro for what amounts to installing some applications. I find the biggest issues on Linux gaming is the applying individual workarounds in Steam, and getting wireless controllers to behave properly.
I've been dual booting Bazzite and Zorin for the last month it's been working out well. I didn't really like Bazzite as a daily driver, but it worked better for gaming.
Any particular reason you didn't like Bazzite as a daily driver? I've been considering replacing Fedora with it on my main laptop.
I admit didn't spend a lot of time with it, but right after installing it, I needed to work on a project with Platform.io in VSCode. What was a 10 minute process in Zorin (mainly due to not using Flatpaks) didn't work out after over an hour in Bazzite.
Also, Bazzite takes over 2 minutes to boot, while Zorin takes less than 20 seconds.
I'm pretty new to Linux as a daily driver, and need a stable base that I'm familiar with for my non-gaming daily work, and Bazzite isn't that for me yet. On the other hand, Bazzite just worked out of the box for gaming, better than Zorin did.
I have a big enough SSD to split the partition and let each distro do its best work for me.
Bazzite is naturally a bit slower to boot compared to other distros due to the things it bundles in and the ostree system, but 2 minutes is unusually long.
On my 3.5yr old ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1 with the stock SSD, if takes exactly 34 seconds to cold boot to the full desktop (KDE) from the boot menu (I have enabled auto-logon), which I find acceptable. Warm boot is 30 seconds.
So there might me something odd about your setup. Are you using nVidia by any chance?
As for VScode, I'm not familiar with platform.io but you really want to be using dev containers. On uBlue distros, Distrobox makes this easy. Just follow the guide here: https://distrobox.it/posts/integrate_vscode_distrobox/
The comments here are hilarious. Something to go with my morning coffee. We live in the universe where you cannot distinguish between a human or an AI.
The more I read, the more confused I get. Either I live in some bubble, or I truly don't understand the world. It's a Linux distro based on Fedora, for gamers or smth - did all Linux gamers gather on HN today!? I'm not into gaming, hey I'm into Linux, I don't understand why this gets so much traction. Like yeah, I cannot comprehend that.
Is this an experiment? Is my mind broken? If 1) cool, if 2) I probably need help. @dang wtf is going on in here!?
Last time I tried bazzite, a year ago, it was very buggy and crashed often. I switched back to SteamOS on deck. Has bazzite gotten any better?
Even if one game doesn't work on this (there are many) and works on Windows, why shouldn't I just use Windows?
If you like the Windows experience you should definitely use Windows.
Do they have breakout? I love that game so much.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3041770/Breakout_Beyond/
That's gorgeous, but the horizontality. Can you handle it? I don't think I can handle it
I spent a lot of time as a kid with Krakout on my c64, which was a horizontal Arkanoid. I could probably handle it. It looks like Atari's got another Breakout remake on Steam that's horizontal-aspect, too.
Personally I've been having fun with BallxPit though (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2062430/BALL_x_PIT/) which is basically what you get when you cross Arkanoid with Vampire Survivors, it gets hilariously chaotic once you have a bunch of upgraded and mutated super-balls to fling at the bricks with monsters sticking out of them. I don't really have an urge to play a more pure riff on Breakout.
> your dad's old CDs
Okay. I think I get a feel for their target audience.
People in their 30s?
This is so cool. I like the mircoSD card idea.
Isn't that just a steam feature?
Why would I use Bazzite and not SteamOS?
I answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46093315
Does the Lutris stuff mean Starcraft 2 and battle.net will easily work on this?
Yet another homepage that doesn't tell me what it is. Something something gaming. Is it a lib, piece of hardware..? Too bored to find out after scrolling down. Oh wait, they're addicted to deadlocks. Great.
Why are there so many of these "specialized" hobby project Linux distros that people are using as daily drivers? Are people too lazy to use an operating system that they have to do even a minor amount of configuration to use? Do people really need every program built in?
Projects like this fit all the criteria of what I've nicknamed "Mastodon projects", because they always have either (or both) Mastodon and Discord links on their websites and are primarily developed by people with "alternative" social media accounts. They always implode within a few years due to some form of ridiculous community drama that other FOSS projects don't suffer from (because other open source projects usually have a somewhat serious "community", or lack of a cohesive one altogether).
I use bazzite. I am a software developer at day, working on Unix exclusively. Let me try to give my reason.
I don’t WANT to fiddle around with some random bullshit when all I have in the evening are 1-2 hours. I want to boot the system and just get cracking with a game. Even the 1-2 hours of installation time are already a hard sell to me. It’s ~20% of my weekly gaming time.
And it’s never usually just „a minor amount of configuration“, is it? Depending on what game you are playing, what hardware you have, you can easily spend hours getting a game to work properly, and that’s with bazzite.
I want something that just works, I don’t want to spend hours figuring out magic incantations.
Though admittedly, with AI it’s gotten easier to figure out magic incantations.
This. We could be good buddies.
I'm not understanding this OS and I'm extremely confused that this post got so much traction on HN. Gosh, either I'm too young, or too old, or too nerdy.
I'm not critiquing the project itself, more like, I'm surprised [very surprised], that it got so much traction on HN, not usual news
Same feeling here. Realistically, what is this distro doing that couldn't just be done with a quick bash script on whatever the current 'new user distro' is?
The wording is weird too : "Comes with Lutris preinstalled!". Would Windows users switch to a different hypothetical "Windows Distro" that was optimised for gaming?
None of this makes any sense to me.
[flagged]
No project needs to justify its existence. I'm wondering why people would use it.
I doubt many people think about the long-term implications of using a small Linux distro like this. They see something "cool", so they use it.
I don't really care about long term implications of the OS for my standalone gaming rig in my living room. If it works, it works.
Bazzite works, so I'm happily using it. If it stops working, I'll just install another distro. Easy as
[flagged]
Why would I be an LLM?
as far as i understand, it is about specific game and performance related tweaks in the kernel. so it goes beyond just a distribution where you just string together few programs, desktop environment and some config files and call it a day.
this is why linux, after all, is still where it was 20 years ago. all those endless distributions and fragmentation make it non-competitive against the mainstream desktop operating systems. ubuntu was doing good work by becoming the de facto desktop linux by sheer branding. but they dropped the ball really hard and that opportunity to make linux desktop a serious competition is gone. now games are leading the way so maybe steam os or one of these gaming-tuned distros might pick up the momentum.
[dead]
Microsoft in disguise
IYKYK
If it would have been a fork of the Mariner distro, perhaps.