Bazzite is seeing an insane amount of growth right now
I had such a good experience switching to bazzite (from arch btw) that I put Aurora on my wife’s Ryzen 2500u laptop when windows 10 was taken out to a nice farm.
That went well until she said her friend’s kids couldn’t play games anymore. I quickly and flawlessly rebased it to bazzite and set up games.
A few hiccups with lacking Microsoft Office and having to learn the alternatives was the only issue she has had but that only took a few days for her to get down.
How is Bazzite for NVIDIA users?
It’s been flawless for me with similar performance (slightly better in some areas) than Windows.
At most you might have to switch to the closed driver image
It’s been working perfectly for me with no tinkering.
I kept breaking my fedora install so I went to bazzite that month lol
I wish people stopped recommending Mint to Windows users
I’m perfectly fine with Mint as a recommendation. It’s not what I would choose, but it does work for a large portion of people without issues.
I am very glad that I hardly ever see Manjaro recommended to new comers anymore though - that’s a curse/trap. There are so much better “Arch but easier” distros now that are rock solid.
As someone who has gone from windows to mint, what is wrong with it? So far I have 0 issues and can run all the games I want. What am I missing out on?
Absolutely nothing. If you’re vibin’ with Mint, 3 Huzzahs for you! If you get curious to try something else later, that’s great too!
It’s not the distro you use that matters in the story of Life, it’s the fact you use Linux that matters.
It suffers from the same problem all Debian/Ubuntu family distros suffer from.
Being horribly out of date. It’s a very slow moving family of distros. Which can be a good thing if your work load doesn’t involve new hardware and software along with a focus on stability and reliability. Since if things don’t update they can’t break.
This can result in support for hardware and software being upwards of two to three YEARS out of date. Which for gamers for example is unacceptable and causes issues more often then not.
It’s the why fedora or arch based distros are generally speaking the better option to suggest to people. Depending on their level of intelligence, education and willingness to learn.
Bazzite and cachyOS for example are both fantastic for gamers.
Fedora or endeavour for your run of the mill office PC.
There is a serious argument to be made that the mass adoption of bazzite and the general flavor of the month affection for immutable distros is very likely going to cause issues for loads of users down the road.
So bazzite being overly popular is somewhat concerning. Flavor of the month distros have a bad tendency to implode randomly.
A big barrier to Linux adoption is lack of software, and immutable distros locking you out of the traditional package managers like APT or DNF or Pacman and limiting you to what is provided on Flatpak, I think might trip some folks.
So bazzite being overly popular is somewhat concerning. Flavor of the month distros have a bad tendency to implode randomly.
If it implodes you can just rebase to kinoite with a single command without needing to backup anything
This can result in support for hardware and software being upwards of two to three YEARS out of date. Which for gamers for example is unacceptable and causes issues more often then not.
I think your perspective might be a bit biased towards your own bubble here. People are still buying Nintendo Switch’s. People are still buying Steam Decks.
I am getting close to 600 games in my Steam Library, but only 2 were released this year. Both were Indie games (Fragrance Point and Tower Wizard).
Ram is costing hundreds of dollars. GPU’s are costing thousands. Desktop gaming, heck desktop ownership in general, has been falling off. If people are still on x86, they are more likely to be on laptops.
For the average person, the idea that you need your OS to be updated every couple of weeks so that you can check your email and play Minecraft with your kids is insane.
I feel like this might come down to more people building their own towers vs buying them outright, whereas those who wouldn’t be inclined to build their own PC are instead defaulting to laptops.
I’d be curious what it looked like during Covid, because a lot of non-PC gamers I knew all of a sudden were interested in building their own rigs.
Packages on Ubuntu was why I had to move. I had issues daily and each time I looked it was actually fixed but not available in the distro. It was especially amnoying for development where I had to manually compile newer versions. Snap being forced while being outdated as well was also part of it.
It’s very stable, but outdated imo, especially its default desktop environnement. Kinda makes linux look like a weird old windows clone, while other desktops can be very modern and way prettier than Windows
I love cinnamon, now you kids get off my lawn
My Cheap, Cheerful, Chinese mini desktop is running the Fedora Cinnamon spin. Works great! And Cinnamon is the best Gnome experience in existence anymore.
