Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming
bazzite.gg
bazzite.gg
Are we reading the same website?
> The operating system for the next generation of gamers
It is the site made like a presentation, in my experience they are all suck and like a real presentation are impossible to comprehend without accompanying speech.
If you want to know more, just scroll down and read more detailed explanation
Not sure in what way some people expect to be fed the information. If you did not understand what it is from the first couple of sentences then maybe it is not for you.
> Next generation of construction - gezzite makes construction smoother and simpler across various commercial and residential projects.
"Next generation of construction bricks" is already obvious
Great victory.
The change is for the better, but I would still like to have words like "Linux" and "distro/distribution/pack" be visible somewhere on the first visible page.
Or it’s some gaming smoothening software.
Hmm runs on tablets, so it’s an App then… that also runs on htpcs… hmmm…
And/or something like Moonlight/Remote Play?
The one fault perhaps is saying "operating system" when it's a distro. Linux is the operating system
The change is for the better, but I would still like to have words like "Linux" and "distro/distribution/pack" be used.
Hopefully Valve will release a general version of SteamOS with Steam Machine coming (and even they are questionable with their track record)
While what you're saying isn't impossible, it's unlikely. In the event it did happen, Bazzite is a fork, a signing key, and a couple forked Fedora Copr repos away from being made completely in someone else's control.
Note that this was in a change proposal which was rescinded without a vote by it's proposer.
> As much as I’d like this change to happen, it’s too soon. This change would kill off projects like Bazzite entirely right as Fedora is starting to make major headway in the gaming space.
> I’m speaking as it’s founder, if this change is actually made as it is written the best option for us is to just go ahead and disband the project.
Now, whenever you would've actually shut down the project is a different story, but your messaging was very clear.
The messaging was very clear that the upstream change would make Bazzite almost untenable.
It was a criticism of Fedora, not a threat to quit.
I don’t interpret “an upstream change would make this project impossible to maintain” as a “threat”.
If nothing else, the only way these problems ever get solved is by bringing them up, surfacing the issues and providing an impetus to get them solved.
Did you mean diktat?
It's an important question to ask.
I did voice that concern in some Bazzite-related spaces before and it felt like it got brushed off with a weird undertone.
Note that we remove rpm Firefox for security reasons. You do not want your browser to only update with your entire operating system.
Just need the Atomic Fedora base to still be around and everything else is already pre-setup to run on GitHub infrastructure neither of which I anticipate going away soon. (Famous last words)
Calling it a superset of Fedora rather than just being its own bespoke distro can be a fine line, but really there's nothing stopping anyone from forking it and continuing on, a good few people run their own forks already to meet their own needs a bit more specifically.
I'm a fan of my Steam Deck and SteamOS, but I'd like that experience to eventually be available via community supported distros, which Valve/Igalia can rebase from, and instead focus on Proton.
Bazzite is the closest to that that we have so far.
So if Bazzite did go that way you could have fedora running in under an hour and with flatpak most thing will just work.
One `rpm-ostree rebase` from Bazzite to a server-oriented flavour of Fedora Silverblue and it's been running and updating flawlessly since then.
You can still fix them manually though, although that's probably not worth the effort in most cases
Anyways, I get that this is a "risk" to consider, but installing a new distro isn't so bad that it should prevent one from trying and using a currently extant distro if it works for them.
This is a bit of an oversimplification, but Bazzite, Bluefin, etc, are basically just Dockerfiles that use Atomic Fedora as the base image.
So you are basically getting a pre-built docker container that is "Fedora + various configs added on top", and then you are booting that docker image.
Since it's just a container file, anyone could theoretically just fork the Bazzite repo, make some changes to the Dockerfile, then push it to github + let github actions build a custom docker image.
So is that custom docker image a distro? Some would say yes, others would say no.
Games are something I do to relax. I want as little friction to play the games as possible. For tech projects and work stuff having to mess with the OS and move away from deprecated stuff isn’t such a big deal, it’s part of the work. But for games I want them to just work as much as possible, I don’t want to have to find a new distro and install it and set everything up again on my gaming PC.
Despite Windows sucking in so many ways, it is the OS with the most assurance that a game will work without fuss. I am happy to see Linux closing this gap.
Currently I literally can’t find the time to convert my drive from master boot record to GPT for Windows 11. I can’t imagine having to completely switch operating systems/distros because it just disappeared. Worrying if it will still be around is legitimate.
I am/was a big PC enthusiast but could no longer keep up with all the stuff due to real-life, eventually even gave up gaming for a few years as I just did not have the time.
The Nintendo Switch bought me back into (limited) gaming. I liked that I could just play from anywhere in short bursts, or could just hook it up to my TV and pick up the controller for longer sessions. The best part, I never had to worry about updates breaking things, or doing system maintenance - I could just power it on and jump straight into gaming. But I still missed my old PC games, especially playing games like Diablo II and Age of Empires.
When the Steam Deck came along, it changed everything. Well, technically I didn't get the Deck, I got a GPD Win Mini instead, and installed Bazzite on to it... but same thing. I get the same convenience as I had with the Switch, except now I had the added advantage of being able to play all my PC games (yes, all of them. No, I don't play games with nasty kernel anticheats).
