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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Probably for the same reason they don't support every Arch package on the Steam Deck out-of-the-box; it breaks easily and it's not their job to fix it.
Additionally, I think Valve doesn't want to end up over-committed to replacing Windows. They can handle the storefront side and do a decent job with handling the runtime, but actually committing to a desktop alternative to Windows would be spreading their resources thin. It feels like a smart call to not jump into that arena if your hardware products don't need it.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Luks can use hardware offload description via opal if configured accordingly. You are also at the vendors firmware implementation in terms of security.
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.
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.
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).
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 out up with any of the continuous enshittifications Canonical subjects you to (Snaps, increasing poor quality code etc).
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.
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".
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)
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.
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.
I will offer a second positive but more reserved data point. It took me closer to a day to get my custom Bazzite build working.
Switching over to my images using bootc failed because of what I eventually tracked down to permissions issues that I didn't see mentioned in any of the docs. In short, the packages you publish to Github's container registry must be public.
Another wrinkle: The Bazzite container-build process comes pretty close to the limits of the default Github runners you can run for free. If you add anything semi-large to your custom image, it may fail to build. For example, adding MS's VSCode was enough to break my image builds because of resource limits.
Fortunately, both of these issues can be fixed by improving the docs.
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 ?)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 to client-side detection for the more recent games.
That statistical analysis with post-facto game recordings could be pretty accurate, and needn't result in bans. In fact, I think banning cheaters is dumb. Instead, we should weight matchmaking algorithms to put cheaters all on the same servers. If they want to cheat, why not let them cheat against each other?
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.
Honest question: given all the companies and people working on anti-cheat systems for the last 20+ years of multiplayer video games, don't you think it would all be server-side if it could be, by now?
No, because most companies will make decisions based on time/effort/profitability, and because client-side anticheat is stupid simple and cheap, that's what they go with. Why waste their own server resources, when they can waste the user's?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It's snapshotted from Arch, once a year they bump the kernel and include "updated Arch Linux base" as a release note.
SteamOS 3.7 is still on Kernel 6.11 and KDE Plasma 6.2, for example. Bazzite is 6.17 and Plasma 6.5.
This matters if you're using more recent hardware or want the latest driver optimizations. My 9070 XT is supported by Bazzite, SteamOS won't even boot.
Especially on the Beta branch, I'm getting several system updates per week. I check for one every time I wake it up, along with checking for any available game update downloads. Originally moved to the Beta branch to get the new 8BitDo controller features (Mid-July maybe), but it's worked well enough I've never gone back to Stable.
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
It isnt so much tinkering vs learning how it works.
Part of the reason new users struggle so much is because they forget they have spent 10 years or whatever using windows / macos and linux is definitely not those.
As much as Linux has become far more user friendly in the last couple years it still has its warts and a quick boot camp like installing arch can be very beneficial.
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.
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.
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.
But not necessarily in the right form factor. My generalist PC build is a laptop, my gaming machine is tucked away under the TV and doesn't have a mouse or keyboard.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
Weren’t you threatening to shutdown Bazzite just a few months ago?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381265
No, my statement was Fedora was about to shoot itself in the foot and that it'd be easier for Bazzite to not exist than for us to clean up their mess.
Note that this was in a change proposal which was rescinded without a vote by it's proposer.
No? Clearly outlining the pitfalls of a proposal is not a threat.
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
You're good -- didn't take it as one.
It's an important question to ask.
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.
Fork and remove this line: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile#...
Note that we remove rpm Firefox for security reasons. You do not want your browser to only update with your entire operating system.
Just want to say big fan of bazzite! Been running it on my 9800x3d / 9070 rig since April and I have very few complaints
Thank you! Glad you're enjoying it
@KyleGospo, Any plans for an arm64 version?
Yes, it'll happen eventually. I can't promise it'll be a good gaming experience anytime soon though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Probably for the same reason they don't support every Arch package on the Steam Deck out-of-the-box; it breaks easily and it's not their job to fix it.
Additionally, I think Valve doesn't want to end up over-committed to replacing Windows. They can handle the storefront side and do a decent job with handling the runtime, but actually committing to a desktop alternative to Windows would be spreading their resources thin. It feels like a smart call to not jump into that arena if your hardware products don't need it.
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.
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.
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).
Encrypted home directories are coming, using the same kernel API that Android uses. https://lwn.net/Articles/1038859/
FDE would be nice though.
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.
Luks can use hardware offload description via opal if configured accordingly. You are also at the vendors firmware implementation in terms of security.
"Custom Distro"? That's every distro mate
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 out up with any of the continuous enshittifications Canonical subjects you to (Snaps, increasing poor quality code etc).
Right, because the idea of Linux has always been about sticking to big corporate distros whenever possible
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.
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".
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.
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)
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.