Cinnamon is the second of five attempts to defuckulate Gnome that I’m aware of, and my personal favorite.
Yep. Mine too. At this point it’s the best modern take on Gnome 2.
I love apt more than I love cinnamon, now scram!
I spent years running Ubuntu. I’ve typed ‘sudo apt-get install’ so many times I got carpel fingernail from doing it. ‘sudo dnf install’ is less typing and could have saved my fingernails. Now I use Kinonite and have all updates set to automatic and I very seldom even need to do anything at all.
Yes, I’m old, lazy, and can’t be bothered anymore. Why do you ask? ;)
That’s fair, it’s not exactly popping off the screen on looks. It was the underlying functionality and ease of use that sold it to me. Tried KDE plasma which was prettier but just changing sound output was so complicated. I have 2 speakers but it listed 8-10 different outputs I’m sure I technically do somehow but I just want a drop-down
I like bazzite-kde because it’s similar to windows. Gnome bothered me - in particular not being able to set a blank desktop easily.
Booting Gnome for the first time is such a baffling experience. Then you discover extensions and it feels pretty good.
I don’t like that I’m beholden to extensions that may break after an update to get what I want out of it, but I still use it on my laptop cause it’s the best touchscreen experience I’ve had (after tweaks)
I don’t know. I use KDE on Debian on my desktop, but I have set up Linux Mint Cinnamon on family laptop and it runs and looks fine.
Why is Mint wasting their spot as the recommendation for Windows users? Is it simply no longer developed or are the devs set in their ways of the UI having to look like Windows7?
Also it’s getting confusing with Zorin and Bazzite and even Aurora which is a Bazzite desktop spinoff as a recommendation.
There’s nothing wrong with Mint, it’s solid. If it works for you don’t stress about it
The only thing is that it’s based on Ubuntu LTS so it’s packages can be a bit old. Doesn’t really matter much unless you have very new hardware and need the hardware support. Then something Fedora based like Bazzite would be better.
For getting newer software you can use flatpak/Flathub.
Bazzite is also “immutable” which makes it harder to break on a system level, but also harder to tinker on a system level. Mint is a “normal” distribution in that regard. Mint does have Timeshift for taking system level snapshots, on the off chance that an update or your tinkering breaks something. Its worth checking that Timeshift is set up for automatic snapshots
Mint is great! It taught me the basics of linux.
Meanwhile SteamOS bewildered me with no printing support
You trying to print screenshots of your game or what lmao
If you have 0 issues and aren’t bored with it either, keep using it. It’s completely fine.
People often have various reasons for not using it. E.g they want more up-to-date packages so they go with a rolling release distro, or they want to use a different package manager, or they want an immutable distro. Mint is just a generalist distro that works fine for most people, but doesn’t excel at any particular thing. Same as Ubuntu LTS, but with a nicer UI and less commercialization, so I see it as a great alternative to Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu non-LTS may be more up to date though.
mostly customizability and good support for new hardware
if you’re running a pc with no major components newer than ~2-3 years old then mint is fine
the idea that it’s “bad for gaming” is nonsense unless you’re running near-bleeding edge hardware or are exceptionally sweaty about eking out an additional couple of frames per second
Why? me and SO have been on mint only for a year now and love it.
Couple other pcs have popos which is OK but a bit buggy for me
Because of outdated packages and UI, same for Pop OS, at least before Cosmic
Mint is based on Ubuntu LTS. The packages aren’t THAT out of date. Most people don’t give a shit if they’re running the bleeding edge of kernels or what version of mesa is installed. If it works with their hardware, they’re good.
Possibly for this reason, Mint is a great choice for “keep my PC going so I can get to the google and the email and the facebook without having to buy another $1000 machine.” Mint is my go-to to keep a Pre-TPM computer on the road.