Regarding your concern about Bazzite completely disappearing, the good news it it doesn't really matter. Since everything you customised lives on your home drive, all you need to do is backup your home drive, and that backs up everything you'd care about. You can use this same backup in Windows (Steam allows you to easily import a library from a different drive/folder) and your Pictures/Documents etc are basically the same folder layout as Windows. I actually ended up setting a triple-boot setup of Windows, Bazzite and CachyOS on my handheld, and they all point to the same Steam Library, same Documents etc. So not only do I have tripe redundancy, it shows how portable and migratable this stuff is.
A community distro (be it a console-like gaming focused distro or not) is going to be the way to be the way to go for the foreseeable future. I'm pretty happy with running EndeavorOS w/ KDE, Steam, and Heroic. The Steam client with Proton is where most of the magic happens in Linux anyway. If I wanted to get fancy, I could set up GameScope with Steam Big Picture to take a SteamOS/Bazzite approach.
Additionally, I think Valve doesn't want to end up over-committed to replacing Windows. They can handle the storefront side and do a decent job with handling the runtime, but actually committing to a desktop alternative to Windows would be spreading their resources thin. It feels like a smart call to not jump into that arena if your hardware products don't need it.
Steam OS I believe is based on Arch. Bazzite is based on Fedora. Personally I have experience with Debian distros so if I wanted a gaming-focused distro I would pick maybe something like Pop OS.
There are limitations but if you want a gaming machine, bazzite is a no-brainer to me. Poo is very impressive but I just don’t want to fight my OS constantly when it comes to gaming.
FDE would be nice though.
It’s not in a consumer friendly state yet, but I’ve been using my steamdeck with encryption for a month now with zero issues. I guess technically this is not “full” disk encryption since it’s just the home dir, but I only care about protecting my personal info which is all in the home dir anyway.
I’m not familiar with how the process works, but if you are setting the password somewhere, it’s exposed to being extracted. You want the password to be something you type in on boot.
1. It’s not exactly some fly by night thing at this point, it’s extremely popular, which means the likelihood of having maintainers and sponsors step up with, at the very least, an easy migration path is high.
2. You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?
3. Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)
In 2009 the CentOS maintainers was AWOL and nobody had any idea where they went and had no access. This caused issues with releases obviously.
There been quite a number of times where people have died, just got bored, had health issues and a project just stops and sometimes people don't access to things.
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/07/30/130249/CentOS-Proj...
> Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)
That sounds all horribly complicated.
I have a dotfiles, 5 bash scripts and a ~/bin folder for anything outside of package manager. I migrated my laptop to Arch recently from Debian and fixing the scripts was literally copy the script, and do a find and replace (I literally put pacman instead of apt install and most of it worked).
It not that much of a big deal to move between distros.
You have 5 bash scripts and various dotfiles. That sounds a lot more complicated.
Bazzite is really not much different to any of the atomic fedora distributions.
The only thing more complicated about immutable Linux is that you have to rethink how you install packages a little bit, as you’re generally using installation methods that offer isolation from your base operating system.
The big upside of this is that essentially all of your modifications are confined to your home directory, and of course system updates and rollbacks are trivial.
One issue I had with OpenSuSE was that once a new release drops you have around 6mo to migrate all your machines over to it. Which, for most businesses, is a pretty short timeline, in my experience.
I've always preferred authoring RPMs over debs, but Caninical having basically one distro without the forks, I think is a huge benefit for a business using them.
The good news is, you can easily rebase to any other uBlue or even Fedora Atomic distro with just one or two commands, or if you're technical, you can even fork Bazzite's repo and build your own Bazzite (they even provide instructions on how to do this, it's very very simple, relatively speaking).
I am a long time Arch user but I totally understand why they went with Fedora for Bazzite.
I really think immutable distributions are the future of linux desktop, and maybe distributions that use OCI images, beacause they are a lot easier to work with than say, NixOS for example.
If you want to have your custom bazzite, you just do a "FROM bazzite:<whatever-version-you-want-to-pin" and add stuff you want.
Of course, you loose a bit of the reproducibility, since usually container images do not pin packages (and maybe other reproducibility issues I am not aware of) but it is way easier to work with.
Switching over to my images using bootc failed because of what I eventually tracked down to permissions issues that I didn't see mentioned in any of the docs. In short, the packages you publish to Github's container registry must be public.
Another wrinkle: The Bazzite container-build process comes pretty close to the limits of the default Github runners you can run for free. If you add anything semi-large to your custom image, it may fail to build. For example, adding MS's VSCode was enough to break my image builds because of resource limits.
Fortunately, both of these issues can be fixed by improving the docs.
It takes away a tad bit of the direct control of the process, but covers the majority of things you would want to configure.
There is something about immutable linuxes that feels right, and I cannot pinpoint why exactly, but it's like things are segregated correctly.
Based on their results, it sounds like there's still quite a way to go Linux gaming/Proton (ie: very inconsistent frametimes on Nvidia hardware), but it's definitely been taking steps in the right direction.
Do note that they make it very, very, very clear that their results are preliminary, and while they've put a whole lot of work into setting up benchmarking on Linux, they're not at all sure that they've got it all correct.
