https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg
Graphs can be found here on their github. Since around mid November the active user count for Bazzite has gone up by around 16k active users.
Personally, my only wish for Bazzite is a Cosmic version 👼 I tried it out recently and it seems fairly impressive
I’m three of those new installs. Bazzite has surpassed every expectation I had.
What’s so special about this? Aside from the immutable thingy, of course.
The immutable thing is nice, though it takes some getting used to. It’s Fedora which I already love, without any of the hassle. Everything just works. I never realized how much time I was wasting until I didn’t have to do it anymore. Every task I throw at it, it performs beautifully, even things I’m sure aren’t going to work out of the box do. Every time, so far.
I was surprised how well it handles printers. We have an old Brother wireless laser mfp. It was pretty cool when it just saw the printer automatically, but I was really impressed with how easy scanning was.
I started going down the rabbit hole of manually installing and configuring it, but then tested some simple terminal command and it already saw the scanner. Ran skanpage and Bob’s your uncle.
It just works. It works better than Windows 11 in my experience. I can’t break it. I forget it’s there. I just do computer stuff. Like video editing, gaming, web browsing.
Literally just the immutable thing. Otherwise it’s either worse or equal to every other flavor of the month option.
So it just comes down to do you consider immutability a positive. If you do it’s the top of the stack since other options are not immutable.
It’s not really surprising, Bazzite has been the talk of Linux internet for the last 18 or so months.
I’m surprised people are so keen on these gaming-focused distros.
I just want a great, general-purpose computing system that can do gaming as well. 😁
Universal Blue is the project which maintains Bazzite and other brilliant immutable images based on Fedora Silverblue (Gnome) and Fedora Kinoite (KDE)
Bazzite has Steam bundled in the image which is a bit better for performance, Bazzite-dx is Bazzite with devtools.
Aurora is another image made for general computing, Steam is installed as a Flatpak with a little worse performance but not much
Bluefin is your typical dev-workstation
If you’re serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.
Why is Flatpak Steam worse for performance? I’ve been using it for years, seemingly better performance than Windows on the same system. Something inherent about Flatpak?
If you’re serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.
Mm, I don’t think I’d be willing to sacrifice my Niri workflow. Niri also supports fractional scaling and VRR, but not yet HDR, which I can live without until it’s implemented. 😁
Generally your life is improved any time you choose to not engage with gnome or it’s nonsense. It’s a good rule of thumb for everything Linux related.
Gnome is just bad apple.
A gaming focused distro will do everything else well too, so thats probably why.
Yea I bounced off Bazzite because I needed to run plex. And I couldn’t get a container to run reliably on it. It’s still a cool distro though.
Edit: typo
Very easy with podman / quadlets
This. If you must have rooted containers docker-compose is only a
rpm-ostree install docker-composeaway, but that’s a big ass layer, you’ll feel it every update, and insecure to boot (yes I know docker finally got userspace, but how many times have you seen it used? Everywhere it’s root.). Run your docker-compose file through podlet, and there you go, userspace quadlets (95+% of the time, every time…). They’re easy to love once you get your head around them.
Yeah, this is the “fun” of bazite. If you want to do the things it does well (desktopy things) it works well. But then things that are trivial in other distros are a pain. And the “solution” is to actually run one of those other distros in a container. It’s ridiculous.
Bazite is for people who want a computer to be like an iPhone near as I can tell.
I think you as yet don’t quite understand the full beauty of immutable distros. Running things in distroboxes, yeah even other distros, is not a bug, it’s a feature (really) because you cannot break your main OS with a distrobox. As a developer it’s a godsend, finnicky AI project that needs a specific version of python and CUDA drivers and only has instructions for Arch ? That’s a distrobox, spin it up, play with it, archive it for later, put it away.
There’s tiers in Bazzite, for GUI apps, flatpak, if what you want isn’t there, it’s in a distrobox Arch in AUR and you can integrate it as an application into the main OS. Stuff that truly needs system level access, like zsh and intel-undervolt gets layered into the main OS with rpm-ostree. There’s security benefits as well like SELinux, but this post has gone on long enough.
It is so not an iPhone.
Distrobox is not a feature of immutable distros. It runs just fine on Debian. As does flatpak.
Duh, but it shines in immutable. Enjoy your debian, I like it too, for servers.
It’s not a pain, it’s just a different process than what you’re used to
It’s not a pain, it’s just a different process than what you’re used to
That’s exactly how people defend something that is a pain.
I think you’ve got it backwards. You’re describing what’s a pretty simple process, as a pain.
I have two computers at my main desk at home. One is exclusively used for gaming, the other is used for everything else. In theory Bazzite is perfect for me.
Why don’t you do the “everything else” part on your gaming PC as well so you don’t have to have two?
