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 think its a new shiny thing but I expect most users to go back to ordinary Linux, and in a year there wont be many still using bazzite. But thats fine. I love playing with new tools myself. But most of them are just temporary and then its back to what works the easiest.
But this is what makes Linux fun. Its not just one system. Tons of desktops, tons of apps, tons of configs.
Personally I tried Bazzite because it was the recommended distro for a gaming device, and I liked it so much that it quickly became my main.
Bazzite may present a bit more friction if you want to do something “advanced” that would otherwise be trivial on other distros perhaps with just a couple terminal commands, but it makes all the “simple” things super-duper easy, and the system is almost impossible to break.
I would say this model makes sense for “ordinary” users that just need a computer to read email, view cat videos, open office documents, and in the specific case of Bazzite also gaming. In my specific case I also needed to write code (I use VSCode + Godot), besides the initial friction of learning to work with containers and SELinux, Bazzite seems to be fit for coding.
Thus, I hope immutable distros will stay and thrive. I hope that one day someone will make a distro that you can just set and forget on your grandma’s laptop, and I think this distro should be immutable, like Bazzite.
For development there’s also Bazzite-dx
People have been saying this for a year, and the line only keeps going up.
Yeah ok. Well we will see. Im sometimes wrong. :)
Long time Debian user, short time Arch user, even shorter Fedora user.
I Switched a few devices over to Bazzite this year, and it’s genuinely game changing. A distro that just works, and stops me from breaking core system stability? But also allows me to install stuff using rpm-ostree and add other distros using distro shelf?
Don’t get me wrong I love compiling from source on Arch, but god damnit, sometimes I need an OS with guard rails, and it won’t be Windows or MacOS for damn sure.
This isn’t your average Glupshitto Linux
You act like arch is gentoo :P compiling on arch is like a blue moon event. You complie on arch about as much as you would on fedora.
Don’t tell me how to use Arch!
Exactly this.
I am likewise a long time Debian user, different flavors, on and off. Played with Arch a little. Never touched fedora.
Installed Bluefin on my main laptop almost a year ago, haven’t looked back. The stability is exactly what I was looking for. It just works, and protects me from myself.
But still my proxmox is full of mostly Debian servers, I still value a traditional install.
But you better believe that when my buddy asked for help with Windows 10 EOL, one of the options I gave him was Linux. He was curious, we went over pros and cons, now he’s running Bluefin too.
Is this counting people who installed it and then left out of disappointment? I installed it once, and then I couldn’t navigate through the menu as mouse-less-ly as Linux Mint can, and Steam wouldn’t show any windows at all despite updating (only right-clicking the system tray icon would bring up that menu, but then clicking those entries or double-clicking the icon did nothing). It was just a really disappointing experience so I returned to Mint Cinnamon.
Which desktop environment did you do
KDE Plasma, on a Lenovo ThinkPad E570 with a… GTX M950, I think.
The graph shows weekly active users. So you wouldn’t be counted unless you actively boot Bazzite.
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).
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?
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.
you can layer vpns via rpm-ostree install [.rpm location]
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mullvad is a better choice anyways. you can also download a wireguard config and load it directly into the network manager
While I agree, it’s a pretty lame thing to say “This doesn’t work for your use case? That’s because your use case is wrong” If the distro doesn’t support PIA, then that is an issue with the distro, not the user.
Nah, it’s an issue, full stop. PIA isn’t responsible for making its shit work everywhere (tho it would be a more responsible approach to use an universal approach) and Bazzite isn’t responsible for making sure every program works on the distro.
Yeah, I agree
Yeah I struggled with reading my rom library over SMB so also had to install something else.
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.
PIA has OpenVPN or IPsec profiles (I forget which) that can be imported into NetworkManager. You just have to put in your account info.
I don’t think every location has one…but a lot do.
There are apparently OpenVPN profile you can import, but as I said in my earlier comment - I just couldn’t get it to work (connection attempts would just time out).
I still have like ~18 months of PIA left (joined under a 100% cashback offer), but will likely switch to Proton or Mullvad afterwards - as they both seem to work better under Linux from what I’ve read.
I’m sure over time I’ll tinker more under the hood over time, but for now - I’m just trying to ease myself into Linux with pre-configured installers when particular apps aren’t available through the Cachy Package Manager.
30-odd years of Windows usage has dulled my IT skills!
Proton has a client app as well, doesn’t it? If it doesn’t have OpenVPN/Wireshark config support I would avoid it
A worthy watch about vpns, obviously just one opinion. https://youtu.be/vQmLMGcCO3I
GG
How do you know how many active users?
fedora distros have a thing called countme that pings their servers so they can measure general trends in how many people are using the OS and the various spins, which can be helpful for determining what to focus on. some amount of the userbase opt out of it
And this is on by default?
