Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

by doener • 8 months ago

499 398 8 months ago

LelouBil2• 8 months ago

Great distro ! I have been using it for the last 2 years on my Framework laptop 16 without any issues. I even have a "fork" of sorts that adds Hyprland + all of my "desktop" config, which I think as being part of the OS.

I really think immutable distributions are the future of linux desktop, and maybe distributions that use OCI images, beacause they are a lot easier to work with than say, NixOS for example.

If you want to have your custom bazzite, you just do a "FROM bazzite:<whatever-version-you-want-to-pin" and add stuff you want.

Of course, you loose a bit of the reproducibility, since usually container images do not pin packages (and maybe other reproducibility issues I am not aware of) but it is way easier to work with.

mikae12• 8 months ago

I'm an https://getaurora.dev user and I agree uBlue is awesome. I'd like to create a custom image too, but it doesn't seem quite as easy as you say: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IxBl11Zmq5w

hokumguru3• 8 months ago

While the video is long, the actual process of setting everything up only took me about 20 minutes. The template they offer is extremely convenient.

LelouBil2• 8 months ago

The actual process for the image is really just what I said. In the video he sets up a github actions automatic build, and adds signing with cosign (which are also all steps you really want to do) but to have custom stuff in your base os is really as easy as a Dockerfile (or should I say Containerfile ?)

scoopdewoop• 8 months ago

I learned about Aurora from a HN comment some weeks ago, and it has been so awesome. I really haven't been as impressed with a distro since the first ubuntu. Its just a rock solid base, awesome defaults, and kde being delightful.

udev40966• 8 months ago

Immutable is very good for new linux users but I personally don't like the restriction and find rpmostree extremely slow to install literally anything. It does make sense to use immutable distros in routers, firewall, etc

tommica• 8 months ago

I try not to use rpmostree to install anything (only steam-input, codecs and nvidia drivers), and rely on homebrew, appimages, flatpaks and toolbox for my app needs. It works so far...

There is something about immutable linuxes that feels right, and I cannot pinpoint why exactly, but it's like things are segregated correctly.

EgregiousCube• 8 months ago

Bazzite fills a SteamOS-sized hole with a decent level of hardware support. Unclear how long that'll be the case - I don't see it surviving the release of a GA SteamOS.

tapoxi4• 8 months ago

I'm not convinced there will be a GA SteamOS.

Bazzite also has a much more frequent release cadence which is important for the kernel and Mesa. SteamOS only ships a major version every year.

galleywest200• 8 months ago

Steam OS is a rolling release (Arch based) with constant small updates. My Steamdeck has had updates several times this year.

throawayonthe• 8 months ago

i'm still not sure why anyone wants a GA steamos, the value is in the vertical integration, no? the "console experience" are mostly the bigscreen mode and other things already available in things like bazzite, while being a more general distro...

giancarlostoro2• 8 months ago

Its a nice distro, though personally I've been using EndeavourOS (Arch based but easier, think of it as the Ubuntu to Debian but for Arch). I wanted to try one of the Fedora Atomic distros but it just didn't boot correctly no matter what I tried, Endeavour just booted and worked and I havent looked back for over a year now...

One insanely underrated Linux software is Lutris, if you have non-steam games, it is phenomenal at helping you wire them up for Wine, especially when Steam itself behaves weird (like installing third party things is not exactly done intelligently by Steam).

tempest_2• 8 months ago

I personally think everyone should install arch once the manual way. It will give you a good idea how everything fits together.

After that, just use EndeavourOS.

I used Antergos before that and EndevourOS has been great since.

entropie• 8 months ago

It will give you a good idea how everything fits together.

The actual user does not give any shits. And while I love tinkering around and understand my OS/distro/$software I can absolutely relate. Linux should be at last so accessible that most of the things just work and a broad audience can just use their computer.

giancarlostoro2• 8 months ago

My first Linux distro was Slackware. I think I will be okay.

hokumguru3• 8 months ago

I have this same issue for a while and it had to deal with secure boot. Was able to install a immutable fedora after disabling.

ecshafer2• 8 months ago

Outside of console or handheld like experiences, I am not sure what this distro gives that Mint, proprietary nvidia drivers and Steam dont give me? I basically just download windows games as external applicationd through steam and use proton. Though I suppose a one click like “run this as proton” and “run this in this proton environment” could be useful. But once you learn how to change targets its not super complicated.

mikae12• 8 months ago

It'd give you Plasma, for one. Even if I'm a proponent of uBlue I'd consider Mint if there was a Plasma version. Seems like a great distro.

ecshafer2• 8 months ago

I don’t really care any desktop environment. I use i3. Otherwise I don’t really have much preference between how Firefox, terminal, and Steam are displayed.

doener• 8 months ago

A few points from the website:

- Out-of-the-box support for Xbox, Wii, Switch, PS3, PS4, PS5, and numerous other controllers.

- Nvidia drivers and the latest Mesa for AMD & Intel pre-installed, with tweaks applied as needed

- Bazzite ships with support for additional Wi-Fi adapters, display standards like DisplayLink, and more

- Out of the box support for not only desktop PCs, but handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs.

saidinesh5• 8 months ago

For things like appliances (home theater pcs, gaming consoles etc..) you'd want an immutable rootfs that's resistant to random reboots, power cuts etc..

You'd also want stable, atomic, updates that can go from "one version of system software to the next" without breaking the system.

Recently, i had to reinstall my 7 year old arch install because a system upgrade after a year or so broke it... It's not like i can't sit down and fix what went wrong manually, it's just that i wouldn't want to ever worry about these things on my home theater/"gaming console" pc...

scheeseman4863• 8 months ago

The gamepadui mode that allows you to use the system with only a game controller connected, effectively turning it into a console-style experience, is the main draw.

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

The entire point of Bazzite and other immutables is that you get a rock solid system that you never ever have to worry about breaking.

Atomic updates means updates either apply or don't: there's no partial/fail state that can stop your PC from working. And in the rare event that an update has issues, you can instantly boot the previous two images, without typing any commands or using any fancy restore tools. And if you're a bit tech savvy (ie you know how to type a single command), you can even go back upto the last 90 days worth of images (via github).

The best part of atomic updates is OS upgrades, they work flawlessly. In fact since updates are delivered as images, an OS upgrade is no different to any other regular update, unlike regular distros like Mint where you have to cross your fingers and hope that your system still works after a dist-upgrade (and I believe Mint's official stance was that they didn't support dist-upgrades, they recommend you to backup, format, clean-install and restore with every OS release. Not sure if that policy has changed now, but that used to be their stance for a very long time).

Gigachad7• 8 months ago

Atomic OSs are such a massive improvement. My experience with traditional Linux disros is the major upgrades failed as often as they worked. And always prompted me to merge config files or other insane stuff.

Bazzite just works like I’d expect an iPhone update or a Nintendo switch update to work.

machomaster12• 8 months ago

Mint does support upgrading the OS, both to minor and major versions.

I personally installed Mint in 2014 and used the upgrade path until a month ago, when my distro finally started showing bad signs of being experimented on (by me, for 11 years) and it was easier to do a fresh install instead.

piaste2• 8 months ago

There's nothing any UniversalBlue image tweaks that you couldn't tweak yourself. It's just adding/removing packages, adding/removing drivers, a few configuration scripts, and a bunch of tweaks to fix well-known gaming-related issues.

But the point is that, if you want to game on Linux, you probably want to perform exactly or almost exactly the same tweaks that Bazzite already does. So why bother doing them yourself?

It's not even a linux-from-scratch situation where you'd do it for the sake of learning. Googling "my controller doesn't work right", finding some discussion threads, and copy-pasting a bunch of fixes isn't particularly interesting.

iLoveOncall2• 8 months ago

While I understand the point of Linux distros overall, because they allow very specific usage like embedded, etc., I really don't get the point of those generalist but slightly specialized distributions focused on a single aspect that consumers use a computer for.

I'm far from a Linux super-user, I only use it for my servers and Raspberry Pis, but even I would rather pick Debian and install the necessary stuff by hand. This feels like opting-in to bloat on your newly installed OS.

I'll happily listen if anyone has a good selling point for those, but I can't think of any OS less attractive than something tailored for a single use-case on my generalist PC build.

hokumguru3• 8 months ago

The reason I use Bazzite is very simple: I only use my desktop computer for gaming and when I turn it on, I want it to work immediately without issues.

With previous distros I always had issues configuring something or another with games/drivers. Bazzite has been the closest to Windows/console experience for me wrt Linux pc gaming.