Performance. I’m a heavy multi tasker and I want nothing to get in the way of my frame rate.
For context my old second machine was a 2018 Mac mini with an 8th Gen. i5 and 32 gigs of ram. It wasn’t enough.
Huh.
I guess with my 16 cores and 64 GB DDR5 I don’t really notice anything hampering my frame rate. 😅
But on my old PC with just 12 cores and 32 GB DDR4, I would sometimes close Firefox and all those YouTube tabs to get some memory back and make some CPU cycles available. Gosh darn Linux just handing out memory on loan rather than what’s available. I don’t use a swap file either. 😅
But I guess just closing stuff down isn’t an option? Is it like services running?
AMDs dual CCD CPUs tend to perform worse than their single ccd models in games. You can “fix” that by running the game only on one, and push everything else to the second. But I’d much rather not deal with that. A second computer is much easier.
Plus I can fuck with computer A when computer B is still doing other things without interrupting. That alone is worth it.
Also if you’re in a game and you have a video running that taking GPU horsepower. I’m not going to have a second GPU just to avoid that.
Hey, if you have the space and don’t mind the extra heat and electricity consumption 😎👌 all good by me.
That’s the other thing. My new computer is a Mac Studio which takes up almost no space, and uses like 10-15 watts. Because I can just turn off my gaming computer when I’m not using it I’m saving significantly more power. Like just your CPU at idle uses more than the entire Mac actually doing things.
My second screen is a laptop (T580), also bazzite, often running moonlight to the big monitor so the main box goes to low power mode when not in use (it’s also the NAS, so no sleep, but mostly lives @ ~50W, got the GPU down to 4W idle :)
I ended up with CachyOS over Bazzite but I’m looking into the latter for my dad since I’m guessing it’s more stable and easier.
I just… Idk, I like Arch over Fedora. I blame the little pacman eating my progress whenever I install stuff in konsole. Desktop mode to desktop mode it’s the same KDE Plasma I’d be using, though. Are there any other striking differences between Cachy and Bazzite?
Edit: it was good to bring it up here, y’all are very knowledgeable on these things. It sounds to me that I need to get bazzite for my dad mostly because he won’t want to fuss or work on it and that I made the right call for myself since Cachy (and Arch in general) gives more flexibility. Frankly I might not even give him desktop mode default, he strictly wants something to play from bed in full on retirement mode.
AFAIK CachyOS still demands a little involvement in the OS. Like, you have to watch the logs when you update, you need keep context in mind, like knowing you’re running KDE and an Nvidia card and so on. But I feel like Bazzite would be more usable to someone who doesn’t know (and doesn’t need to know) what a filesystem or a discrete GPU are.
But in terms of stability, CachyOS has been rock solid for me. The cadence that Arch + CachyOS devs fix stuff has been utterly perfect.
So I say if your dad is more ‘software curious,’ give him CachyOS. If he doesn’t like messing with computer stuff, give him Bazzite.
It’s unfortunate that years as a tech guy at his job has made him less software curious, so probably bazzite then. Rather, I guess when it’s your job to fix things, tinkering isn’t fun anymore.
I second this, it’s why I went with Bazzite on my main rig - it just needs to work and be reliable. The last thing I want to be doing in my spare time is funking around trying to fix anything that happens to break.
All my other devices run whatever I feel like so I can scratch that curiosity-itch but they get reinstalled if anything major breaks and I can’t fix it in a reasonable amount of time
Ah.
Well one catch I’ve found outside of CachyOS is that if something isn’t working right, it’s easy to create a ton of work for yourself trying to fix it. An example would be fighting your system trying to roll a package forward for a fix, which then gets out of sync with your distro, which requires more manual fixing since you’re the one maintaining it now…
The Arch/Cachy ecosystem, on the other hand, tends to encourage more usage of system packages, and fixes stuff quick. Usually waiting a day or a few days + a
pacman -Syyuufixes what was wrong.If your Dad is a software engineer, it’s possible he might fall into that trap with Bazzite. It kinda just depends on his habits/personality, though from what you describe this may not be a huge danger.
Him 20-30 years ago probably would have. This is a man who, when I was a kid, made a custom UI for msdos so my brother and I could play games easier. He wouldn’t just tinker, he’d probably be contributing.
Old age and alcoholism has kind of robbed him of that, though. At this point he’ll probably just ask me to fix it if it goes wrong, lol
i’d recommend aurora, it is from the same team that made bazzite, and is literally just bazzite but without the gaming apps preinstalled, focused more on average pc users
I went from Arch to Fedora idk, I think over a decade ago and haven’t looked back, not sure how things are nowadays, but I switched again this year from Fedora to Bazzite and I love it. Sure, you’ve got to learn to do things a little differently, but so far it’s been great. And it forced me to use distrobox, which honestly I should have done sooner, it’s absolutely great.
