Bazzite Post-Mortem

https://ba.antheas.dev/bazzite-postmortem.html

by transportheap • 5 months ago

136 124 5 months ago

ba.antheas.dev

uncletaco2• 5 months ago

Very nice of Bazzite to adopt Drama Tuesday. They are true gamers.

RicoElectrico• 5 months ago

It's as if everything gaming related attracts immature types. YouTube comment sections, forums, software projects...

pamcake• 5 months ago

Kids and people who identify as such are overrepresented among gamers. Can't really blame the teens for immaturity.

CodinM• 5 months ago

God damn it Kyle.

sho_hn4• 5 months ago

I understand there's been drama, and someone walked away or was pushed out. I don't quite care enough to understand it all or point at guilty parties.

However, my current understanding is that the project remains active, so titling this article "Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over. It's certainly what I immediately assumed made it newsworthy.

Forgeties79• 5 months ago

As a bazzite user who had no idea anything was up until this headline, yes that was very concerning at first glance

jovial_cavalier2• 5 months ago

Antheas was the #1 most active developer, and responsible for almost all low level integrations.

sho_hn4• 5 months ago

Software history is rife with projects that outlive a person like that leaving, though. Ulrich Drepper comes to mind immediately. They don't own the project.

bee_rider• 5 months ago

Just based on this blog post it seems like he wanted the project to be more “professional” in some way that the rest of the developer group didn’t. I wonder if that difference in vision, combined with a (probably justified based on your comment) feeling that he was doing a disproportionate amount of the work lead to an unsustainable situation.

Calling it a post-mortem while others are continuing the project still seems kind of petty, though.

aprilwaters2• 5 months ago

Nope, he was not, and his software will be replaced.

_lvbh• 5 months ago

Looking at the contributor analytics: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/graphs/contributors

Doesn't look like he was, but then looking at the actual commit list: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/commits/main/?before=e49... He definitely had more than the 14 commits listed. They might've lost their email due to the conflicts & lost ownership over the commits?

hiccup_socks2• 5 months ago

"Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over.

is it? outside of autopsies, i think i have only ever seen it used as a synonym for "incident report". i dont think ive ever associated the term specifically with the end of a project.

e.g. cloudflare uses the tag for all of their incident reports (https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/post-mortem/), not as a signal that they are closing shop

sho_hn4• 5 months ago

Gamasutra has a famous line of articles where game developers provide retrospectives on how the development of their titles went, maybe I'm influenced by that.

I'm aware about the use in incident reports of course, but then you still don't call it "<project name> Post-Mortem" but use a more specific namespace.

throwaway_ocr• 5 months ago

In the incident case, it's a post-mortem on the incident. The incident itself is (hopefully) resolved and can now be dissected to learn about what went wrong and how things can improve in the future.

That's what a post-mortem implies to me in the tech industry. A thing happened, it's over now, here are the lessons we learned to take into the future.

kevinrineer• 5 months ago

... as a synonym for "incident report"

People should stop using it as a synonym, then. The Latin effectively means "after death", meaning its a poor synonym for "what happened wrong recently".

ekianjo2• 5 months ago

"someone" is the main developer behind Bazzite. That's some context your post is missing.

ziml773• 5 months ago

Glad I decided not to stick with Bazzite. I gave it a try a few months ago and had issues with Bazaar crashing (not at all low end hardware btw). If the primary method to install software was that broken on a fresh install, there was no way I was going to trust the OS at all, no matter how many people on YouTube and HN talked about how amazing it is.

xd1936• 5 months ago

What alternative did you switch to?

Cyph0n• 5 months ago

I never tried Bazzite, but have been using Jovian, which is a NixOS-based gaming setup.

I have heard that CachyOS (Arch) and Nobara (Fedora) are two other decent options.