> ie: very inconsistent frametimes on Nvidia hardware
Yeah, Nvidia on Linux for non-"compute" use has always been a terrible, godawful shitshow. Given Nvidia's recent and fairly-clear disinterest in the "selling graphics cards for people to play video games with" market, [0] I can't imagine things will get consistently better anytime in the near future. [1]
[0] Why sell that silicon to video gamers when you can sell it to cryptominers and -these days- "AI" companies for a much, much, much higher profit?
[1] I mean, it took them how many Windows driver revisions for them to release somewhat-non-garbage drivers for their spanking-new fancy-ass 5000-series cards? And Windows is the only consumer OS that they care about! For video game use, the Linux drivers are gonna be starved for development resources, and -unlike ATi/AMD's drivers- noone in the world can work on them but Nvidia.
Yeah, I'm not entirely convinced some of the results they're seeing aren't caused by their methodology. I don't think they are either.
I moved a gaming pc with a 4070Ti from Win10 to Cachy 3 weeks ago and have been purposefully testing out various games to see if it's workable; I'm about 50 hours and 15 games deep now and the only thing that doesn't work reliably is HDR. Outside of that I haven't run into any issues I haven't seen on Windows as well.
Nvidia’s Open Kernel Modules are good so far and the in-kernel Nova driver project also seems promising though some way off. I’m running a 5000 series card with Nvidia OKMs and so far it has been a really smooth experience.
I'm currently working on few very targeted optimizations for several hotspots I've found out from messing around so it will be interesting if I can solve those horrible stutter issues on cyberpunk since if I can fix it (in a ghetto and janky way), so can valve.
I can also achieve higher fps in games like overwatch (dx12) out of the box on nvidia on proton experimental which is surprising as 4 years ago the input latency was unbearable and I had drops as low as 30 fps, now I can achieve consistent 600 fps with minimums of 450 whereas on windows I get as low as 220fps and averages of 500ish. I do have anticheat related drops to <300fps due to the amount of translation happens when they decide to scan memory, registry and whatnot although it lasts <1s and doesn't happen during games it seems.
I have an all AMD machine and almost all the games will run the same or better on Windows. I have friends that have tried gaming on Linux and all of them have found the experience worse.
I did run a win debloat script from and use a local account so I don't have the Windows Spyware running in the background so that may make a difference.
Just an aside. I've been using Linux for quite a while now (over-20 years) and the biggest issue is that the community constantly misleads new users about the experience of moving from Windows to Linux. The latest iteration of this has been gaming.
I’ve had the complete opposite experience for the vast majority of games, where in most cases performance for me has been better on Linux than it was on Windows (can’t compare like for like now as I no longer have a Windows install outside of a VM). Friends of mine experience weird mid-session crashes and hangs on Windows that I’ve never had on Linux. I’m running an Nvidia GPU which is supposedly some kind of Linux boogeyman, but have had only one issue with EDID of a specific monitor and that’s it. Just my experience YMMV.
This isn't though. I have hard numbers. I've actually measured the performance. You get 5-20 FPS less and often more input latency and stutters (1%, 0.1% lows). If the machines doesn't well with Linux, it can be much worse.
Basically on HN whenever you express an opinion based on a significant amount of experience. You get someone basically saying "this is anecdote". There is a difference between "an anecdote" and "I've actually have a huge amount experience with this stuff.
For some games it can be. For some games Proton performs far worse than Windows. It's not steady across the board. And some have stability issues, bugs, major performance problems, or just flat out don't work.
I want Proton to be the future as well, but I think it's important not to oversell it as a drop-in replacement either.
EDIT: GN highly recommends against apples-to-oranges comparisons of the two, but even looking at their own data for AMD cards (with exact same CPU, RAM, and motherboard) it clearly shows Proton being behind on the order of 6-15%. Not a lot, but not ahead either. You can compare the numbers for the AMD cards against this video's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP0axVHdP-U
EDIT 2: Instead of just down-voting because the result makes you unhappy, how about responding with well-sourced proof otherwise?
I dunno. I remember a little while back some reviewers got a hold of both a Windows version and Linux version of a handheld gaming machine that had exactly the same hardware. The conclusion reached was that the Linux version was better in nearly every way.
As I remember it, a little while after this happened, some muckety-muck in the Gaming Division in Microsoft announced something like "We're making a new committment to consistent, high performance in Windows on handheld gaming devices! We're going to ensure all those little game-spoiling roadblocks are removed!". Which, like, good job making it NOT look like you're spasmodically reacting to bad press, guy.
Proton needs to be understood as a temporary solution to make the back catalogue on Linux comparable to Windows.
Eventually there is a tipping point and most games will have native Linux binaries. Once that happens all developers will gradually follow suit to avoid being left behind. Perhaps Valve's latest hardware efforts will finally bring this about.
Proton will still exist for older games and as hardware continues to become more powerful, loss of performance won't matter much.
I realize that, in a way, it's no different than installing from AUR or ppa's, but something about both of those (and the fact that package installs are manual) feels safer than copr packages with fewer eyes on them...
I treat my gaming computer as a video game console, it wouldn't occur to me to share passwords, accounts, data or anything sensitive on my gaming machine. And I only connect it to the network if I need to download a game/update.