I recently got a mini PC for couch gaming / HTPC functionality, and I installed Mint without ever booting Windows. I’ve been using Mint for a while after years of distro hopping, but I’m having issues with Bluetooth XBox controllers randomly disconnecting. Maybe this is the excuse I’ve been looking for to try Bazzite, although I might just need to get a USB dongle with a chipset known to work on Linux. What I’m really waiting for is an immutable distro with Plasma Bigscreen.
Yes, but Plasma BigScreen is far from moving fast
Yeah, hobbling along with Pegasus Frontend in the meantime. 😔
I also have Bluetooth issues on mint but I just ignore it ha. Its annoying though
Why though? I don’t like it personally but it’s my #1 recommendation usually. (can’t recommend slackware to noobs)
If they have issues they’re gonna ask me for tech support, and I don’t know how to use immutable distros (lol)
Mint’s mouse acceleration was what killed it for me. Setting acceleration to “constant” still felt rubber-bandy and fucked up, and there’s no obvious “Off” option. That was a hard stop. It never felt like I was using my PC but instead a rubber-bandy immitation. I immediately switched. It’s frustrating considering that the rest of the OS seemed OK, I could have seen myself using it if not for that.
Bazzite immediately felt “good” to use right out of the box. No baked in acceleration weirdness. Kudos to the team for really putting in the effort to make this old gamer feel right at home in it. Now going on over a year of it and still loving it.
I think cinnamons a better de to demo linux than gnome. I do use it now but itd turn ppl away (like me initially). Kde these days is def a better choice, but it was kinda easy to delete all your panels and end up with nothing last time I used it. Should really prevent you from deleting your last one.
Fedora Kinoite is, probably, the best recommendation.
If you’re looking for the immutable Plasma experience, Kinonite IS the best choice. Bazzite, Aurora, and I think Zoran, are reliant on whatever their foundation distro is doing. Other than having some presets you might like, they offer little else.
But if you like one of them, more power to you, use it and enjoy!
mint aint that bad
besides all its desktops not supporting Wayland (ig X11 is better for beginners??)Not really. Beginners don’t know the difference.
Can someone ELI5 why Bazzite is so popular? I’m a Linux longtimer (since 2006!) but never heard of Bazzite.
It’s the “just works” distro for people who want to play games.
A lot of things are built into it to be easily installable with less user effort. Has nice defaults. I use cachyos on my pc but on my handheld a lot of stuff wasn’t working by default, like the handhelds buttons/joystick. On bazzite everything works by default. (Think it’s one terminal command to install what is needed for controls in cachyos, but it didn’t work by default) You can still download whatever using rpm ostree, as a user idr know the difference. Grabbed gparted that way. Bazzite has the ujust command which gives you a lot of options for modifying and installing stuff easily like waydroid, emudeck, plugins, etc.
Also prefer gnome with extensions on touchscreens and handhelds, while everything else comes with kde and it’s apps by default. Kde isn’t bad at all and only 1 extension on pc (window thumbnails to pip any window) has me staying on gnome, but gnome works so much better for touchscreens and smaller devices.
Along with what others have said about it being a great ootb experience for anyone looking to play games. It is also immutable so you can’t fuck it up too easily. And the very popular YouTube channel gamers nexus has started doing their Linux testing exclusively on bazzite. I think the latter is playing one of the biggest parts, while the previous two points are specifically why they choose bazzite.
As I understand it, it’s atomic Fedora with virtually everything you might need to game on Linux baked in (no need for layering) and more or less preconfigured. Off the top of my head, proprietary Nvidia drivers, Steam, Lutris, Hero launcher, support for Xbox One wireless controller dongle, plus a number of useful tools like Tailscale. An app with a catered list of gaming-oriented flatpacks, one click updating. Also a lot of effort into replicating the Steam Deck experience for handheld devices or devices connected to a TV.
I believe they also do Aurora, which is similarly geared toward workstations with a ton of container-related tools like distro box readily available to easily use containers instead of layering where possible. The same tools may be available in Bazzite but I never checked. I have Aurora on my laptop and use a dedicated gaming device with Bazzite.
I’m not a Linux veteran by any means but I was hopping distros looking for something I could install on my family’s computers I tried atomic Fedora. When using it for myself, I became frustrated with the number of tools I use that needed to be layered or run in a container and eventually found myself on Bazzite and Aurora. So far so good.