TehCorwiz• 5 months ago

I tried it but couldn't get it stable on my system. Ended up with EndeavorOS which is arch-based with a much better-install process.

ziml773• 5 months ago

I went with CachyOS. It's based off of Arch and compiles packages with flags for more modern CPUs. They also build extra packages that aren't normally provided by Arch (always nice to rely a little less on the AUR). And their default scheduler is supposed to provide a smoother gaming experience, though they have a selection of schedulers if you don't like that one.

helle253• 5 months ago

man, i was JUST thinking about switching out windows for bazzite, because the only thing i use my windows machine for is video games...

might need to hold off on that, as much as it pains me, with all the weird & sloppy updates windows is pushing out.

ta90006• 5 months ago

I’d recommend trying Linux Mint with Steam.

dismalaf5• 5 months ago

Mint needs to die. It's the most ancient, archaic distro ever.

Replacing something that's SOTA with something that still uses X11 and years old software isn't it (it makes Debian Stable look modern).

vurudlxtyt• 5 months ago

Just install another distribution—Bazzite has some conveniences in setup, but doesn’t fundamentally provide anything that you can’t get elsewhere, and a lot of those customizations you probably won’t need.

I decided to try Fedora Kinoite for my gaming machine (to have something with less “maybe not maintained one day stuff” out of the box and a long term community of maintenance), and have been happy.

waisbrot• 5 months ago

I would still recommend trying Bazzite today.

If we take the post as truth (it's not clear to me whether we can), then Bazzite will get iffy kernel updates that will particularly break handhelds. But desktop will be more stable and you could even turn off automatic updates for 6months and see how things look after.

I think Bazzite has a very smooth experience for Windows gaming and even if you decide that you don't like it or that the distro really is falling apart, you'll have gotten the best Linux-gaming experience and can evaluate other distros more clearly.

bsder• 5 months ago

As I understand it, the primary advantage of Bazzite is that it handles "odd" (read: "nVidia" or handheld) hardware out of the box properly.

If you have normal hardware, something like like Fedora Kinoite should be mostly equivalent.

BoppreH• 5 months ago

As a happy Bazzite user, I had no idea things were so bumpy. At least the migration to other os-tree distros is trivial (Fedora Kinoite -> Bazzite was one or two shell commands). My main reason for using the distro was the built-in nvidia drivers for my old graphics card.

teamspirit2• 5 months ago

Bazzite made it so easy to switch from windows. I first tried cachyos but bazzite’s gamemode worked perfectly from the start, hdr and vrr included, on nvidia. Turned an expensive PC into an expensive console and made me so happy. Just the fact I can sleep the system mid-game and resume is magic!

Guess I gotta go back to cachy and try again. Bummer

uncletaco2• 5 months ago

Why? Because some guy was pushed out of the friend group?

teamspirit2• 5 months ago

Well, yes, but that’s an over simplification. My main concern is the instability. I don’t want to deal with a project that’s in turmoil and Cachy feels like a more stable project, even before reading any of this. It’s a larger user base and therefore more likely to stick around (or so I tell myself).

tracker1• 5 months ago

The guy that did the bulk of the hardware integration work...

ziml773• 5 months ago

It's silly to reduce all issues like this to just pointless drama between people. It affects the product, especially if key people are pushed out. From the sounds of it, the person left running the show has already made a bunch of bad decisions (as I already commented on I ran into one of the issues caused by those bad decisions).

dismalaf5• 5 months ago

For everyone who thinks this is the death of Bazzite or whatever, keep in mind Bazzite, all the UBlue projects, are all based on Fedora Atomic which makes it super easy to make an immutable spin.

There's also Silverblue which is ready to go out of the box (unless you have Nvidia), Nobara which adds some gaming things. And on a different vein CachyOS is making waves with some gamers (but it's Arch based instead of Fedora and not atomic/immutable).

exitb• 5 months ago

Also Jovian Nix, which is great if someone is already invested in that ecosystem.

shantara2• 5 months ago

It’s worth pointing out that the official Bazzite position is that Antheas was removed from the project for breaching Code of Conduct and harassing people in their official Discord server

ekianjo2• 5 months ago

or depending on your point of view (I don't know which one is the correct one), it's very easy to find some rule that was infringed for a quick power grab, right at the time when Bazzite is becoming popular.