I get what you're saying in this comment. And separate from that concept I'm adding on: "Going to?"
We all know how this ends: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365
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.
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
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.
I will offer a second positive but more reserved data point. It took me closer to a day to get my custom Bazzite build working.
Switching over to my images using bootc failed because of what I eventually tracked down to permissions issues that I didn't see mentioned in any of the docs. In short, the packages you publish to Github's container registry must be public.
Another wrinkle: The Bazzite container-build process comes pretty close to the limits of the default Github runners you can run for free. If you add anything semi-large to your custom image, it may fail to build. For example, adding MS's VSCode was enough to break my image builds because of resource limits.
Fortunately, both of these issues can be fixed by improving the docs.
There's also BlueBuild [1] which abstracts the process of building your own images away further into yaml configurations.
It takes away a tad bit of the direct control of the process, but covers the majority of things you would want to configure.
[1] https://blue-build.org/
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 ?)
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.
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.
That's mainly an nVidia issue. On AMD, Linux is actually faster and more stable compared to Windows.
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.
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...
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.
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
Bazzite also mention
> improved CPU schedulers for responsive gameplay,
on their homepage https://bazzite.gg/
Oops you're right, I was searching the docs and couldn't find it, maybe it's time to snoop around in their repo...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 to client-side detection for the more recent games.
That statistical analysis with post-facto game recordings could be pretty accurate, and needn't result in bans. In fact, I think banning cheaters is dumb. Instead, we should weight matchmaking algorithms to put cheaters all on the same servers. If they want to cheat, why not let them cheat against each other?
Mistakenly hellbanning legitimate players wouldn't be much better than banning them outright. Either way you've got a justifiably angry customer.
[dead]
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.
Anticheat doesn't need to be Linux compatible, it needs to move server-side.
Honest question: given all the companies and people working on anti-cheat systems for the last 20+ years of multiplayer video games, don't you think it would all be server-side if it could be, by now?
No, because most companies will make decisions based on time/effort/profitability, and because client-side anticheat is stupid simple and cheap, that's what they go with. Why waste their own server resources, when they can waste the user's?
Agree 100%, client side anti cheat was never going to work.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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/
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.
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.
Steam OS is a rolling release (Arch based) with constant small updates. My Steamdeck has had updates several times this year.
It's snapshotted from Arch, once a year they bump the kernel and include "updated Arch Linux base" as a release note.
SteamOS 3.7 is still on Kernel 6.11 and KDE Plasma 6.2, for example. Bazzite is 6.17 and Plasma 6.5.
This matters if you're using more recent hardware or want the latest driver optimizations. My 9070 XT is supported by Bazzite, SteamOS won't even boot.
I think that's changed recently. Recent release notes state it's added support for RDNA4
VKD3D-Proton gained FSR4 support and will ship in a future release of Proton, but RDNA4 requires a newer kernel.
SteamOS release notes are public at https://www.steamdeck.com/en/news, it still uses a 6.11 kernel from September 2024.
Especially on the Beta branch, I'm getting several system updates per week. I check for one every time I wake it up, along with checking for any available game update downloads. Originally moved to the Beta branch to get the new 8BitDo controller features (Mid-July maybe), but it's worked well enough I've never gone back to Stable.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> your dad's old CDs
Okay. I think I get a feel for their target audience.
This is so cool. I like the mircoSD card idea.
Isn't that just a steam feature?
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.
No kernel modules needed for eGPU, kargs are handled with one command, rpm-ostree kargs --help
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.
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!
Same, it’s been great on living room PC for a console like low maintenance experience
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
It isnt so much tinkering vs learning how it works.
Part of the reason new users struggle so much is because they forget they have spent 10 years or whatever using windows / macos and linux is definitely not those.
As much as Linux has become far more user friendly in the last couple years it still has its warts and a quick boot camp like installing arch can be very beneficial.
For gaming, anything rolling release will be good because you want the latest update from the graphic stack.
I think this is a factor for why SteamOS is Arch.
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.
Any particular reason you didn't like Bazzite as a daily driver? I've been considering replacing Fedora with it on my main laptop.
Do they have breakout? I love that game so much.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3041770/Breakout_Beyond/
That's gorgeous, but the horizontality. Can you handle it? I don't think I can handle it
Why would I use Bazzite and not SteamOS?
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.
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.
^ this. I'm in the same boat. I got tired of having to do windows things on my windows pc.
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.
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.
I have separate PCs for gaming and work. The former lives in the living room and the latter by my desk.
But not necessarily in the right form factor. My generalist PC build is a laptop, my gaming machine is tucked away under the TV and doesn't have a mouse or keyboard.
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.
> 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.
Yeah I distinctly remember a time in my life where most of my Source Engine games would shit the bed if I alt-tabbed Windows Vista.
[dead]