I wish there was better documentation for this, because "random indie game demo cannot upload my family photos" would be a great selling point for SteamOS/Bazzite.
As it stands, the Steam flatpak is probably the safest way to play games (which does not work on Bazzite).
Consider setting up a VLAN or additional WiFi SSID if you find the network situation a hassle.
Atomic updates means updates either apply or don't: there's no partial/fail state that can stop your PC from working. And in the rare event that an update has issues, you can instantly boot the previous two images, without typing any commands or using any fancy restore tools. And if you're a bit tech savvy (ie you know how to type a single command), you can even go back upto the last 90 days worth of images (via github).
The best part of atomic updates is OS upgrades, they work flawlessly. In fact since updates are delivered as images, an OS upgrade is no different to any other regular update, unlike regular distros like Mint where you have to cross your fingers and hope that your system still works after a dist-upgrade (and I believe Mint's official stance was that they didn't support dist-upgrades, they recommend you to backup, format, clean-install and restore with every OS release. Not sure if that policy has changed now, but that used to be their stance for a very long time).
I personally installed Mint in 2014 and used the upgrade path until a month ago, when my distro finally started showing bad signs of being experimented on (by me, for 11 years) and it was easier to do a fresh install instead.
Bazzite just works like I’d expect an iPhone update or a Nintendo switch update to work.
You'd also want stable, atomic, updates that can go from "one version of system software to the next" without breaking the system.
Recently, i had to reinstall my 7 year old arch install because a system upgrade after a year or so broke it... It's not like i can't sit down and fix what went wrong manually, it's just that i wouldn't want to ever worry about these things on my home theater/"gaming console" pc...
- Out-of-the-box support for Xbox, Wii, Switch, PS3, PS4, PS5, and numerous other controllers.
- Nvidia drivers and the latest Mesa for AMD & Intel pre-installed, with tweaks applied as needed
- Bazzite ships with support for additional Wi-Fi adapters, display standards like DisplayLink, and more
- Out of the box support for not only desktop PCs, but handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs.
But the point is that, if you want to game on Linux, you probably want to perform exactly or almost exactly the same tweaks that Bazzite already does. So why bother doing them yourself?
It's not even a linux-from-scratch situation where you'd do it for the sake of learning. Googling "my controller doesn't work right", finding some discussion threads, and copy-pasting a bunch of fixes isn't particularly interesting.
I love the idea, but honestly, juggling all these package managers gets annoying really fast; for now what I use is rpm-ostree (which you really shouldn’t touch unless you absolutely have to), Flatpak, Homebrew (some package are mac only or mac first), and distrobox (with arch).
Every now and then I think of going back to arch cause they are the only distro that made it very convenient to install some obscure packages that is only used by handful of people
Like yesterday, I tried setting up Flutter with the Android SDK command-line tools and the rest of the Android dev stack, and it took me almost 2 hours to get everything working; On Arch? That’s just a few packages, all sitting right there in the main repo or the AUR.
I'm very much like you infact, so I ended up resorting to just using an Arch Distrobox for pretty much everything. I leave rpm-ostree and Flatpaks alone as far as possible, so I only really have to worry about my Arch for updates and everything else takes care of itself.
You may ask then why not just use Arch? Well of course you can, but I like the idea of having a rock solid base where I know for a fact that I can let it happily update without breaking something. Arch still requires manual intervention every now and then (such as package migrations or some dependency conflicts). Not a big deal if you keep up with the Arch News and Discord announcements etc, but sometimes IRL gets in the way and I'm not up-to-speed with what's happening. With my Bazzite+Arch setup, I'm not super bothered with this, plus it's easy to blow my whole container and set it up again, and in fact I've got a bash script to do just that on one of my other PCs that I don't use regularly (because Arch needs to be updated regularly, otherwise you're in for a nasty surprise when you find out your keyring is out-of-date and pacman has been upgraded and nothing works... with a container, just blow it up and fetch the latest version, reinstall your packages and you're up and running in no time).
For normal non dev usage it works great. On my steam deck I just get everything through Flatpak or steam and it just works.
I used Ubuntu for 8 years constantly fixing issues, from the day I installed it (because it didn't support basic Ryzen), after every distro upgrade, and various other random points, e.g. when installing a package whose dependency overwrote something. Each issue took hours to fix, usually searching forums for arcane command lines and trying everything until something worked (possibly breaking other things in the process).
Last year I tried Bazzite for my kid who like games and realized that it's 100x better than Ubuntu, for both gaming and serious work. It's 100x more stable and virtually unbreakable, far more modern and up-to-date than Ubuntu, and I can still do just about everything I want (just have to do it differently because it's atomic). Since I switched to Bazzite I have had zero issues, because atomic distros are inherently so much more stable. Everyone uses the exact same image, and the state of the OS is always fresh and doesn't deteriorate over time the way mutable distros do. And best of all, if any issue does come up (which is extremely rare), the fix is always the same and it takes 1 minute: boot into the previous version.
I used to avoid using my PC due to constant issues with Ubuntu, now I often switch it on simply because Bazzite makes me so happy.
