- 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 š¼ I tried it out recently and it seems fairly impressive
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Iām three of those new installs. Bazzite has surpassed every expectation I had.
Whatās so special about this? Aside from the immutable thingy, of course.
Probably the fact that they have many ISOs tailored for each supported hardware configuration, and they point the user to the right ISO with a clear wizard in their download page.
Also basically it is an unbreakable gaming focused OS very close to SteamOS, that you donāt have to maintain, and it comes preconfigured with Steam and the right drivers for your setup. Iām not the target audience, but I see the appeal.
This, so much. I tried pop_os, mint, ubuntu, and more, but all had the problem that when I had an hour to play games, It became 55min of troubleshooting some random issue and not playing because of it.
With Bazzite i can finally use linux and just boot, play a game, shutdown. No hassle.
I think this is one of the big steps that make Linux gaming more accessible to the general public. Proton was clearly the first major step and Bazzite might be the second one.
Agreed, when SteamOS gets more general hardware supporty things will get interesting, but Bazzite is a desktop with superlative Steam support, while SteamOS is more a steam console with desktop support. When people, especially newbs, want to do desktop things with their general purpose machines, on SteamOS theyāre using Arch (bleeding edge, lower stability), while Bazzites get Fedora (sharp edge, higher stability and security) which should be a less painful and frustrating experience. Of course if thereās a flatpak (possibly the third step) itāll be painless on either, and hey, everybody wins (except winblows) in either case.
Cachy/endeavour is literally more stable from updates than other options at this point.
Every distro is equally breakable by the user so thatās a moot point to compare them.
Which is the whole point of atomic distros to fix that point.
You literally should basically be going bazzite if you donāt want immutable go arch. In the context of gaming.
Like 90% of the problems over the last 3 years I see new users have is that they try a Ubuntu family distro and run head first into the shit show of how out of date they are and how shitty ppas are.
Eh, I did 4 or 5 years on Arch, broke a lot, learned a lot, got tired of that and retired to Fedora, now Bazzite. I would recommend Arch or Cachy to someone with technical chops, which is a surprising amount of PC gamers, who wants to get up to speed fast on linux. Iāll recommend ArchWiki regardless. Then there are the others who just want to game with minimal friction, for them, Bazzite. Horses for coursesā¦ Hard agree on Ubuntu.
I switched a year or two ago to Bazzite from EOS, and it (EOS) broke all of the time during large updates. If I went more than a week without updating, it was almost guaranteed to break. I used TimeShift all of the time out of necessity. Iāve only needed to rollback my Bazzite install once, and that was because I fucked it up. The rollback process was also incredibly easy
This is why I chose it. Gaming living room computer that kids canāt easily break. It just worked. Well, except for my idea to dual boot and have games pulling from an ntfs hdd. Bazzite hated that idea. So if youāre using bazzite, make sure your games are on a Linux partition. Even though Linux is ok with ntfs for some reason beyond my expertiseā¦ Games do not like it.
Steam tends to have massive issues with permissions for games on NTFS partitions. You mightāve run into that.
I second this, had the exact same issue but on Arch back in February. But luckily windows can be made to play nice with non-NTFS drives.
The immutable thing is nice, though it takes some getting used to. Itās Fedora which I already love, without any of the hassle. Everything just works. I never realized how much time I was wasting until I didnāt have to do it anymore. Every task I throw at it, it performs beautifully, even things Iām sure arenāt going to work out of the box do. Every time, so far.
I was surprised how well it handles printers. We have an old Brother wireless laser mfp. It was pretty cool when it just saw the printer automatically, but I was really impressed with how easy scanning was.
I started going down the rabbit hole of manually installing and configuring it, but then tested some simple terminal command and it already saw the scanner. Ran skanpage and Bobās your uncle.
I think you are the first person to ever have had issues with printers on Linux if you are surprised by them working on Bazzite. Printers are one of the things that almost always ājust workā on Linux, and are only a driver headache on Windows
You must have uncanny luck with printers then. The printer I have I bought for itās Linux support and I still have problems.
Across 3 offices and hundreds of PCs literally have never personally seen a issue with printers on Linux that wasnt like I forgot to hook it up to the network or something stupid.
Printers tend to just work.
To be fair, the he last time I was daily driving Linux was probably 20 years ago. I only came back in the last ~2 years.
It just works. It works better than Windows 11 in my experience. I canāt break it. I forget itās there. I just do computer stuff. Like video editing, gaming, web browsing.
