Bazzite is seeing an insane amount of growth right now
Traffic cost must be insane. Hope they have good hosting and won’t be paying through the nose and go broke.
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.
Cloudflare would host it for effectively free
This whole thread had me wondering how much I’m costing them so I could at least pay my share. A quick search got me this page to donate. There’s some information about how they are using that money, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve spent much, and it makes me feel like they’ve got funding from somewhere else that covers their hosting costs.
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
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.
You can install Bazzite with KDE also if I’m not mistaken
My understanding is that one of the upsides to Bazzite is that Nvidia drivers are pretty easy to install and manage. That was the thing that turned me off of Fedora when I tried making the switch to that a couple years ago.
Is that easy to do in Kinoite? This is the first I’ve heard of it, and it sounds like exactly what I would want out of Bazzite.
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.
Can someone ELI5 why Bazzite is so popular? I’m a Linux longtimer (since 2006!) but never heard of 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 comes with a lot of gaming presets. I believe Steam, GOG and Wine are preinstalled and preconfigured for the most compatibility.
It’s the “just works” distro for people who want to play games.
It’s the most plug-and-play Linux has ever been from my experience.
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
I wish people stopped recommending Mint to Windows users
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?
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.
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? ;)
How about
yay
Even more simple, and now guess the update command
Yea, it is just
yay
Damn I love endeavourOS (Arch for lazy people)
Edit: ohh, automatically, yea, for that I use opensuse TW as it updates automatically prior shutdown
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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’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.
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)
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.
Mostly all thanks to Gamers Nexus, I’d wager.
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.
Thanks gaming jesus
I am looking forward to GNU+Linux usage share numbers a year from now. I think it is very likely to pass 5%.
Removed by mod
Does this count torrent downloads?
probably not
How is Bazzite for NVIDIA users?
I put it on my gaming desktop and ROG Xbix Ally X and love it. Works great. The Windows Rog Xbox Ally X portable experience sucks. Also I’m not missing the intrusive updates and AI junk jammed into absolutely every Microsoft product.
While I didn’t use Bazzite I did put Steam OS on my wife’s Ally. Yes the windows handheld experience is (was) atrocious
It’s been flawless for me with similar performance (slightly better in some areas) than Windows.
I’ve been using Pop OS and it’s been pretty good but I’m not super tied to it, would Bazzite be better at all?
If it’s doing what you need it to do, no reason to rock that boat! It is fun to try out other distros without distro hopping, just to see what’s out there. That’s what a good thumb drive is for!
True and fair enough! I suppose it’s working well enough as is
If you want a console like experience on your PC then use bazzite. If you want the same experience but with out the console lock down use cachyOS.
Depends on how much you do with your PC really. Like bazzite has one of the best out-of-box experiences there is. Basically everything is preset up. But if you need to say, leave the steam ecosystem. Things become infinitely more complicated than any other distro to do anything with that is both the benefit in downfall of an immutable distro. It makes sure you can’t f*** anything up but it also means you can’t f*** anything up if you get what I mean.
While cachyOS has the exact same out-of-box experience with the sole exception of you have to push one button and type in your password. And if you do need to leave the steam ecosystem, it’s at the end of the day a normal distribution so you can just do whatever you want.
The downside is you can do whatever you want so you can break s***.
Basically comes down to bazzite is basically old Windows. You are not allowed to do anything really without a lot of jumping through hoops. It means you’re going to get a consistent experience and it’s going to be reliable, but only within the operating parameters set out by the distribution.
While cachyOS is basically all of the same upsides but without any of the guardrails. So if you want just a good out of box experience it’s there. All the compatibility is the same if not generally better in the real world. But again, if you’re stupid or unable to read basic instructions there’s a good chance that you break something and you’ll have no idea how to fix it. Short of a reinstall.
I would give a child bazzite 100% of the time. Immutable this shows work is a fantastic form of parental control. Because while the barrier exists and will prevent most kids from doing something stupid with their computer, it’s not insurmountable and you still can do whatever you want with your computer. It’s just not easy.
But in either case, I would choose literally shooting myself in the foot before using anything in the debian or Ubuntu family if my primary goal is gaming. I love Debian but it in its family of distros are so out of date and require so much f****** to actually bring in newer packages and make sure that they actually compete even half as well as a fedora or arch-based option that it’s not worth the hassle. You’re far more prone to breaking a Debian mint popos install. Trying to make it equivalent to bazzite or cachy for gaming. Than you are breaking an arch install by just randomly installing packages from the aur without reading anything.
Hmmm I’m not super into Bazzite being more locked down. I might have to look into CachyOS tho
Why do people use PopOS? I genuinely don’t get it.
Why don’t you recommend it?
I don’t even know what it does.
Idk, it was recommended as a more entry-level distro for people who are used to Windows and Ubuntu. Seems pretty good and looks pretty professional
Atleast 20 of those are mine, I simply delete the ISO after flashing and ive absolutely flashed one singular USB 10 times with the same nvidia build, let alone other ones
What’s the appeal of Bazzite over regular Fedora immutable version? I’ve personally never had an issue running Steam on Fedora, then again I wouldn’t consider myself a “gamer,” certainly not my biggest requirement as far as computing is concerned.
Plasma/KDE as a first class citizen.
KDE is second-class to GNOME on Fedora.
KDE is second-class to GNOME on Fedora.
It is? I ask because I’ve always used Fedora KDE and honesty it’s been the best KDE experience I’ve had. Now I’m curious how much better the Fedora GNOME experience might be if it’s prioritized so much more, but I’ve never seriously used GNOME so I don’t think I can make a fair assessment. In what ways is KDE deprioritized?
they have nice scripts and tweaks, and afaik steam as a flatpak runs a bit weird so youd have to layer it whereas it comes prebaked on bazzite.