snapplebobapple3• 5 months ago

It's sad that this happens so often now. My brain auto translates the above statement to "we, the wokes, abused the overly broad, convoluted and mostly unnecessary code of conduct we pushed through earlier to get rid of dissent." at this point, although it may not be a correct auto translation in this case.

ramon156• 5 months ago

I don't care enough about the drama to deep-dive, but as far as I can tell both parties are at fault. At least Bazzite did not make a "post mortem" blog post on a project that is still active. Bit petty if you ask me

jna_sh2• 5 months ago

Been on Bazzite for a while now and had very few issues, though to backup the sentiments of Antheas here, they have managed to upset the maintainer of the Go-XLR Linux Utility with their fast and loose HW changes: https://github.com/GoXLR-on-Linux/goxlr-utility/issues/239

Looking around a couple of adjacent communities, it seems the Bazzite maintainers might have acted in the best community interest on this one, so I'm optimistic things will continue in a positive way. Still, might make me a little less full-throated about recommending Bazzite, knowing there's such drama under the surface.

jna_sh2• 5 months ago

Welcome to the comment section Kyle! https://github.com/GoXLR-on-Linux/goxlr-utility/issues/239#i...

rolymath• 5 months ago

This blog post is the only exposure I have to this whole thing, and from it, all I can say for sure is that this post is incredibly immature.

mhitza• 5 months ago

I guess the good thing about Bazzite, CachyOS, Omarchy and what have you, is that it brings new users to Linux.

I would still like to see most users pick established distros, as contributions there have a higher impact on the ecosystem. But self-named gamers are probably harder to reason with.

exographicskip• 5 months ago

Been running cachyos for months, drama-free

caconym_• 5 months ago

I've been using desktop Linux for 20 years in various capacities. I most recently picked Bazzite for my gaming/desktop VM because it's simple to set up and works better than other distros I've tried to game on in the recent past. It's that simple.

snapplebobapple3• 5 months ago

You're basically me except instead of gaming I ripped out hyprjellynix (my super crappy nixos config to autologin to a window manager and start jellyfin media player setup for bazzite because it just worked so well and auto update worked so well and setting up new boxes was a breeze. I just need it to keep booting into kde and loading jellyfin media player and updating and rebooting at 3 am every night on my 3 boxes so really hoping I don't notice this change. If I do I'll have to find another immutable os that can do this and works great with hardware acceleration on the cheap nuc like n150 based boxes I prefer for this.

ThatMedicIsASpy• 5 months ago

The good part of Bazzite is I can just rebase to fedora kinoite and continue to be happy.

devl547• 5 months ago

Bazzite's fate is sealed as a non-commercial hobbyist-like OS.

Sounds like good news to me.

moonlion_eth• 5 months ago

Community member is problematic, makes themselves the victim

hiprob• 5 months ago

what exactly happened to bazzite? I've seen so much hype around the distro and buzz among normal people, that it almost became THE normal gamer distro, so much so it completely overshadowed nobara and whatever other gamer gimmick distros are out there

aprilwaters2• 5 months ago

Its fine and did not die. In fact its growing as always, even with "drama". https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_bazzite...

cobolexpert3• 5 months ago

Relevant comment from some months ago [1].

Personally I find that sticking to distros backed by companies or very large communities is just easier in the long term (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46092225

jajuuka2• 5 months ago

On desktops and servers yeah. Bazzite was a bit of a special case as it was catered to handheld devices. So it did have that going for it. A one stop install that just supported everything on these devices from the start.

opan2• 5 months ago

I've been thinking we could eliminate a lot of niche specialized distros by replacing them with system configs for Guix System or NixOS. Maybe if you got Ansible involved it could work for Debian and Arch also. Set your default packages, custom kernel, whatever else in there. Everything needing a big brand, name, logo, website, and so on seems a bit excessive at times.

cobolexpert3• 5 months ago

Maybe SteamOS will help with this!