I’m in the same boat, my main gaming pc is still bazzite for now (I use it like a HTPC) but eventually when i can be bothered I’ll be on cachy os as I’ve really enjoyed being able to use the arch-iness on my other devices that have it.
Honestly it’s pretty easy to decide if you should use cachy or bazzite.
Do you use your PC for anything more then office PC or console? If yes pick cachy. If no pick bazzite.
Atomic is great till you have to do fucking anything then it’s more effort then it’s worth basically instantly. And iv seen more people break bazzite trying to do basic shit then iv seen cachy randomly explode because “arch is unstable”.
Bazzite is not a home user desktop os, no atomic os is. The entire concept is basically designed for locked down office PCs and consoles where you don’t actually do anything with the PC but use it.
If your giving a PC to a elderly family member, a child, you do actual business on it that’s mission critical. Bazzite is fucking fantastic, so long as you also never give the admin password to the user.
Seriously the entire atomic concept really is… Baffling tho… Its best use case is one that doesn’t really exist in the same context as gaming unless it’s a console. It’s baffling that bazzite is as popular as it is. If not for the simple fact there is an absurd amount of misinformation around arch and really Linux in general.
Because people cling to out of date knowledge from a decade ago because of memes.
Really 9 times out of 10 normal fedora is better for most avg users then cachy or bazzite.
I’m no expert but I didn’t have any trouble compiling and running a native Linux FPS game in an Arch distrobox on bazzite to test a bugfix.
I’m just good enough with Linux to know my way around and to break stuff when I have unfettered access to mess with the base system. Bazzite saves me from myself.
If someone has to try and break into Bazzite to do anything (if they’re not a developer) then they’re doing something very wrong.
What the hell were they even trying to do!?
HTPCs are why bazzite is as popular as it is
handhelds are really great with it too. i use it on my main pc tho because bazzite-dx simplifies a lot for me
Just not true. You can do nearly everything on Bazzite that you can do on other distros, there’s sometimes just a different (often easier) process to do it.
I think the most important advice is to use a separate disk/SSD for your home directory so if you screw something up or if you want to change directions, you don’t lose your files. Some of my vendor contracts actively require that I do just this.
Sample size of 1, here.
Bazzite was my initial entry-point into Linux, but I bounced off it within 48 hours as its immutable nature made it impossible for me to install the native PIA VPN client and for the life of me I couldn’t get the OpenVPN to play nice.
Currently on CachyOS, and seems to run just fine - giving an end user just enough rope 😅
Plus it’s Arch underneath the hood too, so I can still cheekily say that I run Arch!
ETA: I wonder if/how long I would count as part of this Bazzite cohort?
you can layer vpns via rpm-ostree install [.rpm location]
I don’t think PIA uses RPMs
mullvad is a better choice anyways. you can also download a wireguard config and load it directly into the network manager
Yeah, getting PIA running without the native client has been a bit rough. These days I’ve just gotten use to starting a terminal as soon as I log-in, but I probably need a more permanent solution. maybe it’ll be switching to cachy as well.
PIA VPN
Holy mother of blob, Batman
I barely know what I’m looking at! 😅
Pretty sure I tried poking around that file on Bazzite also to see if I could locate the RPM to try and do a manual terminal install - but gave up after a few minutes.
sudo rpm-ostree install foo.rpm
Should work. I’ve been doing this with the mullvad VPN client. Only annoyance is that I have to manually install when there’s an update (the app notifies me)
A worthy watch about vpns, obviously just one opinion. https://youtu.be/vQmLMGcCO3I
I’ve been using Bazzite for a while and mostly happy with it. So from 2026 and on, I’ll start donating a Windows license amount of money to Bazzite and other fundementals every year. Because fuck Windows, that’s why.
As a normie, I love Bazzite because it’s as intuitive as Microsoft without the intrusive and monopolistic proprietary features, and Bazzite is also built for gaming.
Huh I guess it’s “normal” but I hadn’t heard of Linux OSes tracking active user telemetry. Turns out this is a fedora / rpm mechanism that tracks the ip addresses of people updating their system. Something to think about. Archlinux for example does not do any form of this tracking as far as I can tell
iirc it doesnt track ip, it just sends a ping for counting, the unique ID is when you installed your distro. its easy to opt out of. in the past it used IP but they changed it because they didnt like the privacy implications of it. regardless, you should use secureblue if you want a fedora atomic image focused on privacy and security. personally i consider the risk of being included in the count negligible (and on par with pinging timeservers imo, so unless youre making your computer completely silent its kinda nonsensical to worry about) so i keep it running. you still ultimately pull data from fedora/bazzite servers for updates (and thus, show IP) so i dont really understand consternation over this.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/counting/
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/infra/sysadmin_guide/dnf-counting/
Debian has an option to anonymously report packages installed. There’s a question about this at install time and at any time you can install or uninstall the popularity-contest package.
