Bazzite comes ready to rock with Steam and Lutris pre-installed, HDR support, BORE CPU scheduler for smooth and responsive gameplay, and numerous community-developed tools for your gaming needs.
I have been using the hell out of bazzite for the last few weeks and I’ve really enjoyed it. There have been a couple of minor bugs but otherwise everything just generally works.
I’ve enjoyed it so much that I’ve also installed bluefin on my work laptop.
Linux veteran here. I use Bazzite on my gaming PC and ROG Ally. Once I figured out the quirks of an immutable distro and started using distroboxes it became an amazing experience. No complaints here.
I’m seriously considering Bazzite now. Can you explain whether something like LaTeX with custom packages would work? I also don’t want to redownload the LaTeX packages to vanish after a system update.
Also, I’m a tiling window user (i3). Will it be possible to use it in desktop mode?
Basically installing packages. You’re fine if you default to using
flatpaks for gui apps
brew for cli programs
distrobox when building from source or when you need good control over the package environment (e.g. when installing a latex editor and only the latex packages you want)
layer packages on host with “rpm-ostree install” when the program needs tight integration with the host (e.g. VPN software)
Also, you shouldn’t edit files in /usr, but I’ve never run into that limitation. You can still edit other top-level directorys like /etc .
Jorge, Kyle and the others over at ublue is doing a great job with their Fedora spins.
I run Bazzite on all my computers and if you got a full AMD system you can even get full gamemode running by installing the deck image. This in turn give you the best controller experience for games, as Desktop Steam got several issues with Steam Input valve have not fixed yet.
But not all credit should go to them for this but also ChimeraOS team, Nobara and others that are constantly working on an improved gaming experience on Linux.
When developing RetroDECK Steam Input profiles I mainly use the Steam Deck with SteamOS and Bazzite on my desktop to test them.
Has someone tried Steam VR with an Index on Bazzite? How well does it run?
I tried some setups with Steam VR, as Steam inside Flatpak is not supported and not working, but even when installed via deb it can require some restarts and be janky.
Anyone able to give an ELI5 to a linux noob? I’m struggling to find what the benefit is of Fedora’s atomic builds (is it just containerised apps? Is this an immutable distro?)…and then also what the benefit of Bazzite is on top of Fedora’s atomic spins?
The ELI5 for Fedora’s atomic desktops is that if Windows had an Atomic Desktop version, Program Files and most of the Windows folder would be read only, and each program you installed yourself would go into its own folder in your user directory. That’s the basic idea. It’s harder to screw up an Atomic system as long as you stick to containerized app formats like flatpak/appimage whenever possible. It makes it easier for everyone to diagnose problems, and easier for users to roll back if an update has problems. Even if you were to install it right now, you could use one simple command to “roll back” to any image from the last three months.
The benefit of Bazzite is you have all of the above, plus a lot of gaming-related stuff preinstalled which, if you were to install them yourself in a normal Fedora environment, you’d likely have to spend a lot of time just learning how they’re supposed to be configured, how they interact, which versions have problems, and how to troubleshoot problems when an update to one app breaks a prerequisite for something else; eventually you end up in config hell instead of actually using your computer. With Bazzite, the image maintainers are the ones in config hell - they work out the kinks, app versioning, communicate with upstream to fix issues, all that, so your system should be in the most functional state that a Linux system can be, so you only have to think about using your apps.
tl;dr
Atomic Desktops are more resilient to randomly breaking from updates or user error, and are easier to revert to a prior state if problems do arise
Bazzite is a custom Atomic image with lots of gaming stuff preinstalled and preconfigured to work properly out of the box
If you’re a gamer and wanting to try out Linux, Bazzite is going to be the least painful way to get your feet wet.
Immutable distros are excellent for daily driving. I daily drive one myself!
Add comment