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.
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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.
How much different is setting up immutable distros like Bazzite? I like the concept but I’ve been too intimidated to try it out.
Setting up is stupid easy. What makes immutable distros potentially difficult is installing software. Anything packaged as a flatpak is stupid easy. Beyond that it can get complicated. But it’s not bad in general.
Having just switched to Linux with Bazzite two weeks ago, my biggest issues have come from Wayland support. And that’s really just because I have a specific piece of software I need that doesn’t support Wayland. And that’s a bit of an edge case and the result is more annoyance than show stopper.
Can’t you use Xwayland?
No, because it’s a software KVM and it needs to be able to read, mirror, and suppress mouse and keyboard actions.
Which can be done on Wayland but it needs to be dome from a Wayland native app
Can relate
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?
Are immutable distros good for daily driving?
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!
I’ve been using bazzite for over 6 months now, I have it on three of my devices at the current moment in time, and I would never look back to Windows at this point, shit just works.
I have three questions if you have the time. Can you make it go to desktop mode by default, not big picture mode? What DE does it come with, Plasma? Does it come with Lutris or whatever? If I have an .exe installer for an old game, does it come pre-installed with tools to help create the proton wine-prefixes and everything? I imagine the last one would allow Flatpak to be used.
Not OP but:
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on a desktop it’s defaulted to desktop mode. I’m unsure about the steam deck.
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you choose. KDE or GNOME. Budgie is being worked on.
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lutris can install your windows executables. Bottles is available too.
The only games I’m unable to play so far have been AAA games with unfriendly anticheat. ProtonDB helps here.
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As someone who has done a lot of distro hopping in the past, I’ve found that going for a stable release that is widely used as a daily driver is superior for gaming than “gaming specific” linux distros, largely on the basis that the gaming distros have routinely had buggy UIs, driver issues, and a variety of unexpected and undesired behavioral problems tied to the array of “gaming adjacent” software installed, most of which you can install yourself with little to no effort and most of which you probably don’t want or need in the first place.
The thing is, Bazzite isn’t really a distro in it’s own right, which they admit themselves. It is essentially Fedora with a bit extra on top, and it gets all the updates Fedora does at the same time. It seems like they’re trying to “solve” some of the issues with other gaming distros. As far as pre-installed software, it comes with Steam and Lutris pre-installed. Sure, there are some linux gamers out there that don’t need those, but the vast majority will use them. Apart from those, it has the graphics drivers pre-installed for your system, based off your iso choice. Everything else is installed by choice through a first-boot wizard.
So is it pretty much an unofficial Spin then?
Yeah, based off the atomic desktop versions, as it’s immutable.
Thankfully, bazzite is both, the community has gotten rather large lately so support has been good.
Too bad they use discord :(
It is a gaming related community after all. There is less ethical and privacy concerns in that crowd from my experience. Not to say that it is bad as there is a community for everything.
You dont need to care about privacy to realize a platform like discord is not a good idea for any type of software project. Or any project.
I just know it is popular with gamers
