Bazzite is seeing an insane amount of growth right now
Aurora sitting down there at the bottom of the desktop OSs. I’d love to some of the Bazzite users migrate to Bluefin or Aurora.
If you’re not aware, switching between different Universal Blue OSs is super easy, with one caveat. Switching from a GNOME OS to a KDE OS or vice versa is problematic.
I’d love to some of the Bazzite users migrate to Bluefin or Aurora.
Why?
To spread the love, basically.
Bluefin comaintainer here. The metrics are flathub and app developer donations, not the base image. You spread the love when you install a flatpak or buy a linux game and make those numbers go up.
The idea that the base OS is important isn’t a thing, the only way to fix the economics of the linux desktop is to focus on applications, not distros.
Switching from a GNOME OS to a KDE OS or vice versa is problematic.
I did that a few times already on different installs and never had any problems, besides the window decorations/ theming being off and needing to set them again. What issues could be expected?
On atomic systems like Bazzite and the universal blues, getting rid of the old files from the previous DE can be a huge hassle. On normal systems it’s a lot easier
The dotfiles between GNOME and KDE are the same, the base image doesn’t matter, if you try to switch DE’s on old distros you have the same problem.
Right. But cleaning up the old files left over from swapping your DE is much easier if you actually have read and write access to those files. When you swap DEs, it’s gonna leave shit behind whether you’re atomic or not. But atomic systems have more barriers to cleaning them up, to prevent the user from accidentally cleaning the wrong things.
All of the affected files are in the user’s home directory, not on the system.
This just isn’t true. There are tons of dependencies that are going to get left all over the place
It’s an image, there’s no such thing as “left all over the place”. Source: I’m one of the maintainers.
Gamers rock
Reddit apocalypse
Does this count torrent downloads?
probably not
I distrohop every now and then, but usually when I have a convincing argument for it. Anyone want to try to convince me to switch either of my computers (one on Tumbleweed and one on NixOS) to Bazzite?
its closest to nixos in functionality, but basically its just a very simple distro that doesnt require much work to maintain and comes with lots of useful premade scripts and configurations for gaming and making immutables easy to work with. if thats what youre looking for thats what its good for.
Can I setup docker containers on it?
podman works well, docker is a little finicky due to some systemd weirdness and the whole immutability of it all.
it mainly tries to get you to use distroboxes which are awesome. you can even install something in a distrobox and expose it to the host.
Are distroboxes, podman, and docker all names for the same type of program? I’ll have to start researching the ones you mentioned and see if it fits what I’m doing.
Yes, but the beauty of it is that it plugs in Steam immediately. If you’re installing it on a machine that uses Steam and sometimes browses it is a one-stop shop.
I offloaded Windows 10 entirely, installed bazzite, and played Hollow Knight and the entire Dark Souls trilogy from the same installation on the same harddrive I’d had them on Windows. Didnt even need to reinstall.
To me that’s impressive. I only had a few crashes overall too.
You can with the developer oriented spin, bazzite-dx (I think the plan is to unify them). On base bazzite there is no docker but there is podman I believe.
I am looking forward to GNU+Linux usage share numbers a year from now. I think it is very likely to pass 5%.
Thanks, Steve
I’m out of the loop here, what’s the context?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOx4_8ajZ8
Watch around 00:45 ☺️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOx4_8ajZ8&t=44s
There’s a link with the time appended.
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.
Traffic cost must be insane. Hope they have good hosting and won’t be paying through the nose and go broke.
Cloudflare would host it for effectively free
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.
Yo ill take some of your megabytes ill pay for shipping
Should be manageable and it is probably less than you would imagine. Just checked real quick: the isos load from download.bazzite.gg, which is a Cloudflare IP. So they are either using it as CDN or even more likely use Cloudflares R2 storage for isos - which would mean they pay for storage (~15$/TB) and operations, but not for egress. This is seems ideal for few but huge files.
So for a single iso (~7 GB) they would pay 0,105$ for storage monthly and additionally 0,36$ per million of class B operations (reads/downloads). Of course they host more than one ISO, but for this example it would have been downloaded about ~150000 times to reach the petabyte.
So yeah, the ISO download is probably less of a problem. (Disclaimer: lot of assumptions, check in with a bazzite dev for clarity)
Can always stick it up as a torrent if its a concern too
Doesn’t $0.36 times 150,000 downloads come out to 54 thousand dollars, which is a lot of money?
Sorry, my bad. 0,36$ per million class b operations. Of course there will be slightly more operations than downloads (e.g. people/bots sarting downloads and aborting them), but still probably cheap.
yeah i mean for every 1 active user we have 1250 requests to download here. lots of bots. i dont know if they count upgrade pulls (each version is essentially a full iso that gets pulled to your computer), but if so that means with each update we’ll see even more data draw from all the users upgrading.
i have summoned you once again i see 🪄
Also keep in mind cached requests don’t count so it’d be cheaper.
Thanks gaming jesus
I wish people stopped recommending Mint to Windows users
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!
I recently got a mini PC for couch gaming / HTPC functionality, and I installed Mint without ever booting Windows. I’ve been using Mint for a while after years of distro hopping, but I’m having issues with Bluetooth XBox controllers randomly disconnecting. Maybe this is the excuse I’ve been looking for to try Bazzite, although I might just need to get a USB dongle with a chipset known to work on Linux. What I’m really waiting for is an immutable distro with Plasma Bigscreen.