It frustrates me to no end that people to this day still recommend Ubuntu and its derivatives as "good" and "user friendly" when it literally breaks all the bloody time, and meanwhile there are awesome distros like Bazzite and Aurora that are rock-solid like MacOS and ChromeOS.
Also, to anyone who recommends Ubuntu (or derivatives), I point them to this page: https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/02/05/done-with-ubuntu/
It's been tried but I don't think it's ever been very successful. The Battlefield series used to use Fairfight, which is based on server-side heuristics, but they ultimately gave up on it and switched back to client-side detection for the more recent games.
But if your definition specifically refers to shooters like Fortnite or BF6, then yeah, they're not going to work. Except CS of course, but not sure if CS counts as "AAA" in your books.
If you wanted to teleport (and the server was poorly implemented enough to let you) you could just intercept your network packets and add a "teleport plz" message. Real cheats in the wild used to work this way. However a wallhack will need to read the game's memory to know where players are.
What modern anti cheat software does is make it difficult for casual cheats to read/write the game's memory, and force more sophisticated cheats down detectable exploit paths. It's impossible to prevent someone from reading the memory on untrusted hardware, but you can make it difficult and detectable so you can minimize the number of cheaters and maximize the number you detect and ban.
Linux is incompatible with client anti-cheat because there is no security boundary that can't be sidestepped with a custom compiled kernel. Windows is Windows, with known APIs and ways to read process memory that can be monitored. Secure boot means only Microsoft's own built kernels can boot and you now have a meaningful security boundary. Monitor what kernel drivers are loaded and you can make it harder for cheaters to find ways in. Sure you can run in a VM, but you can also detect when it happens.
Sure we can just run with no client side anticheat at all (functionally what Linux always is unless you only run approved, signed kernels and distros with secure boot) but wallhacks and aimbots become trivial to implement. These can only really be detected server side with statistical analysis. I hope you don't ban too many innocent people trying to find all the cheaters that way.
Switched to PopOS, was "ok", switched to Arch, performance was awesome.
A few days ago I gave Bazzite a blast and now I'm currently installing it as the primary OS on my gaming rig. Other than a few small tweaks, it just works.
It's quite a bit more performant than PopOS and PopOS came with a myriad of tweaks and issues needed for things like Ubi Connect (I've been going through the first Division game with my kids and PopOS/Lutris hated... Everything...
It all just works on Bazzite.
Plus the Nvidia drivers don't seem as bad, unsure if it's just the RTX5xxx that were having issues ala GamersNexus but the 4090 doesn't seem to have the same frame time issues that were raised (Knock on wood)
Bazzite also has a much more frequent release cadence which is important for the kernel and Mesa. SteamOS only ships a major version every year.
SteamOS 3.7 is still on Kernel 6.11 and KDE Plasma 6.2, for example. Bazzite is 6.17 and Plasma 6.5.
This matters if you're using more recent hardware or want the latest driver optimizations. My 9070 XT is supported by Bazzite, SteamOS won't even boot.
I installed this begrudgingly after fighting edge cases with Waydroid on Arch. It's the first "batteries included" distro I've actually liked. I usually hate the "omakase" approach, but the setup here is pretty much how I would've done it myself.
Side note: GNOME + Waydroid is the best experience I've had with a desktop OS on a tablet. Finding tools like scrcpy included out of the box was a nice surprise, too.
just relax, install windows and late the escapism take over.
In any case, I would rather use those hard earned skills hand configuring Slackware today than to put with the shitshow of Windows pop-ups, forced account creation, telemetry collection, UI changes for the sake of change, advertisements built into the OS, random OS corrupting BSODs, etc..
Overall I will say things are going like 80% smoothly but there are still some very Linux-y problems with it:
The default grub has options for ostree:0 and ostree:1. 0 is the default and if you pick 0 it just hangs and doesn’t boot. I can’t figure out how to change this because the normal grub config files are read-only. So I have to quickly press down arrow when the computer is booting and select the right option.
Installing certain packages is difficult or impossible, for example I had to get pycairo and some other packages to run a Python program and you can’t add them normally. But I think the proper way is to just run everything in a container so maybe that’s on me.
90% of games work fine, but many have weird bugs like crashing when you Alt-Tab out. I could not get modded Skyrim to work after several attempts. Prism, the Minecraft launcher, has some sort of memory leak because if I leave it on in the background it eventually crashes the desktop and I have to hard restart. And of course anti-cheat games like Valorant/League don’t work at all.
KDE has tons of bugs - tooltips randomly scale to the wrong size, Dolphin refusing to copy a file to another drive for no reason, Dolphin freezing when loading a directory with lots of images, detaching a tab in Konsole sticks the window to your mouse until you click something else, Konsole has like 50 themes and none of them are named so you just have to squint and click one that looks good, drag-and-drop into Electron apps like Discord randomly fails, adding a new widget to the panel and suddenly it’s invisible, notifications appearing floating in the middle of the screen, removing an audio output (like unplugging headphones) seems to cause it to randomly choose an alternative, brightness on my monitor randomly shifts even after turning off DCC, GNOME apps have wonky themes, GNOME apps can’t detect light/dark mode so they just pick one… I could go on.