Literally just the immutable thing. Otherwise itās either worse or equal to every other flavor of the month option.
So it just comes down to do you consider immutability a positive. If you do itās the top of the stack since other options are not immutable.
Itās not really surprising, Bazzite has been the talk of Linux internet for the last 18 or so months.
Iām 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. š
Itās not so much that people are focused on gaming distros, itās more that gaming distros historically havenāt 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.
Thatās 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 couldnāt, are now coming over.
Which is to say, itās not so much that there is āso many of themā, itās more that, theyāre coming over in a big wave, because theyāve been there for years, but havenāt been able to move until recently, and now, they know that there are distros out there that look and feel like something theyāre 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 āWindows but not Microsoft/Windowsā. So itās their gaming PC where they also browse the internet/social media and watch YouTube or Twitch (sometimes at the same time that theyāre 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, āIf I could use SteamOS as a traditional desktop, I would in a heartbeatā 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 itās ever been - to the point where immutable distros are as plug and play as Windows. Then Bazzite comes along and says, āHey, SteamOS isnāt desktop comparable yet, so we went and made it ourselves (with blackjack, and hookers).ā
Just an fyi, Bazzite does all of that as well. Itās not just gaming, itās a fully functional OS
So you can install packages? Itās 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 thereās 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, youāve probably already found a way (or three) to get it to work.
If all that doesnāt work, then you can layer packages onto your image by installing the local .RPM using rpm-ostree then rebooting. Iāve 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.
Most people I know primarily use their desktop computers for games. Bazzite also works great for general purpose computing, although it isnāt advertised as such.
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.
For some things.
For many things it isnāt. 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 donāt personally count āembedded development-relatedā as āgeneral computingā so I think thereās a disconnect there. š
Itās like gaming laptops. The concept of something being āgamingā focused is nonsense bullshit pr spin.
If itās good at gaming itās basically just good at everything. But people gobble up gaming like leds on a serect lab chair.
TIL chairs have LEDs now
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 youāre serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.
Why is Flatpak Steam worse for performance? Iāve been using it for years, seemingly better performance than Windows on the same system. Something inherent about Flatpak?
If youāre serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.
Mm, I donāt think Iād be willing to sacrifice my Niri workflow. Niri also supports fractional scaling and VRR, but not yet HDR, which I can live without until itās implemented. š
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 havenāt seen any performance issues, then keep on doing what youāre 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 ānativeā [sic] applications.
They literally say they are a fucking container tool like Docker in their own FAQ , you silly person.
Read again. You completely misunderstood.
Whatās a container that doesnāt run natively on the system called?
Thatās not what they were refuting. They were just saying that containers run on the metal just like any other software.
š
Thatās not what the FAQ says, rather it says Flatpaks are often sandboxed but not fully containerized. Containers donāt 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 thatās about it. They are in contrast to virtual machines that need to boot an entire additional OS before doing anything.
Looks like I donāt 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.
Isnāt it just library bundling? Itās not like itās 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 donāt know what to believe.
At least one source said the performance overhead is negligible on modern hardware, so I think Iām gucci.
Generally your life is improved any time you choose to not engage with gnome or itās nonsense. Itās a good rule of thumb for everything Linux related.
Gnome is just bad apple.
Yeah, Iām the same, but if itās an easy way to get people into the warm embrace of Linux, then hopefully theyāll look around and see other (Gen Purpose) distros exist.
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 theyāre still capable of doing well outside of gaming.
True. Letās hope itās a great stepping-stone. šš
A gaming focused distro will do everything else well too, so thats probably why.
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 Iām careless when upgrading and not checking the news page beforehand, which you are supposed to do. As long as I play by the rules, itās 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 thereās 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 Iāll check the page before hitting enter, and so on.Remember this one from 2022?
Yeah, that one ended up being a learning experienceā¦ After recovering from that dumb misadventure, I finally learned to take those announcements more seriously.
Yeah, vaguely š 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 canāt be bothered to update every day, or even every week. LOL. More like once a month or so, which means that itās usually 100 MB or more and thereās 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, itās 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. š Seems like a win-win. š
You can also selectively update packages of course, but this is strongly ill-advised unless you know what youāre doing.
But like,
doas pacman -Sy firefoxshould be fineā¦You didnāt hear it from me. š¤š„ø
The āunless you know what youāre doingā part tells me itās 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, itās awesome. If you break your system, you get to keep the pieces and learn something new along the way.