If this is a generalist computer, then you are absolutely correct. This is not the distro for you. This is very specifically built for gaming.

matthewfcarlson3• 8 months ago

^ this. I'm in the same boat. I got tired of having to do windows things on my windows pc.

carlosjobim• 8 months ago

It's common for people to have both a PC and a game console. Even a PC, an iPad and a game console. Right tool for the right job, not a bad idea.

iLoveOncall2• 8 months ago

Yes of course, but if you have a PC that's good enough for gaming, it's also good enough (more than good enough) for all your other PC needs.

moltopoco4• 8 months ago

Bazzite is actually two levels of specialization away from Debian. Yes, it supports gaming better than other distros, especially on the current wave of handheld devices, and last I heard 2/3 of its users were using the handheld/HTPC version of Bazzite.

But it is also part of the Universal Blue family, which means that updates are atomic and can be rolled back. SteamOS, GNOME OS, and KDE Linux are all trying the atomic distro thing, but you don't get it out of the box on the mainstream distros (yet).

jakebasile2• 8 months ago

I mostly use Ubuntu for my gaming PCs but I put Bazzite on my living room PC and it works a treat. It’s much more of a console-like experience and kind of gets out of the way. It also works better with Steam Remote Play.

Give it a shot, not like it costs anything!

lawrencegripper• 8 months ago

Same, it’s been great on living room PC for a console like low maintenance experience

haunter2• 8 months ago

As much as I love Bazzite at end of the day it's still a custom distro and every single day there is a chance they just close the project down and move on. Happened to so many distros in the past, this is not out of question. I’m not saying “big corporate” distros are better but personally I'd rather stick to something more mainline.

Hopefully Valve will release a general version of SteamOS with Steam Machine coming (and even they are questionable with their track record)

spiralcoaster• 8 months ago

Right, because the idea of Linux has always been about sticking to big corporate distros whenever possible

pedrogpimenta• 8 months ago

Well, the idea of Linux was "a better minix" and "I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones".

suprjami• 8 months ago

Not necessarily a corporate distro, but there is somewhat more sustainability in a project based on Debian or Arch than an individual with a bunch of organically handmade scripts.

iotku2• 8 months ago

Always a possibility with any distro, but the tooling around it is flexible and repeatable. If another group of people wanted to continue off where they left off it would be far more possible than a lot of the Ubuntu forks.

Just need the Atomic Fedora base to still be around and everything else is already pre-setup to run on GitHub infrastructure neither of which I anticipate going away soon. (Famous last words)

Calling it a superset of Fedora rather than just being its own bespoke distro can be a fine line, but really there's nothing stopping anyone from forking it and continuing on, a good few people run their own forks already to meet their own needs a bit more specifically.

foxheadman2• 8 months ago

Bazzite is a part of the Universal Blue family, which is more of a repackaging of Fedora Atomic.

I'm a fan of my Steam Deck and SteamOS, but I'd like that experience to eventually be available via community supported distros, which Valve/Igalia can rebase from, and instead focus on Proton.

Bazzite is the closest to that that we have so far.

omnimus3• 8 months ago

Afaik Valve is hiring/sponsoring people that were already making the projects. So much of the work is outsourced to codeweavers and KDE.

hoherd• 8 months ago

Exactly. And Bazzite is crushing the numbers compared to the other ublue distros https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global....

Ferret7446• 8 months ago

SteamOS is Arch based, and can be replicated on Arch by installing Steam if you don't care for the "game console" UI trimmings. Based on another comment thread about past stupid proposals on Fedora, Arch seems like a much more reliable base than Fedora.

uncletaco• 8 months ago

Weird question probably but outside of the super esoteric distros running a bespoke package manager what stops someone who installs a distro like bazzite from just continuing to update packages? If they use apt for example then they'll still get updates when the repos are updated and most of these distros reuse existing software repositories.

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

Bazzite works a bit differently as it's an immutable distro. Whilst updates for normal/user-level packages (Steam etc) will continue to work (as these are Flatpaks), your core system packages won't and you can't just change your repo to say Fedora's repos, as system updates are image-based and are pulled directly from Bazzite's github repo (which in turn pulls from Feodra).

The good news is, you can easily rebase to any other uBlue or even Fedora Atomic distro with just one or two commands, or if you're technical, you can even fork Bazzite's repo and build your own Bazzite (they even provide instructions on how to do this, it's very very simple, relatively speaking).

dangus3• 8 months ago

I don’t see what the point is of bringing this up.

1. It’s not exactly some fly by night thing at this point, it’s extremely popular, which means the likelihood of having maintainers and sponsors step up with, at the very least, an easy migration path is high.

2. You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?

3. Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)

EliteGadget9• 8 months ago

You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?

In 2009 the CentOS maintainers was AWOL and nobody had any idea where they went and had no access. This caused issues with releases obviously.

There been quite a number of times where people have died, just got bored, had health issues and a project just stops and sometimes people don't access to things.

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/07/30/130249/CentOS-Proj...

Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)

That sounds all horribly complicated.

I have a dotfiles, 5 bash scripts and a ~/bin folder for anything outside of package manager. I migrated my laptop to Arch recently from Debian and fixing the scripts was literally copy the script, and do a find and replace (I literally put pacman instead of apt install and most of it worked).

It not that much of a big deal to move between distros.

khannn• 8 months ago

"Custom Distro"? That's every distro mate

bigyabai4• 8 months ago

Any operating system could close down and move on. I'm 100x more concerned that Windows is going to become a cloud service than I'm worried about Bazzite shutting down.

pockybum522• 8 months ago

I get what you're saying in this comment. And separate from that concept I'm adding on: "Going to?"

mastazi• 8 months ago

People who are not new Linux users might prefer a distro which is part of the same "family" of distros they are already familiar with.

Steam OS I believe is based on Arch. Bazzite is based on Fedora. Personally I have experience with Debian distros so if I wanted a gaming-focused distro I would pick maybe something like Pop OS.

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

Pop!_OS isn't good for gaming thanks to being quite behind in package versions. You're better off going with a dedicated gaming distro (which offers recent packages) such as PikaOS if you want a Debian base.

Forgeties794• 8 months ago

I tried Pop before Bazzite on my PC back in April and maybe I’m just bad at Linux, but it was a pain in the ass for gaming at first boot. Bazzite ran Expedition 33 out the box. Didn’t have to download drivers, didn’t have to configure anything, it just worked.

There are limitations but if you want a gaming machine, bazzite is a no-brainer to me. Poo is very impressive but I just don’t want to fight my OS constantly when it comes to gaming.

Gigachad7• 8 months ago

I have both a steamdeck on SteamOS and a pc on Bazzite and they both work exactly the same. They both run literally the same steam UI and both run flawlessly so I couldn’t even tell you which one I’m using if you just showed me a screen and controller.

fritzy• 8 months ago

SteamOS is only going to support other hardware by coincidence. Valve is unlikely to put in resources beyond the hardware that they want to support. It's also unlikely to change the whole "firmware restore, entire drive" approach. They're not going to put in the resources or support work into making and maintaining a full distro by themselves.

A community distro (be it a console-like gaming focused distro or not) is going to be the way to be the way to go for the foreseeable future. I'm pretty happy with running EndeavorOS w/ KDE, Steam, and Heroic. The Steam client with Proton is where most of the magic happens in Linux anyway. If I wanted to get fancy, I could set up GameScope with Steam Big Picture to take a SteamOS/Bazzite approach.

oivey• 8 months ago

I don’t see why Valve wouldn’t try to support lots of hardware. Small time outfits like CachyOS can do it, why wouldn’t they? I think their motive with the Steam Box is hardware sales. It seems like they’re trying to shift the gaming ecosystem away from Windows.

scheeseman4863• 8 months ago

Valve are actively funding NVK.

germandiago• 8 months ago

What you just said is the reason why I use Ubuntu for my company and not something else. It is about risk of lack of support obviously.

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

SuSE would be a better option then, IMO. Not only have they been around much longer (1994 vs 2004), they offer much better support compared to Canonical. And as a bonus, you don't need to put up with any of the continuous enshittifications Canonical subjects you to (Snaps, increasing poor quality code etc).

cyberrock• 8 months ago

Sadly SteamOS doesn't support full disk encryption, which is inexcusable for an OS used on a portable device, that some also use to remote access their desktop (through Steam Link/Moonlight).

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

It doesn't need to, if your disk supports OPAL2 - just set the password in BIOS and encrypt the drive, it's fully transparent to the OS and as a bonus, there's virtually no performance hit unlike software-based encryption like LUKS.

foxheadman2• 8 months ago

Encrypted home directories are coming to the Steam Deck, using the same kernel API that Android uses. https://lwn.net/Articles/1038859/

FDE would be nice though.

Gigachad7• 8 months ago

It actually does in the upstream dev builds https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/holo/dirlock/-/wikis/Enabling-d...

