Bazzite is seeing an insane amount of growth right now
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I am looking forward to GNU+Linux usage share numbers a year from now. I think it is very likely to pass 5%.
Thanks gaming jesus
Removed by mod
I kept breaking my fedora install so I went to bazzite that month lol
Does this count torrent downloads?
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
They should use this technology we used purely for uh… "Linux ISOs’ back is the day.
BitTorrent.
afaik theyre parasitizing microsoft this way by compiling and distributing everything on github, makes it cheaper too. they have a way for local computers to distribute software as peers at least so you only really need to download it once if your server or w.e. runs it too
Meh, flavor of the month.
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.
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.
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?