Iām utilizing this liberty by being a lazy admin who updates things like eventuallyā¢ or soonā¢. Havenāt learned any hard lessons yet, so I guess itās ok. Or maybe I just know what Iām doingā¦
Yea I bounced off Bazzite because I needed to run plex. And I couldnāt get a container to run reliably on it. Itās 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 thatās a big ass layer, youāll 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 itās root.). Run your docker-compose file through podlet, and there you go, userspace quadlets (95+% of the time, every timeā¦). Theyāre easy to love once you get your head around them.
Yeah, this is the āfunā 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 āsolutionā is to actually run one of those other distros in a container. Itās ridiculous.
Bazite is for people who want a computer to be like an iPhone near as I can tell.
I think you as yet donāt quite understand the full beauty of immutable distros. Running things in distroboxes, yeah even other distros, is not a bug, itās a feature (really) because you cannot break your main OS with a distrobox. As a developer itās a godsend, finnicky AI project that needs a specific version of python and CUDA drivers and only has instructions for Arch ? Thatās a distrobox, spin it up, play with it, archive it for later, put it away.
Thereās tiers in Bazzite, for GUI apps, flatpak, if what you want isnāt there, itās 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. Thereās 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.
Itās not a pain, itās just a different process than what youāre used to
Itās not a pain, itās just a different process than what youāre used to
Thatās exactly how people defend something that is a pain.
I think youāve got it backwards. Youāre describing whatās a pretty simple process, as a pain.
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 donāt you do the āeverything elseā part on your gaming PC as well so you donāt have to have two?
Performance. Iām 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 wasnāt enough.
Huh.
I guess with my 16 cores and 64 GB DDR5 I donāt really notice anything hampering my frame rate. š
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 whatās available. I donāt use a swap file either. š
But I guess just closing stuff down isnāt an option? Is it like services running?
AMDs dual CCD CPUs tend to perform worse than their single ccd models in games. You can āfixā that by running the game only on one, and push everything else to the second. But Iād 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 youāre in a game and you have a video running that taking GPU horsepower. Iām not going to have a second GPU just to avoid that.
Hey, if you have the space and donāt mind the extra heat and electricity consumption šš all good by me.
Thatās 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 Iām not using it Iām 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 (itās also the NAS, so no sleep, but mostly lives @ ~50W, got the GPU down to 4W idle :)
How do you know how many active users?
fedora distros have a thing called countme that pings their servers so they can measure general trends in how many people are using the OS and the various spins, which can be helpful for determining what to focus on. some amount of the userbase opt out of it
And this is on by default?
It is on by default, but can be disabled in your repo config: https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/conf_ref.html
The feature works by adding a flag to one random http request to a fedora repo every week. Fedora then aggregates the http logs that have been flagged to derive their metrics. You can opt out of sending the flag, but if youāre querying fedora repos then you still end up in their http log.
But saying it pings their servers isnāt quite a fair statement as itās not some background service that opens a network connection, it sounds to me at least like itās data that is sent to the Fedora repos once a week when you update your system?
Clients (DNF, PackageKit, ā¦) have been modified so they add a countme variable in their requests to mirrors.fedoraproject.org once a week. This ends up in our webserver log data which lets us generate usage statistics.
Would be glad to be corrected on this though as I am a long time Fedora user now and Iām not overly fond of my data being collected by big corpo; itās why I left Windows in the first place š
I feel like people lately go a bit overboard when itās about protecting their ādataā.
As far as I see all it does is just send one single number that shows that there is someone using this specific operation system and it does not include any personal or unique to the user information.
In my opinion this does not even qualify as āmy dataā
Thatās cool. I donāt really have a problem with that, just curious.
I mean fedora is pretty famous for data gathering in the Linux space. Itās kinda what they do. They have ended up in rather sizeable kerfuffles over it.
Fedora is after all one of the two /corpo/ option of the Linux world right next to Ubuntu.
Itās a little strange how these numbers are relatively far off from what the Steam Hardware Survey suggests. On there, Linux is 3.2% of the userbase and Bazzite is 5.5% of that, so Bazzite is about 0.176% of the total userbase. Steam has about 70 million daily active users, so Bazziteās share of that would be about 120 000.
could be bazzite users are more/less likely to take the hardware survey or are likely to opt out of countme.