It’s not in a consumer friendly state yet, but I’ve been using my steamdeck with encryption for a month now with zero issues. I guess technically this is not “full” disk encryption since it’s just the home dir, but I only care about protecting my personal info which is all in the home dir anyway.

udev40966• 8 months ago

I personally don't keep anything sensitive on steam deck or heck, any device related to "gaming". Modern games are nothing but spyware and even more reasons if you are pirating

KyleGospo19• 8 months ago

Hi, I'm the founder.

While what you're saying isn't impossible, it's unlikely. In the event it did happen, Bazzite is a fork, a signing key, and a couple forked Fedora Copr repos away from being made completely in someone else's control.

_cenw3• 8 months ago

I don't doubt it, but I actually really hate that the build system is a bunch of bash scripts, github actions and assuming the previous stage builds fine. Especially when the custom image forkable repo has an action commented out to squeeze more temporary storage out of GHA hosted runners because some images don't even fit on those (like the gnome-deck). I wish the entire setup was a little more decoupled and maybe allowed you to build multiple stages in one go so the entire system was more "forkable" and less spread out. I went on a bit of a wild goose chase trying to build Bazzite without the Firefox RPM removed (rpm-ostree doesn't like adding and removing and then adding packages again).

I did voice that concern in some Bazzite-related spaces before and it felt like it got brushed off with a weird undertone.

0xakhil• 8 months ago

@KyleGospo, Any plans for an arm64 version?

haunter2• 8 months ago

Oh no I didn't mean as a personal attack or anything so thanks for taking your time and for the reply! I know the chances are miniscule but there is that 1% in the back of my brain because it happened in the past with some distros I've really liked

mmh0000• 8 months ago

Weren’t you threatening to shutdown Bazzite just a few months ago?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381265

Forgeties794• 8 months ago

Just want to say big fan of bazzite! Been running it on my 9800x3d / 9070 rig since April and I have very few complaints

jakebasile2• 8 months ago

Isn't every distro a custom distro, by definition?

Anyways, I get that this is a "risk" to consider, but installing a new distro isn't so bad that it should prevent one from trying and using a currently extant distro if it works for them.

__aru• 8 months ago

I'm not sure I'd define the atomic Fedora variants as "distros" in the traditional sense.

This is a bit of an oversimplification, but Bazzite, Bluefin, etc, are basically just Dockerfiles that use Atomic Fedora as the base image.

So you are basically getting a pre-built docker container that is "Fedora + various configs added on top", and then you are booting that docker image.

Since it's just a container file, anyone could theoretically just fork the Bazzite repo, make some changes to the Dockerfile, then push it to github + let github actions build a custom docker image.

So is that custom docker image a distro? Some would say yes, others would say no.

doctorpangloss• 8 months ago

haha, is Windows a custom distro? is it going away anytime soon?

EliteGadget9• 8 months ago

They mean "custom" as "pre-configured to do <X>" where X is gaming. Generally most distributions are not pre-configured outside of a general suite of standard applications.

Forgeties794• 8 months ago

Since I primarily use bazzite to play Steam games it honestly doesn’t remotely concern me. I can just redownload the games on another distro.

debo_• 8 months ago

I don't know why people bring this up so much whenever a new Linux distro shows up. I think one of the coolest things about Linux is that normal people can feasibly roll a useful distro. How much of a longevity guarantee do you need from a distro that is used for gaming, of all things?

vips7L6• 8 months ago

I’ve been running the same gaming setup for almost 10 years. Having to upgrade or change OS is a major thing. Don’t minimize longevity.

Currently I literally can’t find the time to convert my drive from master boot record to GPT for Windows 11. I can’t imagine having to completely switch operating systems/distros because it just disappeared. Worrying if it will still be around is legitimate.

Vegenoid• 8 months ago

How much of a longevity guarantee do you need from a distro that is used for gaming, of all things?

Games are something I do to relax. I want as little friction to play the games as possible. For tech projects and work stuff having to mess with the OS and move away from deprecated stuff isn’t such a big deal, it’s part of the work. But for games I want them to just work as much as possible, I don’t want to have to find a new distro and install it and set everything up again on my gaming PC.

Despite Windows sucking in so many ways, it is the OS with the most assurance that a game will work without fuss. I am happy to see Linux closing this gap.

riffic• 8 months ago

Universal Blue is under very little risk of just shutting down operations without warning (as opposed to a hype-based BFDL kinda situation like Omarchy). I'm a happy Bluefin user and would wholly recommend people step up to help out with the distro if possible.

moltopoco4• 8 months ago

I'm a big fan as well, but couldn't some clueless IBM exec decide to ruin all the parts of Fedora that Bazzite relies on? What if IBM/RH throw their financial weight behind something like the proposal to drop multiarch packages (breaks Steam)?

data-ottawa2• 8 months ago

The nice thing about atomic distros is switching operating systems is as easy as typing 'ostree rebase', and registering a secure boot key.

So if Bazzite did go that way you could have fedora running in under an hour and with flatpak most thing will just work.

piaste2• 8 months ago

I want to bear witness that I did exactly that when I downmoted one of my computers from 'gaming machine' to 'closet server'.

One `rpm-ostree rebase` from Bazzite to a server-oriented flavour of Fedora Silverblue and it's been running and updating flawlessly since then.

TiredOfLife2• 8 months ago

As I understand 'ostree rebase' between KDE and Gnome will lead to broken system.

exitb• 8 months ago

I’ve recently moved between two other steamos-like distros and it’s such a non-event. You just log into Steam, pair controllers and download the games. Your saves are managed for you.

Jnr3• 8 months ago

That sounds awesome!

gethly2• 8 months ago

I wonder if people would be willing to pay 10€/$ for a yearly update so that there could be some commercial force behind a distribution that would provide security and stability for desktop users. with windows, you pay one large amount upfront. with macos, you get it with hardware. so having something like this, i think, has a potential to succeed and a place in commercial market.

Jnr3• 8 months ago

It is a fork of Fedora, one of the most stable distros out there. It is more geared towards regular users when compared to Arch on which SteamOS is based.

I am a long time Arch user but I totally understand why they went with Fedora for Bazzite.

tuananh• 8 months ago

For gaming, anything rolling release will be good because you want the latest update from the graphic stack.

willis936• 8 months ago

I think this is a factor for why SteamOS is Arch.

emsixteen• 8 months ago

Will hop over to one of these the day that the AAA multiplayer titles I want to play are supported. I know it's down to the anticheat, but I still wanna play 'em. Hopefully Valve are able to push that forward.

xiconfjs• 8 months ago

We can only hope Valve‘s new „console“ will hit the market strong so they have another levarage to push the studios to implement appropiate, linux compatible anti-cheat.

MrDrMcCoy4• 8 months ago

Anticheat doesn't need to be Linux compatible, it needs to move server-side.

MrDrMcCoy4• 8 months ago

Personally, I hope that corporate rootkits will never be permitted on Linux in any form. Game studios need to learn that anticheat needs to live on the server side where it belongs.

jsheard2• 8 months ago

Easier said than done for some genres, unfortunately. To catch things like aim assistance from the server-side you'd have to resort to handwavy statistical analysis and somehow thread the needle between catching well-crafted aimbots, but without accidentally banning legitimate players under any circumstances, even if they're extremely skilled and/or lucky.

It's been tried but I don't think it's ever been very successful. The Battlefield series used to use Fairfight, which is based on server-side heuristics, but they ultimately gave up on it and switched back to client-side detection for the more recent games.

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

If your definition of "AAA" includes Arc Raiders and Marvel Rivals, then good news, they work.

But if your definition specifically refers to shooters like Fortnite or BF6, then yeah, they're not going to work. Except CS of course, but not sure if CS counts as "AAA" in your books.

Cyan4882• 8 months ago

I've been dual booting Bazzite and Zorin for the last month it's been working out well. I didn't really like Bazzite as a daily driver, but it worked better for gaming.

ksymph• 8 months ago

Any particular reason you didn't like Bazzite as a daily driver? I've been considering replacing Fedora with it on my main laptop.

Cyan4882• 8 months ago

I admit didn't spend a lot of time with it, but right after installing it, I needed to work on a project with Platform.io in VSCode. What was a 10 minute process in Zorin (mainly due to not using Flatpaks) didn't work out after over an hour in Bazzite.

Also, Bazzite takes over 2 minutes to boot, while Zorin takes less than 20 seconds.

I'm pretty new to Linux as a daily driver, and need a stable base that I'm familiar with for my non-gaming daily work, and Bazzite isn't that for me yet. On the other hand, Bazzite just worked out of the box for gaming, better than Zorin did.

I have a big enough SSD to split the partition and let each distro do its best work for me.

kayson• 8 months ago

I really want to use Bazzite but I also have concerns about their supply chain. Last I checked, they automatically update all packages in their releases. Many of them are from copr, including kernel patches. The release notes do list package version changes, but as far as I can tell there is no human review.

