https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg
Graphs can be found here on their github. Since around mid November the active user count for Bazzite has gone up by around 16k active users.
Personally, my only wish for Bazzite is a Cosmic version 👼 I tried it out recently and it seems fairly impressive
I’m three of those new installs. Bazzite has surpassed every expectation I had.
What’s so special about this? Aside from the immutable thingy, of course.
Probably the fact that they have many ISOs tailored for each supported hardware configuration, and they point the user to the right ISO with a clear wizard in their download page.
Also basically it is an unbreakable gaming focused OS very close to SteamOS, that you don’t have to maintain, and it comes preconfigured with Steam and the right drivers for your setup. I’m not the target audience, but I see the appeal.
This is why I chose it. Gaming living room computer that kids can’t easily break. It just worked. Well, except for my idea to dual boot and have games pulling from an ntfs hdd. Bazzite hated that idea. So if you’re using bazzite, make sure your games are on a Linux partition. Even though Linux is ok with ntfs for some reason beyond my expertise… Games do not like it.
Steam tends to have massive issues with permissions for games on NTFS partitions. You might’ve run into that.
I’ve been using Bazzite for a while and mostly happy with it. So from 2026 and on, I’ll start donating a Windows license amount of money to Bazzite and other fundementals every year. Because fuck Windows, that’s why.
I ended up with CachyOS over Bazzite but I’m looking into the latter for my dad since I’m guessing it’s more stable and easier.
I just… Idk, I like Arch over Fedora. I blame the little pacman eating my progress whenever I install stuff in konsole. Desktop mode to desktop mode it’s the same KDE Plasma I’d be using, though. Are there any other striking differences between Cachy and Bazzite?
Edit: it was good to bring it up here, y’all are very knowledgeable on these things. It sounds to me that I need to get bazzite for my dad mostly because he won’t want to fuss or work on it and that I made the right call for myself since Cachy (and Arch in general) gives more flexibility. Frankly I might not even give him desktop mode default, he strictly wants something to play from bed in full on retirement mode.
It’s amazing. Everything works perfectly, all my favorite games run smooth and gnome is amazing.
I left Linux 10 years ago because I didn’t have the time to maintain a system.
Now it’s less work than Windows to set everything up
I installed Aurora today. My first immutable experience.
It’s not really surprising, Bazzite has been the talk of Linux internet for the last 18 or so months.
Installed it Friday for the first time. Its ridiculously fast. I had everything up in running in less than an hour. It just flies, I m in awe. Only issue I’m having is “trouble” setting up pass-through for the sound system. Currently stuck in stereo. Only spent a few min to tweak things before leaving, though.
Edit: Turns out it had nothing to do with Bazzite. My wife had unplugged the rear speakers , and i had unplugged the subwoofer when plugging new PC. No wonder 5.1 wasnt working…
I’m surprised people are so keen on these gaming-focused distros.
I just want a great, general-purpose computing system that can do gaming as well. 😁
It’s not so much that people are focused on gaming distros, it’s more that gaming distros historically haven’t been much of a thing, and gamers generally had to use windows for their gaming, because the linux experience was limited and sub-optimal. Even dedicated linux users would keep a windows partition/machine that they used for gaming.
That’s not true anymore, as basically anything without kernel level anti cheat works on linux, which means that a huge amount of folk that would have moved to linux earlier, but couldn’t, are now coming over.
Which is to say, it’s not so much that there is “so many of them”, it’s more that, they’re coming over in a big wave, because they’ve been there for years, but haven’t been able to move until recently, and now, they know that there are distros out there that look and feel like something they’re familiar with.
I guess we have different use cases is all. People who primarily use their computers for gaming.
My PC is:
- My media server
- My workstation when WFH
- My entertainment center if the TV is busy
- My gaming PC
- My hobby development PC
(In no particular order.)
Just an fyi, Bazzite does all of that as well. It’s not just gaming, it’s a fully functional OS
So you can install packages? It’s not a fully immutable system?
You install the package and it adds it to your OS image (that re-initializes every time you boot).
They say you should try to avoid it if you can, so if there’s a flatpak use that, if not, then a distrobox with Fedora toolbox for .RPMs or Arch (for AUR and yay) or whatever other distro you choose, then shortcutting it right to your host OS. By this point, you’ve probably already found a way (or three) to get it to work.
If all that doesn’t work, then you can layer packages onto your image by installing the local .RPM using rpm-ostree then rebooting. I’ve only had to do this with my VPN client so far. Only annoyance is that you have to update it manually.
Ooh, okay, definitely sounds cumbersome at first glance.
Universal Blue is the project which maintains Bazzite and other brilliant immutable images based on Fedora Silverblue (Gnome) and Fedora Kinoite (KDE)
Bazzite has Steam bundled in the image which is a bit better for performance, Bazzite-dx is Bazzite with devtools.
Aurora is another image made for general computing, Steam is installed as a Flatpak with a little worse performance but not much
Bluefin is your typical dev-workstation
If you’re serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.
Why is Flatpak Steam worse for performance? I’ve been using it for years, seemingly better performance than Windows on the same system. Something inherent about Flatpak?
If you’re serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.
Mm, I don’t think I’d be willing to sacrifice my Niri workflow. Niri also supports fractional scaling and VRR, but not yet HDR, which I can live without until it’s implemented. 😁
Flatpak is simply a sandboxed application, similar to a Docker container. Its better to have natively installed applications over sandboxed if you are seeking the highest level of performance.
You have essentially made all your games run within a sandboxed instance which has a limited set of binaries that emulate another mini OS within your primary OS.
If you haven’t seen any performance issues, then keep on doing what you’re doing, the software is very well made compared to Ubuntu Snap and likely has similar driver performance as close as possible to bare-metal
Flatpak is simply a sandboxed application, similar to a Docker container. Its better to have natively installed applications over sandboxed if you are seeking the highest level of performance.
This is bullshit. Containers run natively on your system just like “native” [sic] applications.
They literally say they are a fucking container tool like Docker in their own FAQ , you silly person.
That’s not what the FAQ says, rather it says Flatpaks are often sandboxed but not fully containerized. Containers don’t need to have a performance penalty because they run on the same kernel as the host. Container tech applies a chroot, disables some capabilities within the container and that’s about it. They are in contrast to virtual machines that need to boot an entire additional OS before doing anything.
Looks like I don’t understand how it works and should simply shut the fuck up instead of spreading nonsense.
Most people I know primarily use their desktop computers for games. Bazzite also works great for general purpose computing, although it isn’t advertised as such.
For some things.
For many things it isn’t. It is usable (I use it) but with a bunch of workarounds for anything embedded development-related since it needs specific vendor software with device access. I have had to use a variety of distrobox + app image solutions that are often a bit worse than a system that installs them as native apps.
I don’t personally count “embedded development-related” as “general computing” so I think there’s a disconnect there. 😅
Huh I guess it’s “normal” but I hadn’t heard of Linux OSes tracking active user telemetry. Turns out this is a fedora / rpm mechanism that tracks the ip addresses of people updating their system. Something to think about. Archlinux for example does not do any form of this tracking as far as I can tell
Debian has an option to anonymously report packages installed. There’s a question about this at install time and at any time you can install or uninstall the popularity-contest package.
In Debian, that’s opt-in, whereas in Ubuntu it’s opt-out. Tells you something about the core values, doesn’t it?