I ended up with CachyOS over Bazzite but Iām looking into the latter for my dad since Iām guessing itās more stable and easier.
I justā¦ Idk, I like Arch over Fedora. I blame the little pacman eating my progress whenever I install stuff in konsole. Desktop mode to desktop mode itās the same KDE Plasma Iād be using, though. Are there any other striking differences between Cachy and Bazzite?
Edit: it was good to bring it up here, yāall are very knowledgeable on these things. It sounds to me that I need to get bazzite for my dad mostly because he wonāt want to fuss or work on it and that I made the right call for myself since Cachy (and Arch in general) gives more flexibility. Frankly I might not even give him desktop mode default, he strictly wants something to play from bed in full on retirement mode.
AFAIK CachyOS still demands a little involvement in the OS. Like, you have to watch the logs when you update, you need keep context in mind, like knowing youāre running KDE and an Nvidia card and so on. But I feel like Bazzite would be more usable to someone who doesnāt know (and doesnāt need to know) what a filesystem or a discrete GPU are.
But in terms of stability, CachyOS has been rock solid for me. The cadence that Arch + CachyOS devs fix stuff has been utterly perfect.
So I say if your dad is more āsoftware curious,ā give him CachyOS. If he doesnāt like messing with computer stuff, give him Bazzite.
Itās unfortunate that years as a tech guy at his job has made him less software curious, so probably bazzite then. Rather, I guess when itās your job to fix things, tinkering isnāt fun anymore.
I second this, itās why I went with Bazzite on my main rig - it just needs to work and be reliable. The last thing I want to be doing in my spare time is funking around trying to fix anything that happens to break.
All my other devices run whatever I feel like so I can scratch that curiosity-itch but they get reinstalled if anything major breaks and I canāt fix it in a reasonable amount of time
Ah.
Well one catch Iāve found outside of CachyOS is that if something isnāt working right, itās easy to create a ton of work for yourself trying to fix it. An example would be fighting your system trying to roll a package forward for a fix, which then gets out of sync with your distro, which requires more manual fixing since youāre the one maintaining it nowā¦
The Arch/Cachy ecosystem, on the other hand, tends to encourage more usage of system packages, and fixes stuff quick. Usually waiting a day or a few days + a
pacman -Syyuufixes what was wrong.If your Dad is a software engineer, itās possible he might fall into that trap with Bazzite. It kinda just depends on his habits/personality, though from what you describe this may not be a huge danger.
Him 20-30 years ago probably would have. This is a man who, when I was a kid, made a custom UI for msdos so my brother and I could play games easier. He wouldnāt just tinker, heād probably be contributing.
Old age and alcoholism has kind of robbed him of that, though. At this point heāll probably just ask me to fix it if it goes wrong, lol
iād recommend aurora, it is from the same team that made bazzite, and is literally just bazzite but without the gaming apps preinstalled, focused more on average pc users
I went from Arch to Fedora idk, I think over a decade ago and havenāt looked back, not sure how things are nowadays, but I switched again this year from Fedora to Bazzite and I love it. Sure, youāve got to learn to do things a little differently, but so far itās been great. And it forced me to use distrobox, which honestly I should have done sooner, itās absolutely great.
Iāve been using Fedora for while but I decided to try Bazzite and for the most part itās been a great out of the box experience. I didnāt have to mess with NVidia and Wayland as much as I did with vanilla Fedora.
It is a little wonky compared to other distros. I donāt like the way some features are managed, but for a new non-Linux user, they wonāt know the difference. I highly recommend it for people that just want to jump on Steam and go.
The problem with a new user is they need more documentation and more resources which atomic distros like bazzite have less of. Making them worse.
Bazzite is for knowledgeable users who donāt want to tinker much anymore or children who arenāt allowed to modify their computer.
Most people donāt want to tinker. They just want a machine that works without hassle or need to think much about how everything works, or risk breaking somethingā¦ But also without the bloat or the walled garden of Apple.
Thatās a good point overall and definitely something to consider.
However, I donāt think it applies to Bazzite specifically because theyāve had such a meteoric growth rise in popularity over the last year. They have more resources to make that stuff.
But, I donāt think most people in modern hardware need to do much for Bazzite to get going. I think unless they want to play Windows games, they shouldnāt need to do anything weird.
Bazzite handled all the annoying setup for Wayland and the Nvidia drivers. Bazzite also manages the updates without a user needing to know how the terminal works. (I personally donāt like that, but itās probably good for new users).
