Hadn't heard of Bazzite.

> Bazzite is an OCI image that serves as an alternative operating system for the Steam Deck, and a ready-to-game SteamOS-like for desktop computers, living room home theater PCs, and numerous other handheld PCs.

https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/

Worth visiting the readme even if not interested. There's a huge list of included stuff, and a lot of it seems really cool.and helpful (for gamers or streamers mostly).

Bazzite (and Immutable Linux as a whole) is fascinating.

I'm not deep enough in their weeds to perfectly explain it in a concise HN comment, but it's all about having a read-only known-good Linux distro at the root and then layering packages on top, taking much inspiration from server-side containers. It's supposed to be both more secure and more reliable/reproducible/customizable than traditional Linux. You just write in a container manifest which packages you want. When an upgrade comes out, it runs the upgrade, then reinstalls your packages on top.

Even more relevant is that you can "fork" Bazzite relatively simply and add any missing packages or configuration you need to your own custom image and let GitHub actions do most of the infra work for you

https://universal-blue.org/guide/fork-your-own/

And yes, you can roll back to previous images as its an "immutable" OS as well should issues arise

2023 was the first year I gamed exclusively on Linux according to Steam's year in review, including some of this year's titles. Most of that was on the Steam Deck or on a virtual machine with GPU passthrough running Bazzite. It is really well made.

I'm shocked that Bazzite isn't more well known. It's exactly what I dreamed about but didn't know existed until recently