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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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.
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
Just use brew for non-gui programs. Really easy. It’s the recommended way by the ublue devs and should be pre-installed
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.
This has always been my concern with relying on Flatpak. It is only as simple as your requirements are it seems.
The setup process isn’t really much different from other distros, quite easy. It’s documented here. If it’s still too intimidating for you, you could always do a test run in a virtual machine first.
After the initial installation it’s an even better experience than other distros I have used. It gives you a first time portal, where you can choose additional applications that you would like installed. If you get your application via flatpak then you are all setup. If you need other applications not available in flathub, you will have to do some further reading in the documentation, it’s all explained there.
Flatpaks ,boxbuddy for gui RPMS, it’s super versatile once you get it
hmm, may check this out tho I’ve already made mint work to pretty well for gaming
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.
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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.
I want to add to what the others said. Usually I just add windows programs/games to steam as none steam game. that has been the easiest way to do it for me. I have very few games that isn’t on steam so it is nice to be able to add them together with the rest with the correct categories and such.
Nah, that’s a preconfigured distro.
https://universal-blue.discourse.group/c/bazzite/5
Discussion forum for the readers.
Has someone tried Steam VR with an Index on Bazzite? How well does it run?
I tried some setups with Steam VR, as Steam inside Flatpak is not supported and not working, but even when installed via deb it can require some restarts and be janky.
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!
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.
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.
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.
It’s atomic! If the latest version you try has issues you can roll back to the last one that was working. It’s really cool. You cannot write to anything other than /etc and /var unless you make a reversible commit on top of the system base image.
Thankfully, bazzite is both, the community has gotten rather large lately so support has been good.
Too bad they use discord :(
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
Thank you. I’m out. I have no idea why open source software odometer projects use discord and slack.
Well I use bazzite and it is great. Ublue is awesome even with their poor choice of comms
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How good is the “HDR Support”? It’s one thing I’ve really wanted for Linux for a while.
From my experience using Plasma 6+ and a NVIDIA card, I keep HDR on on my main display (Odyssey Neo G7).
No issues with washed out colours on the desktop, everything looks fine
I can watch HDR videos using the included Haruna player or MPV.
Firefox has no HDR support outside Mac OS, so no HDR on YouTube.
For games, it depends. Some games can detect HDR and work fine, but for most I have to use gamescope, which in itself brings some issues like not having the Steam overlay, games freezing randomly or just having terrible performance due to niceness (everything has a workaround though, but that requires some tinkering).
For game scope running HDR, there’s a lot of people and guides telling you to use countless flags that don’t really do anything at all. The best thing to do is to read its documentation. I use the following flags as startup parameters on my Steam games:
gamemoderun gamescope -W 3840 -H 2160 -r 165 --hdr-enabled --hdr-itm-enable --hdr-itm-sdr-nits 300 -f -e --mangoapp -- %command%gamemoderunjust enables game-mode, which can bring some small performance improvements.-W -H -rflags are to determine resolution and desired refresh rate. You might be able to omit those flags but I have had some issues with that.--hdr-enabledis the only flag needed to get HDR working. Nothing else. (except from enabling it on your DE)--hdr-itm-enable --hdr-itm-sdr-nitsare for inverse tone mapping for non HDR games, it’s the same as Windows Auto HDR.-fis full-screen, but to be fair I don’t think this one is doing anything, but I need to test better.-eis to enable Steam integration, which should be the overlay and input, but its broken (there’s a workaround, check the last comment made by me there)--mangoappis to run mangohud, this flag is preferred over runningmangohudbeforecommand%. It’s partially broken this way because it does not dispaly the GPU or gamemode info. Running it asmangohudworks 100% fine but apparently there are some issues with it that are beyond my knowledge.Awesome, thanks so much. I actually just purchased the same monitor so this will be very helpful when I set it up.
Thank you so much! I’ve looked at countless guides and everyone said something different. This helped a lot.
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.
the idea of a console like layout ( Ui ) Out of the box ( if you so choose ) is awesome…
but that installer 😮💨
What about the installer? Anaconda isn’t great, but you only need about 1 minute to set the options to install and then let it do it’s job before rebooting.
Immutable distro…yeah I’m good.
I’ve been rocking it for a couple weeks now. So far it’s been great
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
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
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.