Besides the reasons others mentioned, it’s also popular as an OS for gaming handhelds, like the Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, ASUS Ally X and what have you.
It’s the most plug-and-play Linux has ever been from my experience.
Imagine you like video games. You install Bazzite. You have Steam, with only a little checkbox (to allow playing on linux). It works, you can play, you have a “playstore” if you need something. You have really little to do if you don’t go outside Steam and the playstore.
Problem generally is that the moment you do have to leave steam. It’s infinitely worse and basically impossible to use for a low skilled or new user compared to other gamer distros that do the exact same thing as bazzite but arnt immutable.
Immutability is great till you need to actually do anything at all. It’s such a catch 22. To a new user, it means you can’t accidentally f*** anything up, but also to a new user basically means your computer is a glorified console and you can’t do anything with it because you lack the skill set in knowledge to actually do anything in looking. Anything up basically isn’t going to be helpful for you cuz basically every guide and written account anywhere you find isn’t going to be geared towards an immutable distro.
The immutable gimmick that’s currently going on right now is still way too flavor of the month for new users who are trying to learn from a ground set of nothing.
If I was giving a computer to like a kid who I didn’t want to be able to do anything I would give it to them as a form of parental control more than anything.
What exactly do you think someone is going to have to do that isn’t easily done on Bazzite? Bazzite isn’t based around Steam. 99% of users will install everything they need from Flathub and be perfectly fine.
Also, you can do anything you want with an “immutable” distro, it’s just done differently. Immutable is a bad and unclear descriptor, which is why Bazzite uses atomic.
The immutable gimmick that’s currently going on right now is still way too flavor of the month for new users who are trying to learn from a ground set of nothing.
New users aren’t going to administer their computers either. there’s no “flavor of the month” it’s just teaching new users how to administer linux systems properly. And of course directions on the internet are going to be incorrect, the only correct solution is to follow the documentation, not random guides on the internet.
I never say it has no problem. I’m on bazzite and every time I want something that’s not in the playstore, it’s a fucking hell and it never works. I just stopped.
You couldn’t just layer it on, or use distribox and container it? I have plenty of Linux on machines I work with, but my gaming rig is Bazzite, and it literally does it’s job perfectly, which is to game, and the few other misc things beyond its regular scope I have done in the couple’s years it’s been on that machine I have had no issues with?
Maybe I could if I had an idea what it was x) That’s ok, I do with whatever bazaar has. My main frustration is for the VPN I paid, and can’t use, but I tried things for days with the support and all failed, and since I don’t understand what I’m doing and had to go in admin mode, I let it go. It’s not a call for help.
I just switched to Bazzite recently and have been using containers through podman/docker for anything not on Bazaar. But what do people mean when they say “layering” on an immutable distro? I’m very much still new at this
You can layer packages not in the base image. This effectively installs that package. Except by default the “installation” will not take effect until the next boot.
it comes with a lot of gaming presets. I believe Steam, GOG and Wine are preinstalled and preconfigured for the most compatibility.
Immutable distros are currently the flavor of the month and it’s basically just that. Bazzite is just a worse cachyOS. But because it’s immutable it’s the flavor of the month and therefore it’s the hype new thing.
Everyone loves the hype new thing. Even though in all realistic aspects, it’s more overly complicated. It’s more prone to causing issues for new users. It’s less proven.
There’s a good argument to be made that the project might just end up imploding in a year or two and dying out and f****** over all these new users who are flocking to it because of rampant suggestions.
Is also the general issue of Fedora and its family being prone to breaking itself from early adoption of new ideas. People love to give Arch s*** but Fedora tends to be the one that actually implodes itself for low-skilled users.
Got to love flavor of the month
There’s a good argument to be made that the project might just end up imploding in a year or two and dying out
Could you make this argument?
