- cross-posted to:
- linuxfurs@pawb.social
- bazzite@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- linuxfurs@pawb.social
- bazzite@lemmy.world
https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg
Graphs can be found here on their github. Since around mid November the active user count for Bazzite has gone up by around 16k active users.
Personally, my only wish for Bazzite is a Cosmic version 👼 I tried it out recently and it seems fairly impressive
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In my mother language, kinoite sounds like “what a night”, ans I can’t read it without some giggling >.<
Also, TIL that kinoite is a mineral
bringus studios referense??///?
deleted by creator
Been a happy Bazzite users for over a year. Not much of a gamer but NVIDIA drivers that don’t require tinkering during updates (like with immutable Fedora) and being able to just use the old install until broken updates (sleep mode maybe once?) is sooooo convenient! Also people on their Discord (yeah, I know …) are generally super helpful.
I’m in this picture. Installed bazzite on steam deck and it’s fucking awesome!
hell yeah! linux for the win! I’m working on a computer and might try that one out when I get it to work. hopefully the hdd isn’t dead
Many had cool presents it seems 🤭
I’m one. I set up a Windows/bazzite dual boot situation and I’ve never booted windows since.
what’s bazzite like? might experiment with it when I get my caseless frankenstein floor computer to work lol
think steamos with all of it’s goodies (and more bazzite-exclusive features), but on a more standardised linux base so you can run it on any pc and handheld, not just the steam deck. bazzite is also just as unbreakable as steamos, since it is an immutable (read-only system files) os, and updates the same way as a phone does (downloads an update in the background, and uses it on next boot with a rollback option in the super rare event that it breaks something).
that’s sweet, will probably try it!
Someone else could explain better than me I’m sure but, it’s a Linux distro that is gaming focused. It comes pre-loaded with steam and video card drivers so that someone has a decent chance that their games will just “work”.
will probably try when I get a case for my computer!
I was very happy with Bazzite on my Ally X but version 43 (them or Fedora) broke my WiFi. Then the USBC port has a physical problem as it seems to only deliver power.
My only option without LAN atm was a cloud recovery to Win 11. Uuugh.
I’m surprised people are so keen on these gaming-focused distros.
I just want a great, general-purpose computing system that can do gaming as well. 😁
Most people I know primarily use their desktop computers for games. Bazzite also works great for general purpose computing, although it isn’t advertised as such.
For some things.
For many things it isn’t. It is usable (I use it) but with a bunch of workarounds for anything embedded development-related since it needs specific vendor software with device access. I have had to use a variety of distrobox + app image solutions that are often a bit worse than a system that installs them as native apps.
I don’t personally count “embedded development-related” as “general computing” so I think there’s a disconnect there. 😅
It’s like gaming laptops. The concept of something being “gaming” focused is nonsense bullshit pr spin.
If it’s good at gaming it’s basically just good at everything. But people gobble up gaming like leds on a serect lab chair.
TIL chairs have LEDs now
Agreed. Bloody fantastic for general purpose. Seems like a well kept secret. A lot of people assume Bazzite is just Steam in Big-Screen mode.
It’s not so much that people are focused on gaming distros, it’s more that gaming distros historically haven’t been much of a thing, and gamers generally had to use windows for their gaming, because the linux experience was limited and sub-optimal. Even dedicated linux users would keep a windows partition/machine that they used for gaming.
That’s not true anymore, as basically anything without kernel level anti cheat works on linux, which means that a huge amount of folk that would have moved to linux earlier, but couldn’t, are now coming over.
Which is to say, it’s not so much that there is “so many of them”, it’s more that, they’re coming over in a big wave, because they’ve been there for years, but haven’t been able to move until recently, and now, they know that there are distros out there that look and feel like something they’re familiar with.
I guess we have different use cases is all. People who primarily use their computers for gaming.
My PC is:
- My media server
- My workstation when WFH
- My entertainment center if the TV is busy
- My gaming PC
- My hobby development PC
(In no particular order.)
I think a lot of people are basically looking for “Windows but not Microsoft/Windows”. So it’s their gaming PC where they also browse the internet/social media and watch YouTube or Twitch (sometimes at the same time that they’re gaming), and maybe do some other ancillary stuff like art (digital art, 3d rendering, music, video or photo editing, etc.) or some other hobby related stuff.
So Bazzite is kinda at the center of this perfect storm where plenty of PC gamers have seen the SteamOS/Big Picture mode and gone, “If I could use SteamOS as a traditional desktop, I would in a heartbeat” while Microsoft is also fumbling harder than they ever have - which is saying a lot - and Linux is the easiest to get up and running that it’s ever been - to the point where immutable distros are as plug and play as Windows. Then Bazzite comes along and says, “Hey, SteamOS isn’t desktop comparable yet, so we went and made it ourselves (with blackjack, and hookers).”