I also have Bluetooth issues on mint but I just ignore it ha. Its annoying though
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
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?
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.
There’s nothing wrong with Mint, it’s solid. If it works for you don’t stress about it
The only thing is that it’s based on Ubuntu LTS so it’s packages can be a bit old. Doesn’t really matter much unless you have very new hardware and need the hardware support. Then something Fedora based like Bazzite would be better.
For getting newer software you can use flatpak/Flathub.
Bazzite is also “immutable” which makes it harder to break on a system level, but also harder to tinker on a system level. Mint is a “normal” distribution in that regard. Mint does have Timeshift for taking system level snapshots, on the off chance that an update or your tinkering breaks something. Its worth checking that Timeshift is set up for automatic snapshots
If you have 0 issues and aren’t bored with it either, keep using it. It’s completely fine.
People often have various reasons for not using it. E.g they want more up-to-date packages so they go with a rolling release distro, or they want to use a different package manager, or they want an immutable distro. Mint is just a generalist distro that works fine for most people, but doesn’t excel at any particular thing. Same as Ubuntu LTS, but with a nicer UI and less commercialization, so I see it as a great alternative to Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu non-LTS may be more up to date though.
Mint is great! It taught me the basics of linux.
Meanwhile SteamOS bewildered me with no printing support
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 like bazzite-kde because it’s similar to windows. Gnome bothered me - in particular not being able to set a blank desktop easily.
Booting Gnome for the first time is such a baffling experience. Then you discover extensions and it feels pretty good.
I don’t like that I’m beholden to extensions that may break after an update to get what I want out of it, but I still use it on my laptop cause it’s the best touchscreen experience I’ve had (after tweaks)
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.
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? ;)
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.
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
mint aint that bad
besides all its desktops not supporting Wayland (ig X11 is better for beginners??)Not really. Beginners don’t know the difference.
Can someone ELI5 why Bazzite is so popular? I’m a Linux longtimer (since 2006!) but never heard of Bazzite.
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.
Along with what others have said about it being a great ootb experience for anyone looking to play games. It is also immutable so you can’t fuck it up too easily. And the very popular YouTube channel gamers nexus has started doing their Linux testing exclusively on bazzite. I think the latter is playing one of the biggest parts, while the previous two points are specifically why they choose bazzite.
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
There’s a good argument to be made that the project might just end up imploding in a year or two and dying out
Could you make this argument?
Imagine you like video games. You install Bazzite. You have Steam, with only a little checkbox (to allow playing on linux). It works, you can play, you have a “playstore” if you need something. You have really little to do if you don’t go outside Steam and the playstore.
Problem generally is that the moment you do have to leave steam. It’s infinitely worse and basically impossible to use for a low skilled or new user compared to other gamer distros that do the exact same thing as bazzite but arnt immutable.
Immutability is great till you need to actually do anything at all. It’s such a catch 22. To a new user, it means you can’t accidentally f*** anything up, but also to a new user basically means your computer is a glorified console and you can’t do anything with it because you lack the skill set in knowledge to actually do anything in looking. Anything up basically isn’t going to be helpful for you cuz basically every guide and written account anywhere you find isn’t going to be geared towards an immutable distro.
The immutable gimmick that’s currently going on right now is still way too flavor of the month for new users who are trying to learn from a ground set of nothing.
If I was giving a computer to like a kid who I didn’t want to be able to do anything I would give it to them as a form of parental control more than anything.
I never say it has no problem. I’m on bazzite and every time I want something that’s not in the playstore, it’s a fucking hell and it never works. I just stopped.
You couldn’t just layer it on, or use distribox and container it? I have plenty of Linux on machines I work with, but my gaming rig is Bazzite, and it literally does it’s job perfectly, which is to game, and the few other misc things beyond its regular scope I have done in the couple’s years it’s been on that machine I have had no issues with?
The immutable gimmick that’s currently going on right now is still way too flavor of the month for new users who are trying to learn from a ground set of nothing.
New users aren’t going to administer their computers either. there’s no “flavor of the month” it’s just teaching new users how to administer linux systems properly. And of course directions on the internet are going to be incorrect, the only correct solution is to follow the documentation, not random guides on the internet.
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.
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.
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
You can install Bazzite with KDE also if I’m not mistaken
Yes but they force you to use GTK apps by default for the core apps.
They even replaced Discover with Bazaar where you can’t see certain package types (like mangohud) and have to install them manually, can’t browse by category and just get “selected” games shoved in your phase, as well as getting no update notifications and it will silently fail sometimes in the background with no notifications or messages.
Kinoite is also great and usually what I recommend someone coming from Windows who wants a distro that “Just works”.
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.
Cool thing is you can rebase anytime to any other flavour you want with one command and keep everything that’s yours!
i like it too, but the ublue scripts are extremely handy so i hate leaving anything ublue
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.
Yes… ha ha ha… YES!
(i dont even use bazzite but love that for them)
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.
Immutable?
System files are a read-only container, protecting you from issues such as sudo rm -rf /etc
Really hard to fuck up