I realize that, in a way, it's no different than installing from AUR or ppa's, but something about both of those (and the fact that package installs are manual) feels safer than copr packages with fewer eyes on them...

prmoustache• 8 months ago

Honestly if the point is to run proprietary software like commercial AAA games, the supply chain is already compromised.

I treat my gaming computer as a video game console, it wouldn't occur to me to share passwords, accounts, data or anything sensitive on my gaming machine. And I only connect it to the network if I need to download a game/update.

Gigachad7• 8 months ago

Considering how many games require literal malware for anti cheat. It’s the only sane way to do gaming. Just let the games and proprietary junk have their own environment with total control. But with none of your sensitive data.

moltopoco4• 8 months ago

My understanding is that a lot of the games on Steam are actually executed in some kind of sandbox, but I am sure if that is just for compatibility/emulation reasons, and which directories are still accessible in that case.

I wish there was better documentation for this, because "random indie game demo cannot upload my family photos" would be a great selling point for SteamOS/Bazzite.

As it stands, the Steam flatpak is probably the safest way to play games (which does not work on Bazzite).

herewulf4• 8 months ago

I totally agree and I have done likewise for many years now.

Consider setting up a VLAN or additional WiFi SSID if you find the network situation a hassle.

Rzor2• 8 months ago

They need to work on their messaging if someone has to scroll five to seven times just to figure out that it is an OS, and even then it still is not that clear.

Rzor2• 8 months ago

You guys are fast. Props to you. lol

Before: https://archive.is/Juqfq

After: https://archive.is/RTePv

tombert2• 8 months ago

I just reinstalled my NixOS gaming thing with Jovian from scratch. Not much of a reason, other than I wanted to do things a bit more "correct" this time (e.g. tmpfs root).

I did briefly consider Bazzite, but the thing that stopped me was that I wasn't sure how well it would work with an eGPU. With Jovian and NixOS, it is ultimately still just NixOS minimal under the covers, and that is low-level enough for me to play with boot parameters and kernel modules to get the eGPU working, and it wasn't clear to me that it would be that straightforward with Bazzite.

MrDrMcCoy4• 8 months ago

I take it your eGPU is Nvidia-based? My AMD eGPU didn't need any special handling on Linux. I was pretty amazed by it.

tombert2• 8 months ago

Yeah, nvidia.

KyleGospo19• 8 months ago

No kernel modules needed for eGPU, kargs are handled with one command, rpm-ostree kargs --help

subjectsigma• 8 months ago

Known Linux detractor, been sticking with Windows for years because I’ve had one too many ‘apt-get update’ brick my entire system. Decided to try out Bazzite specifically because of the immutable root partition thing.

Overall I will say things are going like 80% smoothly but there are still some very Linux-y problems with it:

The default grub has options for ostree:0 and ostree:1. 0 is the default and if you pick 0 it just hangs and doesn’t boot. I can’t figure out how to change this because the normal grub config files are read-only. So I have to quickly press down arrow when the computer is booting and select the right option.

Installing certain packages is difficult or impossible, for example I had to get pycairo and some other packages to run a Python program and you can’t add them normally. But I think the proper way is to just run everything in a container so maybe that’s on me.

90% of games work fine, but many have weird bugs like crashing when you Alt-Tab out. I could not get modded Skyrim to work after several attempts. Prism, the Minecraft launcher, has some sort of memory leak because if I leave it on in the background it eventually crashes the desktop and I have to hard restart. And of course anti-cheat games like Valorant/League don’t work at all.

KDE has tons of bugs - tooltips randomly scale to the wrong size, Dolphin refusing to copy a file to another drive for no reason, Dolphin freezing when loading a directory with lots of images, detaching a tab in Konsole sticks the window to your mouse until you click something else, Konsole has like 50 themes and none of them are named so you just have to squint and click one that looks good, drag-and-drop into Electron apps like Discord randomly fails, adding a new widget to the panel and suddenly it’s invisible, notifications appearing floating in the middle of the screen, removing an audio output (like unplugging headphones) seems to cause it to randomly choose an alternative, brightness on my monitor randomly shifts even after turning off DCC, GNOME apps have wonky themes, GNOME apps can’t detect light/dark mode so they just pick one… I could go on.

timschmidt5• 8 months ago

90% of games work fine, but many have weird bugs like crashing when you Alt-Tab out.

This isn't particularly linux-y of an issue. I've had the same sort of behavior in numerous games on Windows, up to and including crashing the graphics driver when alt-tabing out of a full screen game. Seems to be something gamedevs are not commonly testing, and perhaps difficult to defend against when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.

KyleGospo19• 8 months ago

Yeah I distinctly remember a time in my life where most of my Source Engine games would explode if I alt-tabbed in Windows Vista.

oreally4• 8 months ago

Seems to be something gamedevs are not commonly testing, and perhaps difficult to defend against when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.

I can guarantee you any gamedev worth his salt will have used alt-tab at some point in the game's development on windows. It's an incredibly common hotkey to use, and the devs very likely have multiple ides, notepads, image editing software running concurrently. You seem to be trying really hard.

when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.

Most devs are using cross platform graphics APIs. OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan. Alt-tab breaking is likely an OS issue.

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

I run modded Skyrim (SE) via Steam on Bazzite, and it works fine. I just installed Vortex inside the same Proton prefix as Skyrim, installed all my mods via Vortex (and made sure there weren't any conflicts) and it all worked fine. I think I might've had to install .NET as well to get Vortex going, it's been a while so I don't recall, but there should be some update guide somewhere.

RE Anti-cheat, it's not ALL of them, it's only kernel-based ones. For eg, BattlEye, EAC, VAC, and nProtect Gameguard all work just fine, but of course, the game studio will need to enable that support. Arc Raiders, Marvel Rivals, Fall Guys etc all use anticheat and they work fine.

RE KDE, I haven't experienced most of those issues. I don't use Konsole (Ghostty is far better anyways). As for Discord, Equibop is a far better client compared to official.

RE GNOME, unfortunately GNOME and KDE have never really gotten along, personally I avoid GNOME/GTK apps are far as possible.

simoncion7• 8 months ago

...but many have weird bugs like crashing when you Alt-Tab out.

Would it be easy for you to compile a list of like five or ten games that do this? I'm curious to see if I can reproduce this on my Steam-on-xorg-on-Gentoo-Linux machine with an AMD graphics card.

I don't doubt your report, not even a little bit, but -personally- I've found window management on Linux to be light-years better than on Windows. I can put nearly every game I've tried in my huge-ass Steam library on fullscreen on another virtual desktop, flip over to some other desktop (or window) to check something, and flip right back to find the video game still fullscreen and still running happy as a clam. [0] (To say nothing of the total lack of Windows-typical jankiness when changing the screen resolution on an "Exclusive Fullscreen" game.)

Whereas on Windows, it's kinda a crapshoot regarding both what state your desktop will be in when you Alt+Tab out of a fullscreen game and what state that game will be in when you Alt+Tab back. And if that game is "Exclusive Fullscreen" and is not running at your desktop's resolution, all the windows on your secondary monitor are probably going to be rearranged when the game starts, and will definitely be rearranged when you Alt+Tab out and maybe then again when you Alt+Tab back in.

[0] Two very notable exceptions to this are Red Dead Redemption 2 (it notices that its no longer the foreground window and "helpfully" makes itself windowed) and the Linux version of Dead Cells (it "helpfully" minimizes itself when it's no longer the foreground window.).

simoncion7• 8 months ago

...drag-and-drop into Electron apps like Discord randomly fails, adding a new widget to the panel and suddenly it’s invisible, notifications appearing floating in the middle of the screen, removing an audio output (like unplugging headphones) seems to cause it to randomly choose an alternative, brightness on my monitor randomly shifts even after turning off DCC, GNOME apps have wonky themes, GNOME apps can’t detect light/dark mode so they just pick one… I could go on.

Hey, you can't possibly be having these problems! You're using a RedHat-derived distro! That means it uses Wayland! And the Wayland people have been telling us all for years that Wayland is good for daily use for everyone, and that it should be the default everywhere!

(Do note that the above is bitter, bitter sarcasm. I'm so, so disappointed by how the Wayland folks tend to use political pressure (rather than plain declarations of both capabilities and shortcomings) to muster up general support for their project.)

analog83742• 8 months ago

Do they have breakout? I love that game so much.

egypturnash2• 8 months ago

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3041770/Breakout_Beyond/

analog83742• 8 months ago

That's gorgeous, but the horizontality. Can you handle it? I don't think I can handle it

SamDc73• 8 months ago

I’ve been using it for a couple of months on my main dev machine (I don’t game much). It’s my first exposure to immutable systems.

I love the idea, but honestly, juggling all these package managers gets annoying really fast; for now what I use is rpm-ostree (which you really shouldn’t touch unless you absolutely have to), Flatpak, Homebrew (some package are mac only or mac first), and distrobox (with arch).