Just an fyi, Bazzite does all of that as well. It’s not just gaming, it’s a fully functional OS
So you can install packages? It’s not a fully immutable system?
You install the package and it adds it to your OS image (that re-initializes every time you boot).
They say you should try to avoid it if you can, so if there’s a flatpak use that, if not, then a distrobox with Fedora toolbox for .RPMs or Arch (for AUR and yay) or whatever other distro you choose, then shortcutting it right to your host OS. By this point, you’ve probably already found a way (or three) to get it to work.
If all that doesn’t work, then you can layer packages onto your image by installing the local .RPM using rpm-ostree then rebooting. I’ve only had to do this with my VPN client so far. Only annoyance is that you have to update it manually.
Ooh, okay, definitely sounds cumbersome at first glance.
Yeah, I’m the same, but if it’s an easy way to get people into the warm embrace of Linux, then hopefully they’ll look around and see other (Gen Purpose) distros exist.
True. Let’s hope it’s a great stepping-stone. 😊👍
To be fair some of these distros centered on gaming may really have some priorities that are more useful for gamers. Like better driver and system support. And I think they’re still capable of doing well outside of gaming.
In my experience, Debian has been very low maintenance. Occasionally, you may run into an issue that would be solved by having newer packages. If that happens, consider switching to Fedora.
My Fedora installations have been pretty smooth. The only thing that always breaks randomly is the software update GUI. I just got fed up with that and ended up using the terminal for installing all updates. Apparently this distro requires a bit more maintenance.
Fedora installations have been pretty smooth.
ended up using the terminal for installing all updates.
My experience as well with my Arch installations after a decade with that distro. I run a system upgrade because I want to, not because I need to. Never does it break unless I’m careless when upgrading and not checking the news page beforehand, which you are supposed to do. As long as I play by the rules, it’s super stable. (Never did it break for me anyway though. Never happened apart from hardware failure.)
Although admittedly I almost never do check the news page before upgrading, but/because there’s rarely anything there. And after a while you learn to recognize the volatile packages which can break your system, so e.g. if
systemdhas an update I’ll check the page before hitting enter, and so on.Remember this one from 2022?
Yeah, that one ended up being a learning experience… After recovering from that dumb misadventure, I finally learned to take those announcements more seriously.
Yeah, vaguely 😅 I use syslinux for booting, habit from when I used to dual boot, so I was luckily not affected. But yes, it is definitely wise to check the news before upgrading system-critical packages!
I can’t be bothered to update every day, or even every week. LOL. More like once a month or so, which means that it’s usually 100 MB or more and there’s at least one package that is more or less critical. When I start updating, and before hitting Y, I pause for a second and realise I should totally check the news first. Usually, it’s fine, but over the years, there have been a few times when intervention was necessary.
If you only update once a month (which should be fine as well, definitely), then you only need to check the news page once a month too, less often than I do probably. 😄 Seems like a win-win. 👌
You can also selectively update packages of course, but this is strongly ill-advised unless you know what you’re doing.
But like,
doas pacman -Sy firefoxshould be fine…You didn’t hear it from me. 🤐🥸
The “unless you know what you’re doing” part tells me it’s totally worth it in some highly exceptional situations. You just need to be able to justify spending a few hours to figure out exactly how to do it safely.
Best thing about Linux is that you can do literally anything you want. If it works, it’s awesome. If you break your system, you get to keep the pieces and learn something new along the way.
I’m utilizing this liberty by being a lazy admin who updates things like eventually™ or soon™. Haven’t learned any hard lessons yet, so I guess it’s ok. Or maybe I just know what I’m doing…
I have two computers at my main desk at home. One is exclusively used for gaming, the other is used for everything else. In theory Bazzite is perfect for me.
Why don’t you do the “everything else” part on your gaming PC as well so you don’t have to have two?
Performance. I’m a heavy multi tasker and I want nothing to get in the way of my frame rate.
For context my old second machine was a 2018 Mac mini with an 8th Gen. i5 and 32 gigs of ram. It wasn’t enough.
Huh.
I guess with my 16 cores and 64 GB DDR5 I don’t really notice anything hampering my frame rate. 😅
But on my old PC with just 12 cores and 32 GB DDR4, I would sometimes close Firefox and all those YouTube tabs to get some memory back and make some CPU cycles available. Gosh darn Linux just handing out memory on loan rather than what’s available. I don’t use a swap file either. 😅
But I guess just closing stuff down isn’t an option? Is it like services running?