It is on by default, but can be disabled in your repo config: https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/conf_ref.html
The feature works by adding a flag to one random http request to a fedora repo every week. Fedora then aggregates the http logs that have been flagged to derive their metrics. You can opt out of sending the flag, but if you’re querying fedora repos then you still end up in their http log.
But saying it pings their servers isn’t quite a fair statement as it’s not some background service that opens a network connection, it sounds to me at least like it’s data that is sent to the Fedora repos once a week when you update your system?
Clients (DNF, PackageKit, …) have been modified so they add a countme variable in their requests to mirrors.fedoraproject.org once a week. This ends up in our webserver log data which lets us generate usage statistics.
Would be glad to be corrected on this though as I am a long time Fedora user now and I’m not overly fond of my data being collected by big corpo; it’s why I left Windows in the first place 🙄
I mean fedora is pretty famous for data gathering in the Linux space. It’s kinda what they do. They have ended up in rather sizeable kerfuffles over it.
Fedora is after all one of the two /corpo/ option of the Linux world right next to Ubuntu.
That’s cool. I don’t really have a problem with that, just curious.
I feel like people lately go a bit overboard when it’s about protecting their “data”.
As far as I see all it does is just send one single number that shows that there is someone using this specific operation system and it does not include any personal or unique to the user information.
In my opinion this does not even qualify as “my data”
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I’m in this picture. Installed bazzite on steam deck and it’s fucking awesome!
What does it do better than SteamOS on the Steam Deck itself?
Genuinely asking as I didn’t really see any need to switch even as the compulsive tinkerer that I am…
Generally no… Cachyos steam deck version is better in basically every test iv seen them compared head to head in.
Bazzite is more or less the default choice cause it’s a flavor of the month more then it makes any kind of actual sense.
If your going to bazzite your typically better off staying on the stock OS.
Have you seen comparisons between SteamOS and CachyOS? Since we established Bazzite is probably inferior on the Steam Deck when I only want to play games, I wonder if I’d gain anything with CachyOS, which seems to be more like the Arch I usually use.
Being able to install it yourself on any device seems like a big advantage :P
Got it, thank you.
I don’t have any device, I specifically own a Steam deck and if that’s the main benefit, I probably don’t want it on my other devices (I use Arch, btw).
Should’ve added “on the Steam Deck” in the first place, sorry 😅
Haha yeah, I’m not super up-to-date on Bazzite, but I believe it doesn’t add much on a Steam deck. (And if you don’t want your other devices to boot up into Steam, you probably don’t want it there either.)
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
buy, buy, BUY!
In my mother language, kinoite sounds like “what a night”, ans I can’t read it without some giggling >.<
Also, TIL that kinoite is a mineral
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.
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.
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 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.
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’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.
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
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!?
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.
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 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
I’ve been using Fedora for while but I decided to try Bazzite and for the most part it’s been a great out of the box experience. I didn’t have to mess with NVidia and Wayland as much as I did with vanilla Fedora.
It is a little wonky compared to other distros. I don’t like the way some features are managed, but for a new non-Linux user, they won’t know the difference. I highly recommend it for people that just want to jump on Steam and go.
The problem with a new user is they need more documentation and more resources which atomic distros like bazzite have less of. Making them worse.
Bazzite is for knowledgeable users who don’t want to tinker much anymore or children who aren’t allowed to modify their computer.
Most people don’t want to tinker. They just want a machine that works without hassle or need to think much about how everything works, or risk breaking something… But also without the bloat or the walled garden of Apple.
That’s a good point overall and definitely something to consider.
However, I don’t think it applies to Bazzite specifically because they’ve had such a meteoric growth rise in popularity over the last year. They have more resources to make that stuff.
But, I don’t think most people in modern hardware need to do much for Bazzite to get going. I think unless they want to play Windows games, they shouldn’t need to do anything weird.
Bazzite handled all the annoying setup for Wayland and the Nvidia drivers. Bazzite also manages the updates without a user needing to know how the terminal works. (I personally don’t like that, but it’s probably good for new users).
Bazzite also has fairly robust documentation, which is probably not the case for most Atomic Distros. They also have pretty decent support on social media and in their discord server.
Bazzite also manages the updates without a user needing to know how the terminal works. (I personally don’t like that, but it’s probably good for new users).
Should be noted that this is entirely optional. I update manually through the terminal with “ujust update”
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.