Every now and then I think of going back to arch cause they are the only distro that made it very convenient to install some obscure packages that is only used by handful of people

Like yesterday, I tried setting up Flutter with the Android SDK command-line tools and the rest of the Android dev stack, and it took me almost 2 hours to get everything working; On Arch? That’s just a few packages, all sitting right there in the main repo or the AUR.

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

I get what your saying, but it's just a matter of finding the right workflow.

I'm very much like you infact, so I ended up resorting to just using an Arch Distrobox for pretty much everything. I leave rpm-ostree and Flatpaks alone as far as possible, so I only really have to worry about my Arch for updates and everything else takes care of itself.

You may ask then why not just use Arch? Well of course you can, but I like the idea of having a rock solid base where I know for a fact that I can let it happily update without breaking something. Arch still requires manual intervention every now and then (such as package migrations or some dependency conflicts). Not a big deal if you keep up with the Arch News and Discord announcements etc, but sometimes IRL gets in the way and I'm not up-to-speed with what's happening. With my Bazzite+Arch setup, I'm not super bothered with this, plus it's easy to blow my whole container and set it up again, and in fact I've got a bash script to do just that on one of my other PCs that I don't use regularly (because Arch needs to be updated regularly, otherwise you're in for a nasty surprise when you find out your keyring is out-of-date and pacman has been upgraded and nothing works... with a container, just blow it up and fetch the latest version, reinstall your packages and you're up and running in no time).

Gigachad7• 8 months ago

I tried out Fedora Silverblue a while ago but found immutable OSs to be too inconvenient for development right now. I don’t think it’s an inherent flaw in the design, just all the dev tools are not set up to work with them.

For normal non dev usage it works great. On my steam deck I just get everything through Flatpak or steam and it just works.

brianwawok• 8 months ago

Greatly enjoying bazzite. Grabbed a Radeon 9070xt, hook it up to my 4k projector, and get to couch game. Looks a fair bit nicer than my Xbox, and steam is so much better than the Xbox online store.

matthewfcarlson3• 8 months ago

I went to bazzite with a 4070ti super, is it worth going to a 9070xt? I've had graphical issues but a reboot always fixes it. The main menu UI is dog slow though (easily a half second of lag).

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

I can't speak for the 9070XT specifically (I'm on a 7800XT myself), but the thing with Linux in general is that nVidia can be a PITA sometimes and exhibit weird issues like your menu lag. If you want a first-class Linux experience then go all-AMD. I run Linux on four different classes of all-AMD computers (desktop, laptop, mini-PC and handheld) and have literally zero issues. In particular, I've been running Bazzite for about three years on two of my systems (PC and laptop) and it's been rock solid. Three years of updates and upgrades, with only one hiccup this one time on my PC (which wasn't a big deal either since I had pinned a good image versions to my boot menu, so I always have a good image I could boot into).

periodjet• 8 months ago

Kinda seems like they’re relying a lot on all of the work Valve has done with Proton. Difficult to tell what Bazzite per se is bringing to the table.

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

- Additional hardware support (like proprietary nVidia drivers, several game controllers, laptop-specific stuff (like some ASUS sensors etc))

- Newer core packages (kernel, graphics drivers, desktop environment). This often translates to better hardware support (especially if it's recent hardware), and often better game compatibility (newer graphics drivers often include fixes for games), and often better performance as well.

- More suitable as a general purpose OS. SteamOS heavily leans into the gaming use-case (naturally), and whilst you can use it as a regular PC, its immutable nature can make it a bit annoying depending on your workflow. Bazzite includes a bunch of useful defaults (apps/config/shortcuts) that makes it much more conducive for regular PC usage, or advanced gaming usage (like if you want to install an overclocking utility or do something more "advanced", it's far more easier and convenient).

Gigachad7• 8 months ago

Bazzite runs on my desktop while SteamOS does not.

forrestthewoods• 8 months ago

Why would I use Bazzite and not SteamOS?

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

I answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46093315

matthewfcarlson3• 8 months ago

Just dumped windows for bazzite with an Nvidia gpu + a 12700k. So far, great. There's definitely some artifacts but a reboot has always fixed it. I mainly installed it to see if I could go full steam machine.

mortsnort• 8 months ago

The site could make it clear that Bazzite is an operating system (it is right?). It wasn't until I scrolled to the bottom and saw built on Gnome and Fedora that I understood what Bazzite is.

rdudek• 8 months ago

How does it compare to CachyOS? I'm not too familiar with how immutable OS actually works or what is the deal with flatpacks.

I have a system that I kind of want to have Linux forward with Windows on secondary m.2 drive to dual boot if I need something there. Following protonDB, I see all the games that I play work just fine and are either gold or platinum status.

Would you recommend Bazzite or Cachy? I main do gaming, development and web stuff. I tend to run multiple dockers, multiple different versions of python and other packages. How would immutible OS affect me here?

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

Technically its performance is a bit slower than CachyOS, and some of the package versions can be a bit behind as well (like Mesa or the kernel), which can contribute to the slowness. Flatpaks work fine though for the most part.

I would recommend CachyOS if you're after raw performance and you're technically inclined, and don't mind ocassionally going into the terminal to fix something or do some maintenance (maybe once or twice a year).

Bazzite on the other hand is great if you don't care much about minor FPS improvements, but value your time and system stability more. I have both installed, and use Bazzite when I want stuff to "just work" and not think about updates and maintenance. I use it for work, and for braindead gaming (ie I'm back from work and just want to dive into gaming without needing to worry about any PC stuff).

Both OSes are fine for docker/dev workflow. Multiple versions of python isn't an issue on ANY Linux system, as you would never be installing them across the system, you'd be installing them in a container or a sandboxed environment. I'd also recommend checking out Flox[1] as a fast and lightweight alternative to containers, it's great for working with Python in particular.

[1] https://flox.dev/

ksynwa• 8 months ago

How do you normally install these dev dependencies on your current setup?

flawi2• 8 months ago

If you have an NVIDIA GPU CachyOS performs significantly better at the moment, so I would go with that. For AMD GPUs it's more of a preference question.

Personally for dev work I tend to use things like Nix to keep the development packages out of the host, that sort of approach works regardless of distro.

keyle2• 8 months ago

Two distros with fairly similar ideas have showed up for the "replacement for windows" recently[1].

Zorin OS and Bazzite... I was hoping someone who has tried both could enlighten me as to why one is better than the other?

[1] I say recently because I'm not following linux very closely.

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

No offense, but they're about as similar as apples are to oranges: yes they're both fruits, but they're very different kind of fruits.

Zorin is a more "traditional" OS, where things work like most PC operating systems, whereas Bazzite is an immutable OS with atomic updates. Immutable means the core system files are read-only, which makes it less susceptible to corruption and breakage (due to user error or malware). Atomic updates means updates either apply or don't: there's no partial/failed state that can break your PC.

Updates are also image-based, where your entire OS image gets updated in one go, kinda like how mobile OS's work - this means there's no chance of package conflict/version/dependency issues that can sometimes plague regular Linux distros like Zorin. This also means that major OS upgrades are trivial - they're treated like any other update. In Zorin and even Windows for that matter, major OS upgrades are always messy, and there's a chance something can break or get corrupted. You don't have that issue with immutable, image-based distros like Bazzite.

The only area where Zorin would be better is in low-level customisability - like say, you want to switch out your kernel to a custom kernel, or use a different DE, or change login managers etc. You can do that in an immutable system, as these are core components. But most people don't do this, so for regular users, an immutable system like Bazzite would be a much better choice.

keyle2• 8 months ago

My apologies I got it wrong anyway, I was thinking of Cachy OS, not Zorin.

Anyway thanks for your answer!

darcien2• 8 months ago

Recently I learned about CachyOS, it has custom scheduler to run things smoothly, including games. And SteamOS is also doing the custom scheduler for games. From what I can find, Bazzite doesn't seem to use custom scheduler.

Does these custom scheduler bring noticeable gains during usage? My previous linux desktop was a non-gaming distro, so I'm a bit curious on these fancy stuffs.

- BORE, CachyOS scheduler: https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/why_cachyos/#advanced...

- LAVD, SteamOS scheduler: https://www.igalia.com/2025/11/helpingvalve.html

akmittal• 8 months ago

Bazzite also mention

improved CPU schedulers for responsive gameplay,

on their homepage https://bazzite.gg/

darcien2• 8 months ago

Oops you're right, I was searching the docs and couldn't find it, maybe it's time to snoop around in their repo...

Night_Thastus3• 8 months ago

For anyone interested in some gaming benchmarks, Gamer's Nexus (a reputable source with good methodology) has some numbers here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOx4_8ajZ8

Based on their results, it sounds like there's still quite a way to go Linux gaming/Proton (ie: very inconsistent frametimes on Nvidia hardware), but it's definitely been taking steps in the right direction.