AMDs dual CCD CPUs tend to perform worse than their single ccd models in games. You can “fix” that by running the game only on one, and push everything else to the second. But I’d much rather not deal with that. A second computer is much easier.
Plus I can fuck with computer A when computer B is still doing other things without interrupting. That alone is worth it.
Also if you’re in a game and you have a video running that taking GPU horsepower. I’m not going to have a second GPU just to avoid that.
Hey, if you have the space and don’t mind the extra heat and electricity consumption 😎👌 all good by me.
That’s the other thing. My new computer is a Mac Studio which takes up almost no space, and uses like 10-15 watts. Because I can just turn off my gaming computer when I’m not using it I’m saving significantly more power. Like just your CPU at idle uses more than the entire Mac actually doing things.
My second screen is a laptop (T580), also bazzite, often running moonlight to the big monitor so the main box goes to low power mode when not in use (it’s also the NAS, so no sleep, but mostly lives @ ~50W, got the GPU down to 4W idle :)
A gaming focused distro will do everything else well too, so thats probably why.
Universal Blue is the project which maintains Bazzite and other brilliant immutable images based on Fedora Silverblue (Gnome) and Fedora Kinoite (KDE)
Bazzite has Steam bundled in the image which is a bit better for performance, Bazzite-dx is Bazzite with devtools.
Aurora is another image made for general computing, Steam is installed as a Flatpak with a little worse performance but not much
Bluefin is your typical dev-workstation
If you’re serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.
Generally your life is improved any time you choose to not engage with gnome or it’s nonsense. It’s a good rule of thumb for everything Linux related.
Gnome is just bad apple.
Why is Flatpak Steam worse for performance? I’ve been using it for years, seemingly better performance than Windows on the same system. Something inherent about Flatpak?
If you’re serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.
Mm, I don’t think I’d be willing to sacrifice my Niri workflow. Niri also supports fractional scaling and VRR, but not yet HDR, which I can live without until it’s implemented. 😁
Flatpak is simply a sandboxed application, similar to a Docker container. Its better to have natively installed applications over sandboxed if you are seeking the highest level of performance.
You have essentially made all your games run within a sandboxed instance which has a limited set of binaries that emulate another mini OS within your primary OS.
If you haven’t seen any performance issues, then keep on doing what you’re doing, the software is very well made compared to Ubuntu Snap and likely has similar driver performance as close as possible to bare-metal
Flatpak is simply a sandboxed application, similar to a Docker container. Its better to have natively installed applications over sandboxed if you are seeking the highest level of performance.
This is bullshit. Containers run natively on your system just like “native” [sic] applications.
They literally say they are a fucking container tool like Docker in their own FAQ , you silly person.
That’s not what they were refuting. They were just saying that containers run on the metal just like any other software.
🙂
Read again. You completely misunderstood.
What’s a container that doesn’t run natively on the system called?
That’s not what the FAQ says, rather it says Flatpaks are often sandboxed but not fully containerized. Containers don’t need to have a performance penalty because they run on the same kernel as the host. Container tech applies a chroot, disables some capabilities within the container and that’s about it. They are in contrast to virtual machines that need to boot an entire additional OS before doing anything.
Looks like I don’t understand how it works and should simply shut the fuck up instead of spreading nonsense.
essentially made all your games run within a sandboxed instance which has a limited set of binaries that emulate another mini OS within your primary OS.
Isn’t it just library bundling? It’s not like it’s running inside a virtual machine or anything.
I can see the Rocket League process right there when listing my user processes, e.g.
There are so many conflicting reports regarding the performance on Flatpak, for Steam but also in general, so I don’t know what to believe.
At least one source said the performance overhead is negligible on modern hardware, so I think I’m gucci.
Yea I bounced off Bazzite because I needed to run plex. And I couldn’t get a container to run reliably on it. It’s still a cool distro though.
Edit: typo
Very easy with podman / quadlets
This. If you must have rooted containers docker-compose is only a
rpm-ostree install docker-composeaway, but that’s a big ass layer, you’ll feel it every update, and insecure to boot (yes I know docker finally got userspace, but how many times have you seen it used? Everywhere it’s root.). Run your docker-compose file through podlet, and there you go, userspace quadlets (95+% of the time, every time…). They’re easy to love once you get your head around them.
Yeah, this is the “fun” of bazite. If you want to do the things it does well (desktopy things) it works well. But then things that are trivial in other distros are a pain. And the “solution” is to actually run one of those other distros in a container. It’s ridiculous.
