- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- linuxfurs@pawb.social
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- linuxfurs@pawb.social
Bazzite comes ready to rock with Steam and Lutris pre-installed, HDR support, BORE CPU scheduler for smooth and responsive gameplay, and numerous community-developed tools for your gaming needs.
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Just to clear some misunderstandings, TLE did a performance test on this distro and it was pretty much the same in terms of FPS as other distros. Gaming distros like Bazzite are made for a faster and easier setup process because gaming tools and stores and preinstalled.
TLE did a performance test on this distro and it was pretty much the same in terms of FPS as other distros.
Without measuring any 1% lows or 0.1% lows.
I enjoy TLE’s content, but that video is far from exhaustive on this.
Unless a better comparison comes out, we should reserve ourselves from making any judgements on this particular subject.
I still don’t think there will be a difference. I tried distros with various schedulers and didn’t notice a major positive difference except for the DE smoothness that was unbeatable on CachyOS.
So…, you don’t think it will make a difference. However, you do affirm that whatever CachyOS does is noticably better than the rest.
Perhaps more importantly, have you actually measured 1% lows or 0.1% lows on games. And did you compare how different distros fared in this regard?
I didn’t measure 1% lows but I noticed that regular distros (specifically Fedora and Arch based ones) performed noticeably better in terms of overall FPS.
Thank you for mentioning that! Did the slower distros you tested come with older kernels?
Fedora did have an older kernel but other distros were Arch based so always new kernels. Also I have to mention that CachyOS focuses on x86_64-v3 that my machine doesn’t support so results can be very different on newer hardware.
Thank you for the answer and for your time! I wish you a nice day!
I extensively tested apex legends with different kernels and found a difference.
Thank you for sharing! If you remember, could you share your findings?
On one hand, I think some data is better than no data, so I think its fair to say that there is a lack of evidence for it being better in terms of in-game performance after setup based on it and that should just be the null assumption anyways.
On the other hand, its been over a decade since its been pretty well known that average FPS is not necessarily reflective of overall performance and throwing the frametime data into a spreadsheet and doing =percentile([range],.99) and =percentile([range],.999) and then dragging it to neighboring cells seems like a pretty minimal extra work for a commercialized channel. For niche testing like this, I’m less bothered by it because having some results seems better than nothing, but its still nice to see it pointed out.
I installed Bazzite on a sibling’s thinkpad and it was amazing. Chose KDE, out of the box, it was amazing. Fingerprint fprint was pre installed, just had to scan them in settings. Battery management and power level settings (power save or performance) were also already installed. Everything has been flawless. Even full disk encryption works amazingly well without hiccups. I remember trying it on Ubuntu and it bricked itself or something and gave up on it.
Dual booting it and installation was a walk in the park.
Welcome to modern Linux where almost everything works, mister/miss
And way more reliability, even though it is pretty modified.
I’ve been using bazzite for over 6 months now, I have it on three of my devices at the current moment in time, and I would never look back to Windows at this point, shit just works.
I have three questions if you have the time. Can you make it go to desktop mode by default, not big picture mode? What DE does it come with, Plasma? Does it come with Lutris or whatever? If I have an .exe installer for an old game, does it come pre-installed with tools to help create the proton wine-prefixes and everything? I imagine the last one would allow Flatpak to be used.
Not OP but:
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on a desktop it’s defaulted to desktop mode. I’m unsure about the steam deck.
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you choose. KDE or GNOME. Budgie is being worked on.
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lutris can install your windows executables. Bottles is available too.
The only games I’m unable to play so far have been AAA games with unfriendly anticheat. ProtonDB helps here.
Ah. Different builds for different versions. Makes sense
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I apologize for the late reply, the other commenter is correct as well, Bazzite comes out of the box in desktop mode, if you’ve ever used plasma before, it’s a lot like that. For .exe programs I use wine, and haven’t had that let me down yet for the most part. Im fairly certain Bazzite does use flatpaks, but it does also have also Discover baked in.
Honestly, I compare it strongly to using the steam deck desktop mode.
Jorge, Kyle and the others over at ublue is doing a great job with their Fedora spins.
I run Bazzite on all my computers and if you got a full AMD system you can even get full gamemode running by installing the deck image. This in turn give you the best controller experience for games, as Desktop Steam got several issues with Steam Input valve have not fixed yet.
But not all credit should go to them for this but also ChimeraOS team, Nobara and others that are constantly working on an improved gaming experience on Linux.