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

That's mainly an nVidia issue. On AMD, Linux is actually faster and more stable compared to Windows.

Night_Thastus3• 8 months ago

There seems to be little evidence of that, at least from a reputable source.

For some games it can be. For some games Proton performs far worse than Windows. It's not steady across the board. And some have stability issues, bugs, major performance problems, or just flat out don't work.

I want Proton to be the future as well, but I think it's important not to oversell it as a drop-in replacement either.

EDIT: GN highly recommends against apples-to-oranges comparisons of the two, but even looking at their own data for AMD cards (with exact same CPU, RAM, and motherboard) it clearly shows Proton being behind on the order of 6-15%. Not a lot, but not ahead either. You can compare the numbers for the AMD cards against this video's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP0axVHdP-U

EDIT 2: Instead of just down-voting because the result makes you unhappy, how about responding with well-sourced proof otherwise?

EliteGadget9• 8 months ago

That just isn't true. While it is very good now, it is not faster and more stable than Windows. I have performance issues on Linux that just don't happen on Windows.

simoncion7• 8 months ago

Based on their results...

Do note that they make it very, very, very clear that their results are preliminary, and while they've put a whole lot of work into setting up benchmarking on Linux, they're not at all sure that they've got it all correct.

ie: very inconsistent frametimes on Nvidia hardware

Yeah, Nvidia on Linux for non-"compute" use has always been a terrible, godawful shitshow. Given Nvidia's recent and fairly-clear disinterest in the "selling graphics cards for people to play video games with" market, [0] I can't imagine things will get consistently better anytime in the near future. [1]

[0] Why sell that silicon to video gamers when you can sell it to cryptominers and -these days- "AI" companies for a much, much, much higher profit?

[1] I mean, it took them how many Windows driver revisions for them to release somewhat-non-garbage drivers for their spanking-new fancy-ass 5000-series cards? And Windows is the only consumer OS that they care about! For video game use, the Linux drivers are gonna be starved for development resources, and -unlike ATi/AMD's drivers- noone in the world can work on them but Nvidia.

flawi2• 8 months ago

Do note that they make it very, very, very clear that their results are preliminary,

Yeah, I'm not entirely convinced some of the results they're seeing aren't caused by their methodology. I don't think they are either.

I moved a gaming pc with a 4070Ti from Win10 to Cachy 3 weeks ago and have been purposefully testing out various games to see if it's workable; I'm about 50 hours and 15 games deep now and the only thing that doesn't work reliably is HDR. Outside of that I haven't run into any issues I haven't seen on Windows as well.

rounce7• 8 months ago

What’s with the Nvidia on Linux FUD like this is the mid-00s? I’ve run Nvidia cards on Linux for the better part of the last decade and it has been a pretty similar experience to when I was on Windows prior to that.

Nvidia’s Open Kernel Modules are good so far and the in-kernel Nova driver project also seems promising though some way off. I’m running a 5000 series card with Nvidia OKMs and so far it has been a really smooth experience.

ndriscoll• 8 months ago

I've never run into any issues with my GTX 1070 and proprietary drivers. It's ran perfectly well for almost a decade. Like when people complain about nvidia drivers I don't even know what they mean. Do you run into artifacts, or crashes, or kernel panics, or what?

kachapopopow• 8 months ago

I actually get higher FPS in graphically demanding games due to vulkan producing more optimized shaders, most of the lag actually comes from context switching and translation for directx, it's absolutely GREAT one dx12 due to how little translation there is.

I'm currently working on few very targeted optimizations for several hotspots I've found out from messing around so it will be interesting if I can solve those horrible stutter issues on cyberpunk since if I can fix it (in a ghetto and janky way), so can valve.

I can also achieve higher fps in games like overwatch (dx12) out of the box on nvidia on proton experimental which is surprising as 4 years ago the input latency was unbearable and I had drops as low as 30 fps, now I can achieve consistent 600 fps with minimums of 450 whereas on windows I get as low as 220fps and averages of 500ish. I do have anticheat related drops to <300fps due to the amount of translation happens when they decide to scan memory, registry and whatnot although it lasts <1s and doesn't happen during games it seems.

slashdave• 8 months ago

your dad's old CDs

Okay. I think I get a feel for their target audience.

KyleGospo19• 8 months ago

People in their 30s?

naaqq• 8 months ago

This is so cool. I like the mircoSD card idea.

tokai• 8 months ago

Isn't that just a steam feature?

wiradikusuma• 8 months ago

I want to create a "gaming streaming platform" like Stadia as a weekend project, does anyone know where to get started? Basically where the input device and the game are in different machines.

porkloin• 8 months ago

Sunshine is a great open source game streaming stack, and has client applications for tons of platforms, usually under the name "moonlight". Bazzite makes setting that up on a host (machine running the game) dead simple.

ptsd_isv• 8 months ago

For off the shelf shadow.tech has worked pretty reliably for me, even to the point of being usable for streaming vr using alvr (uk based).

For diy you can use moonlight / sunshine or steam remote play. I find latencies lower than around 30ms perfectly playable for everything except twitch shooters etc.

For true diy look into leveraging nvenc or equivalent hw encoder using a “zero latency” profile and build on top of UDP. TCP could be feasible for client input -> remote traffic, but even then building a minimal custom reliable layer on top of UDP probably makes sense to avoid nagle type issues. If you want to support arbitrary input devices (joysticks, wheels etc) that can’t be represented as an Xbox controller things will get pretty tricky. Especially if those devices require drivers, at that point your into proxying usb.

DIY in a weekend? Definitely.

True DIY in a weekend… probably not :)

boatsie• 8 months ago

Moonlight does this if you are just looking for a solution.

ThatPlayer2• 8 months ago

Haven't tried it much myself, but there's Wolf if you want to do it from Docker containers: https://github.com/games-on-whales/wolf

pacifika• 8 months ago

If you already have a gaming pc I can recommend an Apple TV and installing Steam Link.

zanmat02• 8 months ago

I really wanted to give this a legitimate try but even following the installation instructions to the letter, it bricked my Windows install and I had to spend a few hours fixing the MBR, Bootloader, etc. I'm sure it would be a breeze using a separate physical drive but that'll be a project for another day.

Bazzite does look very promising and happy to see innovation in the Linux gaming world!

Borealid2• 8 months ago

Bazzite has a command, `ujust setup-boot-windows-steam`, which when run adds an entry to Steam-in-Bazzite that causes a Windows boot.

It also has a command `ujust regenerate-grub` which adds a Windows entry to the bootloader.

Each of these is a single command which only must be run one time after install. I suppose it could take a few hours to either do it by hand, or to discover one of these options, but they are both documented and in particular the guide at https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/Installation_Guide/dual_boot... (which you implied you followed) mentions the latter command.

It works on each of my Bazzite machines without any manual tinkering/intervention. Not sure why it would not Work On Your Machine (TM).

zanmat02• 8 months ago

I couldn't even manage to boot into any shell so not sure this would've helped me much...

birksherty2• 8 months ago

A video shows difference between Bazzite, Nobara and CachyOS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqIjUddUSo0

Why others are better than Bazzite if it's made for gaming?

SquareWheel2• 8 months ago

I was using Bazzite, but they started talking about potentially shutting it down due to a removal of 32-bit support. It seems a bit safer to choose one of the mainline Fedora spins. Maybe Kinoite or Silverblue if you're into atomicity, though there's still some rough edges to be aware of.

indolering• 8 months ago

They were going to shut it down due to upstream Fedora considering ending 32-bit support. Sticking to upstream wouldn't have helped you avoid that issue.

SquareWheel2• 8 months ago

Why do you say that? If they drop 32-bit support, maybe I won't be able to play games for a time - at least until somebody rigs up a fix - but at least my operating system will still be supported.

If Bazzite goes poof overnight, though, that's a major problem. At least Fedora's official spins will continue to receive necessary updates.

foxandmouse2• 8 months ago

I've been using Linux forever (back to the mailed Ubuntu CDs days).

I installed this begrudgingly after fighting edge cases with Waydroid on Arch. It's the first "batteries included" distro I've actually liked. I usually hate the "omakase" approach, but the setup here is pretty much how I would've done it myself.

Side note: GNOME + Waydroid is the best experience I've had with a desktop OS on a tablet. Finding tools like scrcpy included out of the box was a nice surprise, too.

dmead5• 8 months ago

I've been using linux since the days of downloading slackware on a stack of 1.44mb floppy disks. I gave up on linux gaming around 2007. I've revisited it this year, but it still sucks. it's just not worth it.

just relax, install windows and late the escapism take over.

foxandmouse2• 8 months ago

ugh, I remember when the comments here were better than reddit.

sedatk• 8 months ago

Weird, I’m from the same era, and a predominantly Windows user, but I have zero complaints about Linux gaming on my Steam Deck.

herewulf4• 8 months ago

I also started my Linux journey with a turn of the century Slackware install. Linux has come a long, long way since then, but I learned a lot back then. Distros like Bazzite are practically "turn-key" now.