Bazite is for people who want a computer to be like an iPhone near as I can tell.
I think you as yet don’t quite understand the full beauty of immutable distros. Running things in distroboxes, yeah even other distros, is not a bug, it’s a feature (really) because you cannot break your main OS with a distrobox. As a developer it’s a godsend, finnicky AI project that needs a specific version of python and CUDA drivers and only has instructions for Arch ? That’s a distrobox, spin it up, play with it, archive it for later, put it away.
There’s tiers in Bazzite, for GUI apps, flatpak, if what you want isn’t there, it’s in a distrobox Arch in AUR and you can integrate it as an application into the main OS. Stuff that truly needs system level access, like zsh and intel-undervolt gets layered into the main OS with rpm-ostree. There’s security benefits as well like SELinux, but this post has gone on long enough.
It is so not an iPhone.
Distrobox is not a feature of immutable distros. It runs just fine on Debian. As does flatpak.
Duh, but it shines in immutable. Enjoy your debian, I like it too, for servers.
It’s not a pain, it’s just a different process than what you’re used to
It’s not a pain, it’s just a different process than what you’re used to
That’s exactly how people defend something that is a pain.
I think you’ve got it backwards. You’re describing what’s a pretty simple process, as a pain.
buy, buy, BUY!
Very cool. I am still running Bazzite as my reintroduction into Linux as a daily and it’s been great for gaming but I will say that as more and more familiarity rolls in, I do get frustrated with it being an immutable distro and having to jump through hoops to get it do what I want.
Still I think it’s a great distro for those who don’t want to deal with MS bullshit anymore and a great friendly, works right out of the box while you learn or relearn Linux, and gets you gaming without a lot of hassle and having to deal with less than friendly Linux users.
I found, as an experienced Linux user, that with Bazzite you’ve got to forget the complicated approaches you’re used to, and go for the easy one, it usually works. Lots can be done from KDE’s system settings, or from the bundled utilities. Also I disagree with the order they chose for the application installation methods on their wiki, I think distrobox should be right after Flatpak.
What I would like to know is what data they use as a reference to produce that graph and whether that data can be audited.
Probably data from their Bazaar or I heard some other Fedora tool. I believe the growth, its actually good and not in a gimmicky way.
im in that chart! i just built my wife a gaming PC, she is not a PC person and knows exactly nothing about linux as a whole, but she loves her steamdeck and bazzite means she never has to worry about opening a terminal (or even the desktop if she doesnt want to)
Excuse my ignorance. I know nothing about this stuff. Aren’t Steamdeck and Bazzite completely unrelated things? Or is Bazzite something that you install on Steamdeck? Your comment confused me.
Bonus question: what would be a good piece of used hardware to install Bazzite on? Could I install it on an older MS Surface for example?
not at all! SteamOS and Bazzite are pretty fundamentally different on the back end (one is arch, one is fedora) but on the front end, they both launch into steam big picture mode, and offer a KDE desktop you can switch to.
steamOS is available for download as a beta, but it is still a very handheld focused distro and does not include simple QOL things like print drivers, it struggles with things like wake from sleep, but it’s fairly stable and pretty usable
bazzite is a little more refined and a little more fully fleshed out, it includes more packages and drivers and is better suited as a ‘daily driver’ os
both are immutable distros, meaning you can’t really install stuff outside of the official app store/repository and a lot of terminal commands wont work out of the box. this means there are ‘nannies’ to make sure you don’t effectively softlock your os by running random terminal commands that chatbot told you were a good idea while troubleshooting.
the primary focus of these distros is gaming, so they are optimized for speed, performance, and compatibility with steam/lutris, and putting up safety rails to make sure you dont nuke yourself.
distros like cachyOS and nobara have the same focus, but do not have the nannies, so you can sudo whatever you want (but remember, #3 with great power comes great responsibility). its gaming focused, but meant for more confident power users.
in terms of what to install it on… linux loves team red, and redder the better! everything AMD is always going to work best, an intel cpu is going to work as poorly (hot and slow) on linux as it does on windows, but amd GPU is always preferred for any linux builds. ive never had a microsoft surface to mess around with, but youtube suggests there are lots of options for installing linux on a surface (although i dont know what hoops you have to jump trough… but if youre interested in linux, then jumping through hoops should be second nature to you lol)
I’ve been using Bazzite for a while and mostly happy with it. So from 2026 and on, I’ll start donating a Windows license amount of money to Bazzite and other fundementals every year. Because fuck Windows, that’s why.