I’m one. I set up a Windows/bazzite dual boot situation and I’ve never booted windows since.
what’s bazzite like? might experiment with it when I get my caseless frankenstein floor computer to work lol
think steamos with all of it’s goodies (and more bazzite-exclusive features), but on a more standardised linux base so you can run it on any pc and handheld, not just the steam deck. bazzite is also just as unbreakable as steamos, since it is an immutable (read-only system files) os, and updates the same way as a phone does (downloads an update in the background, and uses it on next boot with a rollback option in the super rare event that it breaks something).
that’s sweet, will probably try it!
Someone else could explain better than me I’m sure but, it’s a Linux distro that is gaming focused. It comes pre-loaded with steam and video card drivers so that someone has a decent chance that their games will just “work”.
will probably try when I get a case for my computer!
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. 😁
Most people I know primarily use their desktop computers for games. Bazzite also works great for general purpose computing, although it isn’t advertised as such.
Agreed. Bloody fantastic for general purpose. Seems like a well kept secret. A lot of people assume Bazzite is just Steam in Big-Screen mode.
For some things.
For many things it isn’t. It is usable (I use it) but with a bunch of workarounds for anything embedded development-related since it needs specific vendor software with device access. I have had to use a variety of distrobox + app image solutions that are often a bit worse than a system that installs them as native apps.
I don’t personally count “embedded development-related” as “general computing” so I think there’s a disconnect there. 😅
It’s like gaming laptops. The concept of something being “gaming” focused is nonsense bullshit pr spin.
If it’s good at gaming it’s basically just good at everything. But people gobble up gaming like leds on a serect lab chair.
TIL chairs have LEDs now
In my experience, Debian has been very low maintenance. Occasionally, you may run into an issue that would be solved by having newer packages. If that happens, consider switching to Fedora.
My Fedora installations have been pretty smooth. The only thing that always breaks randomly is the software update GUI. I just got fed up with that and ended up using the terminal for installing all updates. Apparently this distro requires a bit more maintenance.
Fedora installations have been pretty smooth.
ended up using the terminal for installing all updates.
My experience as well with my Arch installations after a decade with that distro. I run a system upgrade because I want to, not because I need to. Never does it break unless I’m careless when upgrading and not checking the news page beforehand, which you are supposed to do. As long as I play by the rules, it’s super stable. (Never did it break for me anyway though. Never happened apart from hardware failure.)
Although admittedly I almost never do check the news page before upgrading, but/because there’s rarely anything there. And after a while you learn to recognize the volatile packages which can break your system, so e.g. if
systemdhas an update I’ll check the page before hitting enter, and so on.Remember this one from 2022?
Yeah, that one ended up being a learning experience… After recovering from that dumb misadventure, I finally learned to take those announcements more seriously.
Yeah, vaguely 😅 I use syslinux for booting, habit from when I used to dual boot, so I was luckily not affected. But yes, it is definitely wise to check the news before upgrading system-critical packages!
I can’t be bothered to update every day, or even every week. LOL. More like once a month or so, which means that it’s usually 100 MB or more and there’s at least one package that is more or less critical. When I start updating, and before hitting Y, I pause for a second and realise I should totally check the news first. Usually, it’s fine, but over the years, there have been a few times when intervention was necessary.
If you only update once a month (which should be fine as well, definitely), then you only need to check the news page once a month too, less often than I do probably. 😄 Seems like a win-win. 👌
You can also selectively update packages of course, but this is strongly ill-advised unless you know what you’re doing.
But like,
doas pacman -Sy firefoxshould be fine…You didn’t hear it from me. 🤐🥸
The “unless you know what you’re doing” part tells me it’s totally worth it in some highly exceptional situations. You just need to be able to justify spending a few hours to figure out exactly how to do it safely.
Best thing about Linux is that you can do literally anything you want. If it works, it’s awesome. If you break your system, you get to keep the pieces and learn something new along the way.
I’m utilizing this liberty by being a lazy admin who updates things like eventually™ or soon™. Haven’t learned any hard lessons yet, so I guess it’s ok. Or maybe I just know what I’m doing…
A gaming focused distro will do everything else well too, so thats probably why.
It’s not so much that people are focused on gaming distros, it’s more that gaming distros historically haven’t been much of a thing, and gamers generally had to use windows for their gaming, because the linux experience was limited and sub-optimal. Even dedicated linux users would keep a windows partition/machine that they used for gaming.
That’s not true anymore, as basically anything without kernel level anti cheat works on linux, which means that a huge amount of folk that would have moved to linux earlier, but couldn’t, are now coming over.