Bazzite also has fairly robust documentation, which is probably not the case for most Atomic Distros. They also have pretty decent support on social media and in their discord server.
Bazzite also manages the updates without a user needing to know how the terminal works. (I personally donāt like that, but itās probably good for new users).
Should be noted that this is entirely optional. I update manually through the terminal with āujust updateā
Iām in the same boat, my main gaming pc is still bazzite for now (I use it like a HTPC) but eventually when i can be bothered Iāll be on cachy os as Iāve really enjoyed being able to use the arch-iness on my other devices that have it.
Honestly itās pretty easy to decide if you should use cachy or bazzite.
Do you use your PC for anything more then office PC or console? If yes pick cachy. If no pick bazzite.
Atomic is great till you have to do fucking anything then itās more effort then itās worth basically instantly. And iv seen more people break bazzite trying to do basic shit then iv seen cachy randomly explode because āarch is unstableā.
Bazzite is not a home user desktop os, no atomic os is. The entire concept is basically designed for locked down office PCs and consoles where you donāt actually do anything with the PC but use it.
If your giving a PC to a elderly family member, a child, you do actual business on it thatās mission critical. Bazzite is fucking fantastic, so long as you also never give the admin password to the user.
Seriously the entire atomic concept really isā¦ Baffling thoā¦ Its best use case is one that doesnāt really exist in the same context as gaming unless itās a console. Itās baffling that bazzite is as popular as it is. If not for the simple fact there is an absurd amount of misinformation around arch and really Linux in general.
Because people cling to out of date knowledge from a decade ago because of memes.
Really 9 times out of 10 normal fedora is better for most avg users then cachy or bazzite.
Iām no expert but I didnāt have any trouble compiling and running a native Linux FPS game in an Arch distrobox on bazzite to test a bugfix.
Iām just good enough with Linux to know my way around and to break stuff when I have unfettered access to mess with the base system. Bazzite saves me from myself.
Just not true. You can do nearly everything on Bazzite that you can do on other distros, thereās sometimes just a different (often easier) process to do it.
HTPCs are why bazzite is as popular as it is
handhelds are really great with it too. i use it on my main pc tho because bazzite-dx simplifies a lot for me
If someone has to try and break into Bazzite to do anything (if theyāre not a developer) then theyāre doing something very wrong.
What the hell were they even trying to do!?
I think the most important advice is to use a separate disk/SSD for your home directory so if you screw something up or if you want to change directions, you donāt lose your files. Some of my vendor contracts actively require that I do just this.
Sample size of 1, here.
Bazzite was my initial entry-point into Linux, but I bounced off it within 48 hours as its immutable nature made it impossible for me to install the native PIA VPN client and for the life of me I couldnāt get the OpenVPN to play nice.
Currently on CachyOS, and seems to run just fine - giving an end user just enough rope š
Plus itās Arch underneath the hood too, so I can still cheekily say that I run Arch!
ETA: I wonder if/how long I would count as part of this Bazzite cohort?
Yeah I struggled with reading my rom library over SMB so also had to install something else.
you can layer vpns via rpm-ostree install [.rpm location]
I donāt think PIA uses RPMs
mullvad is a better choice anyways. you can also download a wireguard config and load it directly into the network manager
While I agree, itās a pretty lame thing to say āThis doesnāt work for your use case? Thatās because your use case is wrongā If the distro doesnāt support PIA, then that is an issue with the distro, not the user.
Nah, itās an issue, full stop. PIA isnāt responsible for making its shit work everywhere (tho it would be a more responsible approach to use an universal approach) and Bazzite isnāt responsible for making sure every program works on the distro.
Yeah, I agree
Yeah, getting PIA running without the native client has been a bit rough. These days Iāve just gotten use to starting a terminal as soon as I log-in, but I probably need a more permanent solution. maybe itāll be switching to cachy as well.
PIA VPN
Holy mother of blob, Batman
I barely know what Iām looking at! š
Pretty sure I tried poking around that file on Bazzite also to see if I could locate the RPM to try and do a manual terminal install - but gave up after a few minutes.
sudo rpm-ostree install foo.rpm
Should work. Iāve been doing this with the mullvad VPN client. Only annoyance is that I have to manually install when thereās an update (the app notifies me)
PIA has OpenVPN or IPsec profiles (I forget which) that can be imported into NetworkManager. You just have to put in your account info.
I donāt think every location has oneā¦but a lot do.