Hey, you can't possibly be having these problems! You're using a RedHat-derived distro! That means it uses Wayland! And the Wayland people have been telling us all for years that Wayland is good for daily use for everyone, and that it should be the default everywhere!
(Do note that the above is bitter, bitter sarcasm. I'm so, so disappointed by how the Wayland folks tend to use political pressure (rather than plain declarations of both capabilities and shortcomings) to muster up general support for their project.)
Would it be easy for you to compile a list of like five or ten games that do this? I'm curious to see if I can reproduce this on my Steam-on-xorg-on-Gentoo-Linux machine with an AMD graphics card.
I don't doubt your report, not even a little bit, but -personally- I've found window management on Linux to be light-years better than on Windows. I can put nearly every game I've tried in my huge-ass Steam library on fullscreen on another virtual desktop, flip over to some other desktop (or window) to check something, and flip right back to find the video game still fullscreen and still running happy as a clam. [0] (To say nothing of the total lack of Windows-typical jankiness when changing the screen resolution on an "Exclusive Fullscreen" game.)
Whereas on Windows, it's kinda a crapshoot regarding both what state your desktop will be in when you Alt+Tab out of a fullscreen game and what state that game will be in when you Alt+Tab back. And if that game is "Exclusive Fullscreen" and is not running at your desktop's resolution, all the windows on your secondary monitor are probably going to be rearranged when the game starts, and will definitely be rearranged when you Alt+Tab out and maybe then again when you Alt+Tab back in.
[0] Two very notable exceptions to this are Red Dead Redemption 2 (it notices that its no longer the foreground window and "helpfully" makes itself windowed) and the Linux version of Dead Cells (it "helpfully" minimizes itself when it's no longer the foreground window.).
RE Anti-cheat, it's not ALL of them, it's only kernel-based ones. For eg, BattlEye, EAC, VAC, and nProtect Gameguard all work just fine, but of course, the game studio will need to enable that support. Arc Raiders, Marvel Rivals, Fall Guys etc all use anticheat and they work fine.
RE KDE, I haven't experienced most of those issues. I don't use Konsole (Ghostty is far better anyways). As for Discord, Equibop is a far better client compared to official.
RE GNOME, unfortunately GNOME and KDE have never really gotten along, personally I avoid GNOME/GTK apps are far as possible.
This isn't particularly linux-y of an issue. I've had the same sort of behavior in numerous games on Windows, up to and including crashing the graphics driver when alt-tabing out of a full screen game. Seems to be something gamedevs are not commonly testing, and perhaps difficult to defend against when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.
I can guarantee you any gamedev worth his salt will have used alt-tab at some point in the game's development on windows. It's an incredibly common hotkey to use, and the devs very likely have multiple ides, notepads, image editing software running concurrently. You seem to be trying really hard.
> when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.
Most devs are using cross platform graphics APIs. OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan. Alt-tab breaking is likely an OS issue.
I'm far from a Linux super-user, I only use it for my servers and Raspberry Pis, but even I would rather pick Debian and install the necessary stuff by hand. This feels like opting-in to bloat on your newly installed OS.
I'll happily listen if anyone has a good selling point for those, but I can't think of any OS less attractive than something tailored for a single use-case on my generalist PC build.
With previous distros I always had issues configuring something or another with games/drivers. Bazzite has been the closest to Windows/console experience for me wrt Linux pc gaming.
If this is a generalist computer, then you are absolutely correct. This is not the distro for you. This is very specifically built for gaming.
But it is also part of the Universal Blue family, which means that updates are atomic and can be rolled back. SteamOS, GNOME OS, and KDE Linux are all trying the atomic distro thing, but you don't get it out of the box on the mainstream distros (yet).
Problem statement: speaker do not work properly (Asus Rog Z13 in my case).
Here what Bazzite does: obtains a firmware _somewhere_, stores in a no-license personal repo with a promise to rewrite repo history and purge files within 5 business days on contact, builds Bazzite-only installation script and pulls it in a main repo[1]. Users after that say, that Bazzite is the only distro where it works out-of-the-box.
Here what I did: contacted linux-firmware, was redirected by Mario Limonciello to Cirrus, contacted few Cirrus people who commit these firmwares, got response the same day. Same day Asus Rog Z13 firmwares were added to linux-firmware[2]. Was it simple? Hell yes. Why other people prefer to reverse-engineer instead? Today users say that Bazzite is the best, tomorrow they will see the price of this smoothness and it will turn into another Ventoy-style drama[3].
[1] https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/ad5704b87388fbde7e3...
[2] https://gitlab.com/kernel-firmware/linux-firmware/-/commit/0...
But Fedora Atomic confuses the hell out of me. To recommend it to potential Linux newbies and as the great next thing feels bizarre to me.
I help run a small Linux gaming community and at least once a day on the Discord (yes it’s a problematic service but that’s another rant) there is someone trying to install a mod or set up some piece of sim hardware, having recently switched from Windows, and being confused by FlatPak or by system immmutability.