No they can’t, they can only say “flavor of the month” nonstop until another parrot catches it and repeats it
I can counter argument their non-existing argument, if bazzite dies tomorrow you are free to rebase to any other Fedora Atomic distro
I distrohop every now and then, but usually when I have a convincing argument for it. Anyone want to try to convince me to switch either of my computers (one on Tumbleweed and one on NixOS) to Bazzite?
its closest to nixos in functionality, but basically its just a very simple distro that doesnt require much work to maintain and comes with lots of useful premade scripts and configurations for gaming and making immutables easy to work with. if thats what youre looking for thats what its good for.
Can I setup docker containers on it?
Yes, but the beauty of it is that it plugs in Steam immediately. If you’re installing it on a machine that uses Steam and sometimes browses it is a one-stop shop.
I offloaded Windows 10 entirely, installed bazzite, and played Hollow Knight and the entire Dark Souls trilogy from the same installation on the same harddrive I’d had them on Windows. Didnt even need to reinstall.
To me that’s impressive. I only had a few crashes overall too.
You can with the developer oriented spin, bazzite-dx (I think the plan is to unify them). On base bazzite there is no docker but there is podman I believe.
I didnt know they had multiple versions of bazzite, thats good to know. Appreciate the advice!
podman works well, docker is a little finicky due to some systemd weirdness and the whole immutability of it all.
it mainly tries to get you to use distroboxes which are awesome. you can even install something in a distrobox and expose it to the host.
Are distroboxes, podman, and docker all names for the same type of program? I’ll have to start researching the ones you mentioned and see if it fits what I’m doing.
Distrobox is more like running an entire other Linux distro to run your program, so like before my laptop died completely I had Bazzite and needed to install something locally that was way easier to do in an Ubuntu Distrobox, any time I wanted to run that program I open up my distrobox and run it, felt very native and the app and its files were still in my normal home directory yet ran with dependencies and such I had in the distrobox only.
Definitely nifty but different from the goal of podman/docker imo
Oh thats cool, I can make use of that for sure. Thanks for the explanation!
they’re all containerization programs yes. I believe they differ in some minor details but thanks to the OCI standards a image built with docker will run in podman or vice versa.
distrobox is a little more feature rich for development, meant for exposing services and are interactive by default, vs dockers run and forget methodology.
If you’ve got actual work to do, don’t.
I’ve got Bazzite on my TV PC, and it’s pretty cromulent for that, but Flatpak alone doesn’t have everything I need to do actual work.
I‘m one of them. I already only used Windows for gaming and seeing where this OS is going, made me try Linux again and this time might be the first time I might stick with it, thanks to Bazzite.
Games run incredibly well and compatibility is surprisingly good at this point. The only exception are games with invasive anti-cheat like the new Battlefield. But I guess it’s just a pro that I won’t buy a game that essentially has malware included with it.
Traffic cost must be insane. Hope they have good hosting and won’t be paying through the nose and go broke.
Should be manageable and it is probably less than you would imagine. Just checked real quick: the isos load from download.bazzite.gg, which is a Cloudflare IP. So they are either using it as CDN or even more likely use Cloudflares R2 storage for isos - which would mean they pay for storage (~15$/TB) and operations, but not for egress. This is seems ideal for few but huge files.
So for a single iso (~7 GB) they would pay 0,105$ for storage monthly and additionally 0,36$ per million of class B operations (reads/downloads). Of course they host more than one ISO, but for this example it would have been downloaded about ~150000 times to reach the petabyte.
So yeah, the ISO download is probably less of a problem. (Disclaimer: lot of assumptions, check in with a bazzite dev for clarity)
Can always stick it up as a torrent if its a concern too
Doesn’t $0.36 times 150,000 downloads come out to 54 thousand dollars, which is a lot of money?
Sorry, my bad. 0,36$ per million class b operations. Of course there will be slightly more operations than downloads (e.g. people/bots sarting downloads and aborting them), but still probably cheap.
Also keep in mind cached requests don’t count so it’d be cheaper.
yeah i mean for every 1 active user we have 1250 requests to download here. lots of bots. i dont know if they count upgrade pulls (each version is essentially a full iso that gets pulled to your computer), but if so that means with each update we’ll see even more data draw from all the users upgrading.
i have summoned you once again i see 🪄
I’m surprised they don’t have torrent downloads for it. That would save on bandwidth costs and it’s more reliable since torrent clients verify the checksum and automatically redownload any corrupted blocks.