I’m in this picture. Installed bazzite on steam deck and it’s fucking awesome!
I’m not wild about it for desktop, but I did convert a laptop into a gaming PC for the living room (for lighter titles). I went with Bazzite for the Steam-deck like features and it has been great.
Wikipedia: Bazzite is a Fedora-based[1] Linux distribution designed to be similar to Valve’s SteamOS 3 while still functioning as a normal computer.[2][3][4] It offers support for handheld PC devices, including the Steam Deck.[5][6][7][8] Bazzite is named after the mineral of the same name, as Fedora Atomic Desktops historically had used a mineral naming scheme.[9] It aims to deliver a seamless out-of-the-box experience for both casual and advanced Linux gamers.[10]
I’ve recently dove back into Linux and my last try was on Mint. After a few issues I went back to Windows. With the recent Microsoft news I wasn’t happy using a system that could start spying on me.
It’s been close to a month and aside from some specific game issues likely due to running a nivida GPU I’ve been enjoying my time so far.
Copy paste did take a while to get used to. Also the default screenshot tool doesn’t automatically put the snip on the clipboard.
My main focus is gaming so this has been a solid operating system to use.
Always good to try out a few distros before settling in for the long run. As much as I love Mint, there are always cases where one distro has issues with your hardware where another doesn’t.
Copy paste did take a while to get used to.
Which part, the highlight-middle click part or something else?
Also the default screenshot tool doesn’t automatically put the snip on the clipboard.
In Mint? You’ve made me realize that would be convenient for me so I looked into it, I believe copying straight to clipboard is a default keyboard shortcut option I didn’t know about.
Sometimes ctrl c / v doesn’t work and it’s a combination of ctrl, super and C.
Que confused “what’s the super key”Turns out that’s what the windows key on my keyboard is called. So far only when I was messing with the terminal.
The screenshot tool in Brazzite. I think it’s called spectre.
Ctrl C doesn’t work in the terminal because that’s how you terminate programs. You need to use Ctrl shift c, control shift v etc.
Yep. Learning a lot of common inputs on Windows does and does not apply with Linux. Lots of muscle memory to retrain myself on.
That’s true.
On one hand, there are often ways to change the settings to make things more like how they were on Windows,
On the other hand, sometimes there’s a good reason for it to be different, so I always try to check why it’s different before changing it. An example is some window managers putting the taskbar panel at the top of the screen or on the side instead of the bottom (top panel is more convenient with a mouse, side panel takes up less space on a wide/landscape screen).
Very cool. I am still running Bazzite as my reintroduction into Linux as a daily and it’s been great for gaming but I will say that as more and more familiarity rolls in, I do get frustrated with it being an immutable distro and having to jump through hoops to get it do what I want.
Still I think it’s a great distro for those who don’t want to deal with MS bullshit anymore and a great friendly, works right out of the box while you learn or relearn Linux, and gets you gaming without a lot of hassle and having to deal with less than friendly Linux users.
I found, as an experienced Linux user, that with Bazzite you’ve got to forget the complicated approaches you’re used to, and go for the easy one, it usually works. Lots can be done from KDE’s system settings, or from the bundled utilities. Also I disagree with the order they chose for the application installation methods on their wiki, I think distrobox should be right after Flatpak.
The universal blue distros are the fastest I’ve been able to have a usable computer up and running and doing what I want it to do. They are fantastic.
There are no official cosmic variants anymore, but there are things like Origami that you can rebase to, if you want to try. Can’t vouch for their stability, but it’s an option. If support is dropped you can rebase back to regular bazzite. Rebasing is easy and pretty safe, it basically acts like an update and switches out the system files, but you should back up your config files just in case the different DE’s don’t play nice with each others config settings. From what ublue developers have said this can cause problems or annoyances.
Or you could develop your own derivitive with bluebuild or something. I’m not sure how involved that requires you to be, but it’s probably easier than learning nixos.
Yeah I tried out Origami I just felt the philosophy for the distro is a little strange lol. Cosmic itself was nice, it ran way snappier than GNOME and KDE on one of my really old computers, so thats interesting
Been a happy Bazzite users for over a year. Not much of a gamer but NVIDIA drivers that don’t require tinkering during updates (like with immutable Fedora) and being able to just use the old install until broken updates (sleep mode maybe once?) is sooooo convenient! Also people on their Discord (yeah, I know …) are generally super helpful.