There are apparently OpenVPN profile you can import, but as I said in my earlier comment - I just couldnāt get it to work (connection attempts would just time out).
I still have like ~18 months of PIA left (joined under a 100% cashback offer), but will likely switch to Proton or Mullvad afterwards - as they both seem to work better under Linux from what Iāve read.
Iām sure over time Iāll tinker more under the hood over time, but for now - Iām just trying to ease myself into Linux with pre-configured installers when particular apps arenāt available through the Cachy Package Manager.
30-odd years of Windows usage has dulled my IT skills!
Proton has a client app as well, doesnāt it? If it doesnāt have OpenVPN/Wireshark config support I would avoid it
A worth watch about vpns, obviously just one opinion. https://youtu.be/vQmLMGcCO3I
As a normie, I love Bazzite because itās as intuitive as Microsoft without the intrusive and monopolistic proprietary features, and Bazzite is also built for gaming.
Iāve been using Bazzite for a while and mostly happy with it. So from 2026 and on, Iāll start donating a Windows license amount of money to Bazzite and other fundementals every year. Because fuck Windows, thatās why.
Wikipedia: Bazzite is a Fedora-based[1] Linux distribution designed to be similar to Valveās SteamOS 3 while still functioning as a normal computer.[2][3][4] It offers support for handheld PC devices, including the Steam Deck.[5][6][7][8] Bazzite is named after the mineral of the same name, as Fedora Atomic Desktops historically had used a mineral naming scheme.[9] It aims to deliver a seamless out-of-the-box experience for both casual and advanced Linux gamers.[10]
Iām not wild about it for desktop, but I did convert a laptop into a gaming PC for the living room (for lighter titles). I went with Bazzite for the Steam-deck like features and it has been great.
Iām in this picture. Installed bazzite on steam deck and itās fucking awesome!
What does it do better than SteamOS on the Steam Deck itself?
Genuinely asking as I didnāt really see any need to switch even as the compulsive tinkerer that I amā¦
Generally noā¦ Cachyos steam deck version is better in basically every test iv seen them compared head to head in.
Bazzite is more or less the default choice cause itās a flavor of the month more then it makes any kind of actual sense.
If your going to bazzite your typically better off staying on the stock OS.
Have you seen comparisons between SteamOS and CachyOS? Since we established Bazzite is probably inferior on the Steam Deck when I only want to play games, I wonder if Iād gain anything with CachyOS, which seems to be more like the Arch I usually use.
Being able to install it yourself on any device seems like a big advantage :P
Got it, thank you.
I donāt have any device, I specifically own a Steam deck and if thatās the main benefit, I probably donāt want it on my other devices (I use Arch, btw).
Shouldāve added āon the Steam Deckā in the first place, sorry š
Haha yeah, Iām not super up-to-date on Bazzite, but I believe it doesnāt add much on a Steam deck. (And if you donāt want your other devices to boot up into Steam, you probably donāt want it there either.)
Huh I guess itās ānormalā but I hadnāt heard of Linux OSes tracking active user telemetry. Turns out this is a fedora / rpm mechanism that tracks the ip addresses of people updating their system. Something to think about. Archlinux for example does not do any form of this tracking as far as I can tell
Debian has an option to anonymously report packages installed. Thereās a question about this at install time and at any time you can install or uninstall the popularity-contest package.
In Debian, thatās opt-in, whereas in Ubuntu itās opt-out. Tells you something about the core values, doesnāt it?
Sure. On the other hand, one implementation seems like it would be fairly useless.
True, but I still think there are some significant ethical questions here.
iirc it doesnt track ip, it just sends a ping for counting, the unique ID is when you installed your distro. its easy to opt out of. in the past it used IP but they changed it because they didnt like the privacy implications of it. regardless, you should use secureblue if you want a fedora atomic image focused on privacy and security. personally i consider the risk of being included in the count negligible (and on par with pinging timeservers imo, so unless youre making your computer completely silent its kinda nonsensical to worry about) so i keep it running. you still ultimately pull data from fedora/bazzite servers for updates (and thus, show IP) so i dont really understand consternation over this.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/counting/
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/infra/sysadmin_guide/dnf-counting/
Very cool. I am still running Bazzite as my reintroduction into Linux as a daily and itās 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 itās a great distro for those who donāt 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 youāve got to forget the complicated approaches youāre used to, and go for the easy one, it usually works. Lots can be done from KDEās 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.