In any case, I would rather use those hard earned skills hand configuring Slackware today than to put with the shitshow of Windows pop-ups, forced account creation, telemetry collection, UI changes for the sake of change, advertisements built into the OS, random OS corrupting BSODs, etc..

imcritic• 8 months ago

I just learned about this project.

I do play games and I am a Linux user.

I see this project being an OS distribution with image update approach. It basically has some programs used for gaming on Linux preinstalled and probably preconfigured.

I wish the project would exist in 2 variants: an OS (as it currently is) and as an installer that would allow the user to select parts to install and configure on their current Linux distro.

Because I am using debian, this is my home PC and gaming is not the sole thing that I do on this PC.

Switching to a Fedora distro is not an option for me.

So, as nice as this project is - I say farewell to it.

udev40966• 8 months ago

Last time I tried bazzite, a year ago, it was very buggy and crashed often. I switched back to SteamOS on deck. Has bazzite gotten any better?

snapplebobapple2• 8 months ago

It's also the best distribution for jellyfin media player because it's trivially easy to get the jellyfin client to autostart in kde and it's not that hard to get it auto updating and rebooting nightly. This distro plus an intel n150 mini pc (aoostar n1 pro is decent) and a flir dongle and the flir remote is a big win.

ragazzina2• 8 months ago

Can I ask you whether HDR works without any hiccup? I can't seem to find a definitve answer online.

snapplebobapple2• 8 months ago

bazzite supports it I believe but I am not sure my n150 based mini pcs that I'm using on my tvs does. This was running on six your old tvs until this month when I bought a lg g5 for the basement. It looks great but I couldn't say if it looks the greatest it could look with HDR on or not... My previous tv frontend was a custom nixos setup that was a pain to maintain over the years. bazzite just works and the setup is simple for my needs (basically autologging in to kde and autostarting jellyfin media player in full screen plus a systemd timer to ensure the system updates and reboots overnight while I'm sleeping.

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

HDR can be a hit-or-miss even on Windows though, thanks to the myriad combinations of monitors, cable versions and standards. So hard to give a definite answer besides "YMMV".

In my case though, it works fine without any hiccups. My main setup is a 7800XT, connected to an AOC CQ32G3SE using a DisplayPort 2.1 cable. HDR works fine both in Steam game mode as well as in desktop mode (KDE).

EliteGadget9• 8 months ago

These sort of derivative distros seem to be aimed at Windows 11 Refugees.

I am not a fan of these derivative distros and I would always recommend using one of the mainline distros e.g Debian, Arch, Fedora etc.

I am using Debian 13 for gaming and the most difficult thing I had to install was a backports kernel which improved performance in some games, in other games it made no difference at all.

Installing Steam and Lutris takes about 5 minutes and it yet another distro for what amounts to installing some applications. I find the biggest issues on Linux gaming is the applying individual workarounds in Steam, and getting wireless controllers to behave properly.

alfanick4• 8 months ago

The comments here are hilarious. Something to go with my morning coffee. We live in the universe where you cannot distinguish between a human or an AI.

alfanick4• 8 months ago

The more I read, the more confused I get. Either I live in some bubble, or I truly don't understand the world. It's a Linux distro based on Fedora, for gamers or smth - did all Linux gamers gather on HN today!? I'm not into gaming, hey I'm into Linux, I don't understand why this gets so much traction. Like yeah, I cannot comprehend that.

alfanick4• 8 months ago

Is this an experiment? Is my mind broken? If 1) cool, if 2) I probably need help. @dang wtf is going on in here!?

GaryBluto• 8 months ago

Why are there so many of these "specialized" hobby project Linux distros that people are using as daily drivers? Are people too lazy to use an operating system that they have to do even a minor amount of configuration to use? Do people really need every program built in?

Projects like this fit all the criteria of what I've nicknamed "Mastodon projects", because they always have either (or both) Mastodon and Discord links on their websites and are primarily developed by people with "alternative" social media accounts. They always implode within a few years due to some form of ridiculous community drama that other FOSS projects don't suffer from (because other open source projects usually have a somewhat serious "community", or lack of a cohesive one altogether).

gethly2• 8 months ago

as far as i understand, it is about specific game and performance related tweaks in the kernel. so it goes beyond just a distribution where you just string together few programs, desktop environment and some config files and call it a day.

this is why linux, after all, is still where it was 20 years ago. all those endless distributions and fragmentation make it non-competitive against the mainstream desktop operating systems. ubuntu was doing good work by becoming the de facto desktop linux by sheer branding. but they dropped the ball really hard and that opportunity to make linux desktop a serious competition is gone. now games are leading the way so maybe steam os or one of these gaming-tuned distros might pick up the momentum.

alfanick4• 8 months ago

This. We could be good buddies.

I'm not understanding this OS and I'm extremely confused that this post got so much traction on HN. Gosh, either I'm too young, or too old, or too nerdy.

I'm not critiquing the project itself, more like, I'm surprised [very surprised], that it got so much traction on HN, not usual news

Underphil• 8 months ago

Same feeling here. Realistically, what is this distro doing that couldn't just be done with a quick bash script on whatever the current 'new user distro' is?

The wording is weird too : "Comes with Lutris preinstalled!". Would Windows users switch to a different hypothetical "Windows Distro" that was optimised for gaming?

None of this makes any sense to me.

haizhung• 8 months ago

I use bazzite. I am a software developer at day, working on Unix exclusively. Let me try to give my reason.

I don’t WANT to fiddle around with some random bullshit when all I have in the evening are 1-2 hours. I want to boot the system and just get cracking with a game. Even the 1-2 hours of installation time are already a hard sell to me. It’s ~20% of my weekly gaming time.

And it’s never usually just „a minor amount of configuration“, is it? Depending on what game you are playing, what hardware you have, you can easily spend hours getting a game to work properly, and that’s with bazzite.

I want something that just works, I don’t want to spend hours figuring out magic incantations.

Though admittedly, with AI it’s gotten easier to figure out magic incantations.

jtrn2• 8 months ago

I have a special spot that gets extremely annoyed when I feel I have to spend a necessary time just figuring out what something is. The page suffers from "developer-brain" marketing, where they describe the technology used to build it (cloud-native images) rather than what the product actually is. Why not just lead with that it is a Linux distro/version focused on gaming. In the beginning, I thought it was new hardware, then I actually thought it was a streaming service. the website does a poor job of simply stating what it actually is. Then again, I might be stupid, but the problem is that a lot of people are stupid. And I guess many non-developers are going to have a hard time just figuring out what the hell this thing is. I’m probably being too cranky now, but the page reads like a combination of the worst from developers-speak combined with the rest of marketing-speak.

KyleGospo19• 8 months ago

"The next generation of Linux gaming - Bazzite makes gaming and everyday use smoother and simpler across desktop PCs, handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs."

Are we reading the same website?

k_bx2• 8 months ago

I agree with the author. Is that an OS image you put on a machine to make it a game box? Or is it a piece of software you put on your existing Linux? Or a framework for game developers? Not clear.

wqaatwt• 8 months ago

So it’s some sort of an application you install on your PC to make game runs smoother?

And/or something like Moonlight/Remote Play?

jtrn2• 8 months ago

That could apply to everything from some sort of software service, to a game installer, to a streaming service, to an App Store for cross-platform games. You have to take into account the chaos that is the Internet and the promotional material shit storm of marketing speak. A sentence extremely close to this could easily be found on the top of the Razer Synapse promotional page. Why not lead with a simple description that uniquely describes what THIS is? I work in both development and psychology, and it’s frustrating when tech people make fun of others for not understanding their jargon, but those same people get extremely annoyed when they don’t understand anything outside their area because other fields use unnecessarily indirect and convoluted language. Why don’t we just help each other out and try not to create unnecessary cognitive load, just to understand what something is? It is actually possible without dumping down, it’s just a little framing that is needed.

dmos622• 8 months ago

Here's a thought experiment. What hypothetical piece of technology am I describing?

Next generation of construction - gezzite makes construction smoother and simpler across various commercial and residential projects.

Qwertious• 8 months ago

That could describe a special "gaming-optimized" router.

teekert• 8 months ago

Ah so it’s a usb C key that adds a Linux friendly GPU for which the drivers are in the kernel?

Or it’s some gaming smoothening software.

Hmm runs on tablets, so it’s an App then… that also runs on htpcs… hmmm…

0x70c51c• 8 months ago

Did they change the website in the last hour? It now says "The operating system for the next generation of gamers".

nkrisc• 8 months ago

That’s says nothing about what it actually is.

ordu• 8 months ago

I believe you are. Or we are. The quoted line tells me nothing. Is it a new game engine? Or something like winetricks to tune wine, maybe more streamlined? Or is it a some kind of app store? App launcher?