When developing RetroDECK Steam Input profiles I mainly use the Steam Deck with SteamOS and Bazzite on my desktop to test them.
Linux veteran here. I use Bazzite on my gaming PC and ROG Ally. Once I figured out the quirks of an immutable distro and started using distroboxes it became an amazing experience. No complaints here.
I’m seriously considering Bazzite now. Can you explain whether something like LaTeX with custom packages would work? I also don’t want to redownload the LaTeX packages to vanish after a system update.
Also, I’m a tiling window user (i3). Will it be possible to use it in desktop mode?
As per my other comment:
Do your latex work inside a distrobox and you’re fine.
I’m not sure if you can layer another window manager on top. You may have to create a custom image for that
Bazzite is exclusively KDE, and I honestly don’t think it’s possible to run a different desktop manager on it.
Edit: Sorry, my mistake, there’s the option for GNOME as well. But I don’t think they recommend even switching between them on an install.
As someone who never used an immutable distro: what are the quirks when using it?
Basically installing packages. You’re fine if you default to using
- flatpaks for gui apps
- brew for cli programs
- distrobox when building from source or when you need good control over the package environment (e.g. when installing a latex editor and only the latex packages you want)
- layer packages on host with “rpm-ostree install” when the program needs tight integration with the host (e.g. VPN software)
Also, you shouldn’t edit files in /usr, but I’ve never run into that limitation. You can still edit other top-level directorys like /etc .
That’s about it.
This sums up all of my issues perfectly!
Anyone able to give an ELI5 to a linux noob? I’m struggling to find what the benefit is of Fedora’s atomic builds (is it just containerised apps? Is this an immutable distro?)…and then also what the benefit of Bazzite is on top of Fedora’s atomic spins?
Are immutable distros good for daily driving?
The ELI5 for Fedora’s atomic desktops is that if Windows had an Atomic Desktop version, Program Files and most of the Windows folder would be read only, and each program you installed yourself would go into its own folder in your user directory. That’s the basic idea. It’s harder to screw up an Atomic system as long as you stick to containerized app formats like flatpak/appimage whenever possible. It makes it easier for everyone to diagnose problems, and easier for users to roll back if an update has problems. Even if you were to install it right now, you could use one simple command to “roll back” to any image from the last three months.
The benefit of Bazzite is you have all of the above, plus a lot of gaming-related stuff preinstalled which, if you were to install them yourself in a normal Fedora environment, you’d likely have to spend a lot of time just learning how they’re supposed to be configured, how they interact, which versions have problems, and how to troubleshoot problems when an update to one app breaks a prerequisite for something else; eventually you end up in config hell instead of actually using your computer. With Bazzite, the image maintainers are the ones in config hell - they work out the kinks, app versioning, communicate with upstream to fix issues, all that, so your system should be in the most functional state that a Linux system can be, so you only have to think about using your apps.
tl;dr
- Atomic Desktops are more resilient to randomly breaking from updates or user error, and are easier to revert to a prior state if problems do arise
- Bazzite is a custom Atomic image with lots of gaming stuff preinstalled and preconfigured to work properly out of the box
- If you’re a gamer and wanting to try out Linux, Bazzite is going to be the least painful way to get your feet wet.
- Immutable distros are excellent for daily driving. I daily drive one myself!
As someone who has done a lot of distro hopping in the past, I’ve found that going for a stable release that is widely used as a daily driver is superior for gaming than “gaming specific” linux distros, largely on the basis that the gaming distros have routinely had buggy UIs, driver issues, and a variety of unexpected and undesired behavioral problems tied to the array of “gaming adjacent” software installed, most of which you can install yourself with little to no effort and most of which you probably don’t want or need in the first place.
Thankfully, bazzite is both, the community has gotten rather large lately so support has been good.
Too bad they use discord :(
I mean yes, but at least their Discord is externally archived/indexed and they have a Discorse Forum. None of those are my preferences but it’s better than nothing.
Thank you. I’m out. I have no idea why open source software projects use discord and slack.
Well I use bazzite and it is great. Ublue is awesome even with their poor choice of comms
It is a gaming related community after all. There is less ethical and privacy concerns in that crowd from my experience. Not to say that it is bad as there is a community for everything.
You dont need to care about privacy to realize a platform like discord is not a good idea for any type of software project. Or any project.