I would seed…
Same, I have 100Mb up and only use a fraction of it.
Yo ill take some of your megabytes ill pay for shipping
Cloudflare would host it for effectively free
Yes… ha ha ha… YES!
(i dont even use bazzite but love that for them)
I am looking forward to GNU+Linux usage share numbers a year from now. I think it is very likely to pass 5%.
Does this count torrent downloads?
probably not
Bazzite is great. I wish I’d tried it sooner. It is great for a “steam machine” or just as a very stable regular desktop.
For general user maybe but honestly I would prefer kinoite ,I don’t like bazzite replacing all their apps with gtk4 libadwaita while KDE written in qt apps looks much better that’s why I switched to kinoite
You can install Bazzite with KDE also if I’m not mistaken
Yes but they force you to use GTK apps by default for the core apps.
They even replaced Discover with Bazaar where you can’t see certain package types (like mangohud) and have to install them manually, can’t browse by category and just get “selected” games shoved in your phase, as well as getting no update notifications and it will silently fail sometimes in the background with no notifications or messages.
Bazaar has the best search by far, try them all, youll actually find stuff using bazaar, like fps will actually show all the fps, the rest wont, tried them all trying to find the best appstore
The first thing I noticed was how bad the search was on kde and gnome for the software stores. (Tried cosmic, appcenter, etc. also)
I must have an older install then, I installed Bazzite some time ago and it came with discover
Kinoite is also great and usually what I recommend someone coming from Windows who wants a distro that “Just works”.
i like it too, but the ublue scripts are extremely handy so i hate leaving anything ublue
Can you explain more? What are ublue scripts and what makes them so handy? I’m still new to this space.
They just do nice simple little things that people want in the command line. Like a rollback helper for example
Very cool thanks for pointing them out, I will look into them.
I spent a little bit deciding between Bazzite and Kinoite when I got my PC and ultimately went with Kinoite since I still have some work stuff to do every now and then. Not a single issue on my end so far.
Cool thing is you can rebase anytime to any other flavour you want with one command and keep everything that’s yours!
What about steamOS for a steam machine that has all AMD hardware so Nvidia drivers will not be an issue.
I’m building an htpc that will never be used in desktop mode just couch gaming used by kids too. Still trying to decide which os to go with.
Just want to know what the downsides if any of installing SteamOS if I just want valve to handle it for me.
To my knowledge Bazzite is basically SteamOS with more flexibility under the hood if you’re looking for it. By default it boots right into big picture mode. I imagine if you get an HDMI-CEC dongle it would work great as an HTPC once you get Big Picture set up with the streaming apps.
Mostly all thanks to Gamers Nexus, I’d wager.
Also thanks to windows for continuing to double down on being dogshit
That contributed to all Linux. Gamers Nexus exclusively using Bazite for their Linux game testing is giving them specifically, a big bump.
Thanks, Steve
I’m out of the loop here, what’s the context?
Gamer’s Nexus has heard a lot of interest in their community about gaming on linux. So they’ve been working with Wendell from Level1Techs to put together a Linux benchmarking workflow. They chose Bazzite for those efforts.
Gamer’s Nexus likes to make frequent use of a clip from an Intel presentation where one of the presenters says “Thanks Steve,” because the main personality on Gamers Nexus is Stephen Burke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOx4_8ajZ8
Watch around 00:45 ☺️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOx4_8ajZ8&t=44s
There’s a link with the time appended.
I’m doing my part.
I set up bazzite in a VM and passed my GPU thru it.
Now I’ve got a nuc clone in my office with bazzite on it as well and it’s just a moonlight client. But it’s silent. Or damn close. The GPU is two floors away, I hear nothing!
That was two separate downloads, too…Nvidia-gnone and gnome-standard.
I was on Nobara a couple months ago and liked it…but a colleague piqued my interest on immutable distros and now here I am.
Immutable?
System files are a read-only container, protecting you from issues such as sudo rm -rf /etc
Really hard to fuck up