Which is to say, it’s not so much that there is “so many of them”, it’s more that, they’re coming over in a big wave, because they’ve been there for years, but haven’t been able to move until recently, and now, they know that there are distros out there that look and feel like something they’re familiar with.
I guess we have different use cases is all. People who primarily use their computers for gaming.
My PC is:
- My media server
- My workstation when WFH
- My entertainment center if the TV is busy
- My gaming PC
- My hobby development PC
(In no particular order.)
Just an fyi, Bazzite does all of that as well. It’s not just gaming, it’s a fully functional OS
So you can install packages? It’s not a fully immutable system?
You install the package and it adds it to your OS image (that re-initializes every time you boot).
They say you should try to avoid it if you can, so if there’s a flatpak use that, if not, then a distrobox with Fedora toolbox for .RPMs or Arch (for AUR and yay) or whatever other distro you choose, then shortcutting it right to your host OS. By this point, you’ve probably already found a way (or three) to get it to work.
If all that doesn’t work, then you can layer packages onto your image by installing the local .RPM using rpm-ostree then rebooting. I’ve only had to do this with my VPN client so far. Only annoyance is that you have to update it manually.
Ooh, okay, definitely sounds cumbersome at first glance.
I think a lot of people are basically looking for “Windows but not Microsoft/Windows”. So it’s their gaming PC where they also browse the internet/social media and watch YouTube or Twitch (sometimes at the same time that they’re gaming), and maybe do some other ancillary stuff like art (digital art, 3d rendering, music, video or photo editing, etc.) or some other hobby related stuff.
So Bazzite is kinda at the center of this perfect storm where plenty of PC gamers have seen the SteamOS/Big Picture mode and gone, “If I could use SteamOS as a traditional desktop, I would in a heartbeat” while Microsoft is also fumbling harder than they ever have - which is saying a lot - and Linux is the easiest to get up and running that it’s ever been - to the point where immutable distros are as plug and play as Windows. Then Bazzite comes along and says, “Hey, SteamOS isn’t desktop comparable yet, so we went and made it ourselves (with blackjack, and hookers).”
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.
Yeah, I’m the same, but if it’s an easy way to get people into the warm embrace of Linux, then hopefully they’ll look around and see other (Gen Purpose) distros exist.
True. Let’s hope it’s a great stepping-stone. 😊👍
To be fair some of these distros centered on gaming may really have some priorities that are more useful for gamers. Like better driver and system support. And I think they’re still capable of doing well outside of gaming.
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 :)
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.
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.
Why is Flatpak Steam worse for performance? I’ve been using it for years, seemingly better performance than Windows on the same system. Something inherent about Flatpak?
If you’re serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.
Mm, I don’t think I’d be willing to sacrifice my Niri workflow. Niri also supports fractional scaling and VRR, but not yet HDR, which I can live without until it’s implemented. 😁
Flatpak is simply a sandboxed application, similar to a Docker container. Its better to have natively installed applications over sandboxed if you are seeking the highest level of performance.
You have essentially made all your games run within a sandboxed instance which has a limited set of binaries that emulate another mini OS within your primary OS.
If you haven’t seen any performance issues, then keep on doing what you’re doing, the software is very well made compared to Ubuntu Snap and likely has similar driver performance as close as possible to bare-metal
essentially made all your games run within a sandboxed instance which has a limited set of binaries that emulate another mini OS within your primary OS.
Isn’t it just library bundling? It’s not like it’s running inside a virtual machine or anything.
I can see the Rocket League process right there when listing my user processes, e.g.
There are so many conflicting reports regarding the performance on Flatpak, for Steam but also in general, so I don’t know what to believe.
At least one source said the performance overhead is negligible on modern hardware, so I think I’m gucci.
Flatpak is simply a sandboxed application, similar to a Docker container. Its better to have natively installed applications over sandboxed if you are seeking the highest level of performance.
This is bullshit. Containers run natively on your system just like “native” [sic] applications.
They literally say they are a fucking container tool like Docker in their own FAQ , you silly person.
That’s not what they were refuting. They were just saying that containers run on the metal just like any other software.
🙂
Read again. You completely misunderstood.
What’s a container that doesn’t run natively on the system called?
That’s not what the FAQ says, rather it says Flatpaks are often sandboxed but not fully containerized. Containers don’t need to have a performance penalty because they run on the same kernel as the host. Container tech applies a chroot, disables some capabilities within the container and that’s about it. They are in contrast to virtual machines that need to boot an entire additional OS before doing anything.
Looks like I don’t understand how it works and should simply shut the fuck up instead of spreading nonsense.
Many had cool presents it seems 🤭