It is the site made like a presentation, in my experience they are all suck and like a real presentation are impossible to comprehend without accompanying speech.

3uler2• 8 months ago

I mean the sort of user you are describing sounds like they’d struggle with PC gaming in general.

t43562• 8 months ago

That's not "developer brain" but marketing speak! Lots of websites for technical products are like this - generalities galore. Usually the open source ones just say what they are.

designerarvid• 8 months ago

No, marketing starts with the person being marketed to. Engineers thinking they are doing marketing state technical terms with colourful fonts.

NaomiLehman• 8 months ago

this is what developers think marketing is

batisteo• 8 months ago

stupidity != ignorance

sublinear• 8 months ago

The page clearly states that it's an operating system. It's the very first words.

oblio2• 8 months ago

They've edited it due to HN.

andrepd• 8 months ago

It literally begins with "The operating system for".

Aardwolf• 8 months ago

It says on the main page: "The operating system for the next generation of gamers"

The one fault perhaps is saying "operating system" when it's a distro. Linux is the operating system

vilunov• 8 months ago

Linux is a kernel, it doesn't have a stable and rich enough set of userspace services to be considered an operating system on its own.

machomaster12• 8 months ago

They JUST changed it (probably due to the HN feedback). Now the title on tip reads "The operating system for the next generation of gamers" while just yesterday it was simply "The next generation of Linux gaming".

The change is for the better, but I would still like to have words like "Linux" and "distro/distribution/pack" be used.

icemelt8• 8 months ago

Even if one game doesn't work on this (there are many) and works on Windows, why shouldn't I just use Windows?

ragazzina2• 8 months ago

If you like the Windows experience you should definitely use Windows.

nprateem• 8 months ago

Yet another homepage that doesn't tell me what it is. Something something gaming. Is it a lib, piece of hardware..? Too bored to find out after scrolling down. Oh wait, they're addicted to deadlocks. Great.

WhereIsTheTruth• 8 months ago

Microsoft in disguise

IYKYK

qweqweqwe122• 8 months ago

If it would have been a fork of the Mariner distro, perhaps.

vga42• 8 months ago

At this point, I have almost 30 years of daily driving Linux desktop experience, and several decades of professional Linux experience. I have tried and kind of liked NixOS and although I prefer the simplicity of Arch Linux, I see how it would be useful in a professional scenario with lots of servers to upkeep.

But Fedora Atomic confuses the hell out of me. To recommend it to potential Linux newbies and as the great next thing feels bizarre to me.

rounce7• 8 months ago

Yep, I run NixOS on everything but no way in hell am I recommending it to complete newbies to Linux who also have no programming experience.

I help run a small Linux gaming community and at least once a day on the Discord (yes it’s a problematic service but that’s another rant) there is someone trying to install a mod or set up some piece of sim hardware, having recently switched from Windows, and being confused by FlatPak or by system immmutability.

It feels like these things are a double edged sword, on the one hand they are less prone to break they system and not under and why, on the other they now have a bunch of new roadblocks they don’t understand nor fully comprehend the purpose of. I can’t think of a better alternative but I sort of feel that the technology isn’t the issue, more like lack of a good FTUE which provides low friction education about how the system works and why that is beneficial. To use a bit of a tired analogy, it seems to me that a certain proportion of users are being thrown a nice big fish but aren’t being helped to understand what a fishing rod is, let alone able to fish for themselves.

I think I’m really just echoing other users’ comments about how a lot of the experience doesn’t really deliberately speak to people who are barely technical and just want things to work. The sort of people who run an iPhone because it’s simple, and whose response to windows acting weird is to just reinstall it.

oasisaimlessly• 8 months ago

FTUE = First Time User Experience

data-ottawa2• 8 months ago

I'm newish to Linux, so take my opinions with a grain of salt and having a lot of unknown unknowns.

I think the update/os upgrade situation is better, security is better, and frankly my least favorite thing with Linux is going in and making sure the system state is healthy.

When I started using Linux this summer I had to wipe my system twice because I put it in broken states or couldn't figure out how to undo some change. I went through all sorts of issues like managing grub and gnome not working with my studio display or thunderbolt peripherals. Almost all of the fixes required editing arcane files then calling commands which fed them into some subsystem I had no idea about. All that blind faith online sourced stuff felt like a security nightmare too.

Since migrating to atomic fedora and then this weekend Bazzite, that has not happened once. There was initial friction with dev tool setup and toolbox, but things have been completely on the rails since then.

Zedfragg• 8 months ago

Soooo, after having to migrate multiple college campus sites across to Windows 11 in time for the W10 drop dead date. I kinda gave up with trying to get my PC running Windows 11 without bugs and freezes.

Switched to PopOS, was "ok", switched to Arch, performance was awesome.

A few days ago I gave Bazzite a blast and now I'm currently installing it as the primary OS on my gaming rig. Other than a few small tweaks, it just works.

It's quite a bit more performant than PopOS and PopOS came with a myriad of tweaks and issues needed for things like Ubi Connect (I've been going through the first Division game with my kids and PopOS/Lutris hated... Everything...

It all just works on Bazzite.

Plus the Nvidia drivers don't seem as bad, unsure if it's just the RTX5xxx that were having issues ala GamersNexus but the 4090 doesn't seem to have the same frame time issues that were raised (Knock on wood)

wronex• 8 months ago

Huu. I had the opposite experience almost. I’m a complete Linux noob. Could not get Bazzite to work as expected. Had much better luck with Arch though the install was a bit archaic. Managed to get a desktop and Steam installed with all drivers on the second attempt (which wasn’t to bad since Arch is a fast install.) It has worked flawless since. Absolutely zero bloat.

otikik• 8 months ago

I use it for gaming.

It gets updates. Games work. I don't have to spend a bunch of time trying to debug or customize it, but I could if I wanted to.

That's the way I like it.

wffurr• 8 months ago

“Dad’s old CDs…”. It me. I can’t decide whether to be mad at being called old or glad that someone cares enough to make them run.

spwa4• 8 months ago

Does the Lutris stuff mean Starcraft 2 and battle.net will easily work on this?

jjaksic• 8 months ago

Bazzite is an insanely awesome distro!

I used Ubuntu for 8 years constantly fixing issues, from the day I installed it (because it didn't support basic Ryzen), after every distro upgrade, and various other random points, e.g. when installing a package whose dependency overwrote something. Each issue took hours to fix, usually searching forums for arcane command lines and trying everything until something worked (possibly breaking other things in the process).

Last year I tried Bazzite for my kid who like games and realized that it's 100x better than Ubuntu, for both gaming and serious work. It's 100x more stable and virtually unbreakable, far more modern and up-to-date than Ubuntu, and I can still do just about everything I want (just have to do it differently because it's atomic). Since I switched to Bazzite I have had zero issues, because atomic distros are inherently so much more stable. Everyone uses the exact same image, and the state of the OS is always fresh and doesn't deteriorate over time the way mutable distros do. And best of all, if any issue does come up (which is extremely rare), the fix is always the same and it takes 1 minute: boot into the previous version.

I used to avoid using my PC due to constant issues with Ubuntu, now I often switch it on simply because Bazzite makes me so happy.

It frustrates me to no end that people to this day still recommend Ubuntu and its derivatives as "good" and "user friendly" when it literally breaks all the bloody time, and meanwhile there are awesome distros like Bazzite and Aurora that are rock-solid like MacOS and ChromeOS.

d3Xt3r29• 8 months ago

100% this.

Also, to anyone who recommends Ubuntu (or derivatives), I point them to this page: https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/02/05/done-with-ubuntu/

Lockal• 8 months ago

A bit of salt from me. This is why I don't like target-audience-optimized distributions.

Problem statement: speaker do not work properly (Asus Rog Z13 in my case).

Here what Bazzite does: obtains a firmware _somewhere_, stores in a no-license personal repo with a promise to rewrite repo history and purge files within 5 business days on contact, builds Bazzite-only installation script and pulls it in a main repo[1]. Users after that say, that Bazzite is the only distro where it works out-of-the-box.

Here what I did: contacted linux-firmware, was redirected by Mario Limonciello to Cirrus, contacted few Cirrus people who commit these firmwares, got response the same day. Same day Asus Rog Z13 firmwares were added to linux-firmware[2]. Was it simple? Hell yes. Why other people prefer to reverse-engineer instead? Today users say that Bazzite is the best, tomorrow they will see the price of this smoothness and it will turn into another Ventoy-style drama[3].

[1] https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/ad5704b87388fbde7e3...

[2] https://gitlab.com/kernel-firmware/linux-firmware/-/commit/0...

[3] https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/2795

Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

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