It feels like these things are a double edged sword, on the one hand they are less prone to break they system and not under and why, on the other they now have a bunch of new roadblocks they don’t understand nor fully comprehend the purpose of. I can’t think of a better alternative but I sort of feel that the technology isn’t the issue, more like lack of a good FTUE which provides low friction education about how the system works and why that is beneficial. To use a bit of a tired analogy, it seems to me that a certain proportion of users are being thrown a nice big fish but aren’t being helped to understand what a fishing rod is, let alone able to fish for themselves.
I think I’m really just echoing other users’ comments about how a lot of the experience doesn’t really deliberately speak to people who are barely technical and just want things to work. The sort of people who run an iPhone because it’s simple, and whose response to windows acting weird is to just reinstall it.
I think the update/os upgrade situation is better, security is better, and frankly my least favorite thing with Linux is going in and making sure the system state is healthy.
When I started using Linux this summer I had to wipe my system twice because I put it in broken states or couldn't figure out how to undo some change. I went through all sorts of issues like managing grub and gnome not working with my studio display or thunderbolt peripherals. Almost all of the fixes required editing arcane files then calling commands which fed them into some subsystem I had no idea about. All that blind faith online sourced stuff felt like a security nightmare too.
Since migrating to atomic fedora and then this weekend Bazzite, that has not happened once. There was initial friction with dev tool setup and toolbox, but things have been completely on the rails since then.
Before: https://archive.is/Juqfq
After: https://archive.is/RTePv
- Newer core packages (kernel, graphics drivers, desktop environment). This often translates to better hardware support (especially if it's recent hardware), and often better game compatibility (newer graphics drivers often include fixes for games), and often better performance as well.
- More suitable as a general purpose OS. SteamOS heavily leans into the gaming use-case (naturally), and whilst you can use it as a regular PC, its immutable nature can make it a bit annoying depending on your workflow. Bazzite includes a bunch of useful defaults (apps/config/shortcuts) that makes it much more conducive for regular PC usage, or advanced gaming usage (like if you want to install an overclocking utility or do something more "advanced", it's far more easier and convenient).
Bazzite does look very promising and happy to see innovation in the Linux gaming world!
It also has a command `ujust regenerate-grub` which adds a Windows entry to the bootloader.
Each of these is a single command which only must be run one time after install. I suppose it could take a few hours to either do it by hand, or to discover one of these options, but they are both documented and in particular the guide at https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/Installation_Guide/dual_boot... (which you implied you followed) mentions the latter command.
It works on each of my Bazzite machines without any manual tinkering/intervention. Not sure why it would not Work On Your Machine (TM).
In my case though, it works fine without any hiccups. My main setup is a 7800XT, connected to an AOC CQ32G3SE using a DisplayPort 2.1 cable. HDR works fine both in Steam game mode as well as in desktop mode (KDE).
Give it a shot, not like it costs anything!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqIjUddUSo0
Why others are better than Bazzite if it's made for gaming?
One insanely underrated Linux software is Lutris, if you have non-steam games, it is phenomenal at helping you wire them up for Wine, especially when Steam itself behaves weird (like installing third party things is not exactly done intelligently by Steam).
After that, just use EndeavourOS.
I used Antergos before that and EndevourOS has been great since.
The actual user does not give any shits. And while I love tinkering around and understand my OS/distro/$software I can absolutely relate. Linux should be at last so accessible that most of the things just work and a broad audience can just use their computer.
I did briefly consider Bazzite, but the thing that stopped me was that I wasn't sure how well it would work with an eGPU. With Jovian and NixOS, it is ultimately still just NixOS minimal under the covers, and that is low-level enough for me to play with boot parameters and kernel modules to get the eGPU working, and it wasn't clear to me that it would be that straightforward with Bazzite.
I have a system that I kind of want to have Linux forward with Windows on secondary m.2 drive to dual boot if I need something there. Following protonDB, I see all the games that I play work just fine and are either gold or platinum status.
Would you recommend Bazzite or Cachy? I main do gaming, development and web stuff. I tend to run multiple dockers, multiple different versions of python and other packages. How would immutible OS affect me here?
Personally for dev work I tend to use things like Nix to keep the development packages out of the host, that sort of approach works regardless of distro.
I would recommend CachyOS if you're after raw performance and you're technically inclined, and don't mind ocassionally going into the terminal to fix something or do some maintenance (maybe once or twice a year).
Bazzite on the other hand is great if you don't care much about minor FPS improvements, but value your time and system stability more. I have both installed, and use Bazzite when I want stuff to "just work" and not think about updates and maintenance. I use it for work, and for braindead gaming (ie I'm back from work and just want to dive into gaming without needing to worry about any PC stuff).
Both OSes are fine for docker/dev workflow. Multiple versions of python isn't an issue on ANY Linux system, as you would never be installing them across the system, you'd be installing them in a container or a sandboxed environment. I'd also recommend checking out Flox[1] as a fast and lightweight alternative to containers, it's great for working with Python in particular.
I do play games and I am a Linux user.
I see this project being an OS distribution with image update approach. It basically has some programs used for gaming on Linux preinstalled and probably preconfigured.
I wish the project would exist in 2 variants: an OS (as it currently is) and as an installer that would allow the user to select parts to install and configure on their current Linux distro.
Because I am using debian, this is my home PC and gaming is not the sole thing that I do on this PC.
Switching to a Fedora distro is not an option for me.