I just know it is popular with gamers
The thing is, Bazzite isn’t really a distro in it’s own right, which they admit themselves. It is essentially Fedora with a bit extra on top, and it gets all the updates Fedora does at the same time. It seems like they’re trying to “solve” some of the issues with other gaming distros. As far as pre-installed software, it comes with Steam and Lutris pre-installed. Sure, there are some linux gamers out there that don’t need those, but the vast majority will use them. Apart from those, it has the graphics drivers pre-installed for your system, based off your iso choice. Everything else is installed by choice through a first-boot wizard.
So is it pretty much an unofficial Spin then?
Yeah, based off the atomic desktop versions, as it’s immutable.
This is the first and only distro I’ve tried that has display link drivers already installed. Was able to plug my laptop into my work dock and immediately have it all work. I used to have to install a community version of the displaying driver for my Ubuntu and Debian based distros. Shit just works the first time.
https://universal-blue.discourse.group/c/bazzite/5
Discussion forum for the readers.
I tried it. Gave up and moved to regular fedora at the end. I didn’t see any real benefits personally
I did like many of the ideas, like gamescope is built in. But I think I had minor issues
Biggest benefit for me is automatic updates in the background which are also safe. On a normal distro, if your pc shuts down for whatever reason during kernel updates you have an unbootable system. That can’t happen on bazzite
Just ran into this exact problem this morning which was incredibly frustrating. Performed a routine system update, and I’m pretty sure I had a kernel panic (all input was non responsive, couldn’t even switch to a tty) in the middle of pacman’s upgrade phase.
While I was able to chroot into my install and reinstall the kernel, half of my system’s packages were left in an inconsistent state so I still couldn’t properly boot - and so I just nuked my root subvolume and reinstalled Arch (I suspect I could’ve somehow got the packages reinstalled if I wrangled for a while with pacman but it was just easier to reinstall at this point).
Atomic distros like Bazzite are designed to prevent that exact situation I ran into, unfortunately I just haven’t had enough time or energy to try to make my own custom image that has what I need in it (got kind of close with NixOS but that had its own issues), otherwise I’d probably be running that.
Another unsung nicety related to this one is that you can fully update your system but only start using it once you reboot. Too many times I updated the kernel on Arch only to find everything stopped working until I rebooted, hence why routine updates can just be done automatically with no issues to the user.
Same here. Ir’s very bloated. You can decide on what to install,but if you do install all that bloat,you need to be prepared. I tried their AMD GPU overclock tool and after a got a black screen, I ended up with missing packages. Immediately went back to Arch.
Edit:words
I think I tried emudeck and it wouldn’t install. But that wasn’t their issue (turned out to be a regression upstream).
I think I had stuttering sound in audio too. But that’s via HDMI.
Spdif no issue
I also used another gaming distro though so might be confusing them
They should absolutely keep developing it. It will only get better, and I’m a unique case because I’ve been using Linux probably since 1998 or so.
But I feel they make things a bit more custom, and it will only get better. It has a lot of potential, and is probably the best option already for many people
I have been using the hell out of bazzite for the last few weeks and I’ve really enjoyed it. There have been a couple of minor bugs but otherwise everything just generally works.
I’ve enjoyed it so much that I’ve also installed bluefin on my work laptop.
That seems to be a great distro to follow
I’ve been rocking it for a couple weeks now. So far it’s been great
How much different is setting up immutable distros like Bazzite? I like the concept but I’ve been too intimidated to try it out.
Setting up is stupid easy. What makes immutable distros potentially difficult is installing software. Anything packaged as a flatpak is stupid easy. Beyond that it can get complicated. But it’s not bad in general.
Having just switched to Linux with Bazzite two weeks ago, my biggest issues have come from Wayland support. And that’s really just because I have a specific piece of software I need that doesn’t support Wayland. And that’s a bit of an edge case and the result is more annoyance than show stopper.
Just use brew for non-gui programs. Really easy. It’s the recommended way by the ublue devs and should be pre-installed
Can’t you use Xwayland?
No, because it’s a software KVM and it needs to be able to read, mirror, and suppress mouse and keyboard actions.
Which can be done on Wayland but it needs to be dome from a Wayland native app
Can relate
Having to install things mostly through flatpaks works seamlessly until it doesn’t. Then you’re stuck in dependency hell where you have to open holes in your containers to allow access to files or binaries.
I’m at a point where I layer enough software that I don’t know If there is still value added.
Flatpaks ,boxbuddy for gui RPMS, it’s super versatile once you get it
Really annoying that I cannot uninstall Lutris…
You can rpm-ostree remove
No you can’t.
the idea of a console like layout ( Ui ) Out of the box ( if you so choose ) is awesome…
but that installer 😮💨