RandomGerm4n• 5 months ago

Using Fedora Kinoite/Silverblue is not really an option if you are using an Nvidia GPU. With Bazzite, the driver is pre-installed and also signed directly with a Secure Boot Key that you can import when installing Bazzite. With normal Fedora Atomic, you have to install and sign the driver manually, and with some updates, the whole thing breaks again, so you have to fiddle around with it. In addition, Fedora Flatpak Remote has been removed, which is a “noobtrap” in normal Fedora Atomic. This allows you to install broken versions of browsers where the codecs are missing and videos don't work. In addition, Distrobox functions better than Toolbox, and in general, Bazzite's defaults are much more geared towards an immutable system. Silberblue/Kinoite's defaults are just like normal Fedora, and you have to layer dozens of things to achieve the same thing, whereas Bazzite is completely designed for a container workflow.

Even if you ignore any gaming optimizations, etc., this alone makes it a significantly better option than the official Fedora Atomic images.

WhereIsTheTruth• 5 months ago

You like me for my (always right) conspiratorial takes

I got another one:

Look, follow the money, Microsoft knows Windows 11 on handhelds is a dumpster fire right now, and they are not ready to drop their own "Xbox Portable" yet

So how do they keep the market from moving to the alternative SteamOS/Valve?

They trojan horse the "alternative"

Think about it: Bazzite pops up, gains massive community "trust", every traditionally pro-MSFT media talk about it, and then coincidentally becomes the loudest voice trashing GPD's HW support, why would they do that?

It's a classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish play

FUD: Use Bazzite as an "undercover" $MSFT project to make GPD look like a risky, unoptimized mess

Damage: GPD takes the hit because they are actually trying to innovate, while the "community" devs (who are definitely on a $MSFT gang) tell everyone to just buy an Rog Ally ($MSFT Partner) or wait for the next Microsoft Xbox handheld

Pivot: Once GPD is sidelined as a "niche hobbyist risk", Microsoft drops a polished Handheld UX for Windows, Bazzite magically "loses funding" or support, and everyone gets funneled back into the Game Pass ecosystem on "approved" hardware

Bazzite isn't a "community project", it's a trojan hose

GPD bet on the wrong horse thinking that community was neutral

malicka• 5 months ago

Convoluted, but hypothetically possible. We have no reason to think that right now, though…

liamgm• 5 months ago

not undercover, kyle is microsoft employee based on his github bio.

also if you wanna support linux on gaming, just buy hardware that support steamos like steamdeck, steam machine, steam frame, legion go s, rog ally.

maeln• 5 months ago

Sometimes I feel like Discord as been nothing but a bane on OSS. A chat is inherently less searchable than a wiki/forum/documentation, and those sources are often readable without needing to authenticate, which meant that you could find an answer through Google and such. Most project now don't bother with publicly readable and archivable (and so offline viewable) information sources and just rely on Discord. This lead to the same newbie question being answered over and over again, and is a clear degradation of the UX. But on top of that, most people see Discord as a hangout. Almost all Discord server I know have an "offtopic"/"random"/"meme"/etc channel, if not several. This almost inevitably lead to drama on a scale that newsgroups and IRC fellows could have only dreamed off. And considering that a lot of devs are able to create drama over even a mailing list, Discord is turbocharging the ability for nuisance.

Maybe it's my "Am I out of touch ? No it's the children who are wrong" moment, but I really think OSS projects would benefit from ditching discord.

opan2• 5 months ago

Strongly agreed. I'd like to see users pushing more for this. Return to IRC, try XMPP or Matrix, put up a forum. Lots of options exist that would be more freedom-respecting, stable, and publicly searchable.

yomismoaqui• 5 months ago

You are not out of touch, I rember in the 90s when people recommended using IRC for Linux questions and I hated it.

I didn't want to ask something and interacting in pseudo-realtime with another human being (that could potentionally laugh at me for asking a n00b question).

News groups were a little better for this, but the real progress was when you could search them or later read the answer in Stack Overflow. And the final step here is a LLM agent that has a web/doc search tool and can answer more difficult questions.

digiown2• 5 months ago

It is. I'm not a fan of Drew Devault, but I can agree with this article of his:

https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS...