So, as nice as this project is - I say farewell to it.
If Bazzite goes poof overnight, though, that's a major problem. At least Fedora's official spins will continue to receive necessary updates.
Zorin OS and Bazzite... I was hoping someone who has tried both could enlighten me as to why one is better than the other?
[1] I say recently because I'm not following linux very closely.
Zorin is a more "traditional" OS, where things work like most PC operating systems, whereas Bazzite is an immutable OS with atomic updates. Immutable means the core system files are read-only, which makes it less susceptible to corruption and breakage (due to user error or malware). Atomic updates means updates either apply or don't: there's no partial/failed state that can break your PC.
Updates are also image-based, where your entire OS image gets updated in one go, kinda like how mobile OS's work - this means there's no chance of package conflict/version/dependency issues that can sometimes plague regular Linux distros like Zorin. This also means that major OS upgrades are trivial - they're treated like any other update. In Zorin and even Windows for that matter, major OS upgrades are always messy, and there's a chance something can break or get corrupted. You don't have that issue with immutable, image-based distros like Bazzite.
The only area where Zorin would be better is in low-level customisability - like say, you want to switch out your kernel to a custom kernel, or use a different DE, or change login managers etc. You can do that in an immutable system, as these are core components. But most people don't do this, so for regular users, an immutable system like Bazzite would be a much better choice.
Anyway thanks for your answer!
Does these custom scheduler bring noticeable gains during usage? My previous linux desktop was a non-gaming distro, so I'm a bit curious on these fancy stuffs.
- BORE, CachyOS scheduler: https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/why_cachyos/#advanced...
- LAVD, SteamOS scheduler: https://www.igalia.com/2025/11/helpingvalve.html
> improved CPU schedulers for responsive gameplay,
on their homepage https://bazzite.gg/
For diy you can use moonlight / sunshine or steam remote play. I find latencies lower than around 30ms perfectly playable for everything except twitch shooters etc.
For true diy look into leveraging nvenc or equivalent hw encoder using a “zero latency” profile and build on top of UDP. TCP could be feasible for client input -> remote traffic, but even then building a minimal custom reliable layer on top of UDP probably makes sense to avoid nagle type issues. If you want to support arbitrary input devices (joysticks, wheels etc) that can’t be represented as an Xbox controller things will get pretty tricky. Especially if those devices require drivers, at that point your into proxying usb.
DIY in a weekend? Definitely.
True DIY in a weekend… probably not :)
Also, Bazzite takes over 2 minutes to boot, while Zorin takes less than 20 seconds.
I'm pretty new to Linux as a daily driver, and need a stable base that I'm familiar with for my non-gaming daily work, and Bazzite isn't that for me yet. On the other hand, Bazzite just worked out of the box for gaming, better than Zorin did.
I have a big enough SSD to split the partition and let each distro do its best work for me.
I am not a fan of these derivative distros and I would always recommend using one of the mainline distros e.g Debian, Arch, Fedora etc.
I am using Debian 13 for gaming and the most difficult thing I had to install was a backports kernel which improved performance in some games, in other games it made no difference at all.
Installing Steam and Lutris takes about 5 minutes and it yet another distro for what amounts to installing some applications. I find the biggest issues on Linux gaming is the applying individual workarounds in Steam, and getting wireless controllers to behave properly.
It gets updates. Games work. I don't have to spend a bunch of time trying to debug or customize it, but I could if I wanted to.
That's the way I like it.
Okay. I think I get a feel for their target audience.
Projects like this fit all the criteria of what I've nicknamed "Mastodon projects", because they always have either (or both) Mastodon and Discord links on their websites and are primarily developed by people with "alternative" social media accounts. They always implode within a few years due to some form of ridiculous community drama that other FOSS projects don't suffer from (because other open source projects usually have a somewhat serious "community", or lack of a cohesive one altogether).
I don’t WANT to fiddle around with some random bullshit when all I have in the evening are 1-2 hours. I want to boot the system and just get cracking with a game. Even the 1-2 hours of installation time are already a hard sell to me. It’s ~20% of my weekly gaming time.
And it’s never usually just „a minor amount of configuration“, is it? Depending on what game you are playing, what hardware you have, you can easily spend hours getting a game to work properly, and that’s with bazzite.
I want something that just works, I don’t want to spend hours figuring out magic incantations.
Though admittedly, with AI it’s gotten easier to figure out magic incantations.
I'm not understanding this OS and I'm extremely confused that this post got so much traction on HN. Gosh, either I'm too young, or too old, or too nerdy.
I'm not critiquing the project itself, more like, I'm surprised [very surprised], that it got so much traction on HN, not usual news
The wording is weird too : "Comes with Lutris preinstalled!". Would Windows users switch to a different hypothetical "Windows Distro" that was optimised for gaming?
None of this makes any sense to me.
this is why linux, after all, is still where it was 20 years ago. all those endless distributions and fragmentation make it non-competitive against the mainstream desktop operating systems. ubuntu was doing good work by becoming the de facto desktop linux by sheer branding. but they dropped the ball really hard and that opportunity to make linux desktop a serious competition is gone. now games are leading the way so maybe steam os or one of these gaming-tuned distros might pick up the momentum.
IYKYK