The most salient part:

Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.

jajuuka2• 5 months ago

Wouldn't any platform have the same problem though? A forum would partition the community between those willing to make an account and submit private information and those who aren't. It seems like no matter what platform you choose there will always be those who are willing to participate and those who are not.

altairprime• 5 months ago

It turns out that before Discord, we had project IRC channels, and they would splinter along various prosocial or antisocial lines over time. It was essentially guaranteed when the channel exceeded 150 regulars, but there were criticality points around 5-10 and ~50 as well. None of this excuses anyone from behaving badly, but certainly Discord is not the cause of communication breakdown and group shattering events — it’s just a chat server, same as all the ones before it. And as with all prior chat servers, they make horrendous technical LB replacements — but are a brilliant way to provide mentorship to (slash and infect enthusiasm upon) others, which is why they persist so strongly in the face of all of the problems these real-time group chain letters highlight in human behaviors: Hobbyists desire to socialize with other hobbyists.

razighter777• 5 months ago

This is pure dramaposting- "post-mortem" is so misleading and mischaracterizes the situation. I don't use bazzite, I don't know Kyle or anybody here, but I am tired of the drama.

All of the things listed in the blog are personal and technical disagreements, nothing morally reprehensible, no disrespect, nothing that would make anyone want to burn bridges like this.

It's fine to leave a project and to publicize disagreements but this comes across as spiteful.

moribvndvs• 5 months ago

Leftism and OSS share a similar problem, being that good ideas, intentions, and works are squandered by petty drama and insecure egos.

otikik• 5 months ago

Right-ism is the same, without the good intentions or ideas.

hysan• 5 months ago

Linking related post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46818467

AFAIK, removing Antheas from Bazzite opened the door to discussions for forming the OGC. Prior to that, Antheas had created such difficult situations that many of the member groups in the OGC did not collaborate with Bazzite because of his presence. Whether or not the OGC actually works (ex: getting patches upstreamed faster), only time will tell.

pelzatessa• 5 months ago

Some time ago I actually downloaded bazzite to run in a VM in order to play some indie games from itch.io and to not worry about them doing some shady things on my computer. I installed the OS and everything was fine, but to my surprise..... wine was not installed by default (I'm not familiar with wine environment, i just got that impression because the terminal didn't recognize the wine command when i typed it manually).

I get that the distribution is geared towards steam+proton usage, but I was disoriented to see that one creates "an operating system for gamers", which will most certainly run a lot of windows executables, and then won't include wine in it. There is lutris preinstalled and the documentation also hints towards installing winezgui from their appstore (which is what I did), but I wonder why wasn't that obvious for the developers of bazzite that after installing the system, user would just want to download a game, double click the executable and play.

On the other hand, wine tends to be quite heavy package (503MB installed size according to arch repo), perhaps that's the reason for not including it.

Bender5• 5 months ago

I've been testing Bazzite and noticed a couple of things that raised an eyebrow for me. Sexual preferences in Bazaar options tool to update flatpaks seems out of place and even if not the limited subset of flags is odd. To me personally that is risking potential drama in the OS/apps.

There is also a suspiciously long delay in closing the shell terminal which feels like it is storing or sending something but I have yet to debug it. This does not occur on any other of the many Linux distributions I have tested.

It is a snappy and decent distro otherwise. Good thing they are removing drama, something that almost nuked Mint not long after its inception.

presbyterian3• 5 months ago

Sexual preferences in Bazaar options tool to update flatpaks seems out of place and even if not the limited subset of flags is odd.

I've been using Bazzite for almost a year and I have no idea what this is referring to

Bender5• 5 months ago

Click Bazaar in menu bar -> Click hamburger button -> Scroll Down

cedws• 5 months ago

This is a shame, I’ve been running Bazzite on my gaming PC since Christmas and have been pretty happy with it. To the honest I don’t really care who is at fault, I don’t want the maintainers of my OS to be a drama show, so I’ll probably switch to Cachy. Building my own image would be cool but it’s not high on my list of priorities.

cornhole• 5 months ago

this is why I don’t pay attention to most Linux distros except debian and fedora

Bazzite Post-Mortem

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