alt Hacker NewsBazzite: The next generation of Linux gaming
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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)
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.
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.
Soooo, after having to migrate multiple college campus sites across to Windows 11 in time for the W10 drop dead date. I kinda gave up with trying to get my PC running Windows 11 without bugs and freezes.
Switched to PopOS, was "ok", switched to Arch, performance was awesome.
A few days ago I gave Bazzite a blast and now I'm currently installing it as the primary OS on my gaming rig. Other than a few small tweaks, it just works.
It's quite a bit more performant than PopOS and PopOS came with a myriad of tweaks and issues needed for things like Ubi Connect (I've been going through the first Division game with my kids and PopOS/Lutris hated... Everything...
It all just works on Bazzite.
Plus the Nvidia drivers don't seem as bad, unsure if it's just the RTX5xxx that were having issues ala GamersNexus but the 4090 doesn't seem to have the same frame time issues that were raised (Knock on wood)
I use it for gaming.
It gets updates. Games work. I don't have to spend a bunch of time trying to debug or customize it, but I could if I wanted to.
That's the way I like it.
“Dad’s old CDs…”. It me. I can’t decide whether to be mad at being called old or glad that someone cares enough to make them run.
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...
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.
I've been using Linux forever (back to the mailed Ubuntu CDs days).
I installed this begrudgingly after fighting edge cases with Waydroid on Arch. It's the first "batteries included" distro I've actually liked. I usually hate the "omakase" approach, but the setup here is pretty much how I would've done it myself.
Side note: GNOME + Waydroid is the best experience I've had with a desktop OS on a tablet. Finding tools like scrcpy included out of the box was a nice surprise, too.
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.
Why are there so many of these "specialized" hobby project Linux distros that people are using as daily drivers? Are people too lazy to use an operating system that they have to do even a minor amount of configuration to use? Do people really need every program built in?
Projects like this fit all the criteria of what I've nicknamed "Mastodon projects", because they always have either (or both) Mastodon and Discord links on their websites and are primarily developed by people with "alternative" social media accounts. They always implode within a few years due to some form of ridiculous community drama that other FOSS projects don't suffer from (because other open source projects usually have a somewhat serious "community", or lack of a cohesive one altogether).
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.
At this point, I have almost 30 years of daily driving Linux desktop experience, and several decades of professional Linux experience. I have tried and kind of liked NixOS and although I prefer the simplicity of Arch Linux, I see how it would be useful in a professional scenario with lots of servers to upkeep.
But Fedora Atomic confuses the hell out of me. To recommend it to potential Linux newbies and as the great next thing feels bizarre to me.
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 also the best distribution for jellyfin media player because it's trivially easy to get the jellyfin client to autostart in kde and it's not that hard to get it auto updating and rebooting nightly. This distro plus an intel n150 mini pc (aoostar n1 pro is decent) and a flir dongle and the flir remote is a big win.
I really wanted to give this a legitimate try but even following the installation instructions to the letter, it bricked my Windows install and I had to spend a few hours fixing the MBR, Bootloader, etc. I'm sure it would be a breeze using a separate physical drive but that'll be a project for another day.
Bazzite does look very promising and happy to see innovation in the Linux gaming world!
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 just learned about this project.
I do play games and I am a Linux user.
I see this project being an OS distribution with image update approach. It basically has some programs used for gaming on Linux preinstalled and probably preconfigured.
I wish the project would exist in 2 variants: an OS (as it currently is) and as an installer that would allow the user to select parts to install and configure on their current Linux distro.
Because I am using debian, this is my home PC and gaming is not the sole thing that I do on this PC.
Switching to a Fedora distro is not an option for me.
So, as nice as this project is - I say farewell to it.
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.
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.
A video shows difference between Bazzite, Nobara and CachyOS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqIjUddUSo0
Why others are better than Bazzite if it's made for gaming?
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?
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!
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.
I was using Bazzite, but they started talking about potentially shutting it down due to a removal of 32-bit support. It seems a bit safer to choose one of the mainline Fedora spins. Maybe Kinoite or Silverblue if you're into atomicity, though there's still some rough edges to be aware of.
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.
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).
These sort of derivative distros seem to be aimed at Windows 11 Refugees.
I am not a fan of these derivative distros and I would always recommend using one of the mainline distros e.g Debian, Arch, Fedora etc.
I am using Debian 13 for gaming and the most difficult thing I had to install was a backports kernel which improved performance in some games, in other games it made no difference at all.
Installing Steam and Lutris takes about 5 minutes and it yet another distro for what amounts to installing some applications. I find the biggest issues on Linux gaming is the applying individual workarounds in Steam, and getting wireless controllers to behave properly.
Even if one game doesn't work on this (there are many) and works on Windows, why shouldn't I just use Windows?
The comments here are hilarious. Something to go with my morning coffee. We live in the universe where you cannot distinguish between a human or an AI.
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.
For gaming, anything rolling release will be good because you want the latest update from the graphic stack.
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.
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
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'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.
> your dad's old CDs
Okay. I think I get a feel for their target audience.
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.
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.
Last time I tried bazzite, a year ago, it was very buggy and crashed often. I switched back to SteamOS on deck. Has bazzite gotten any better?
Yet another homepage that doesn't tell me what it is. Something something gaming. Is it a lib, piece of hardware..? Too bored to find out after scrolling down. Oh wait, they're addicted to deadlocks. Great.
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I have a special spot that gets extremely annoyed when I feel I have to spend a necessary time just figuring out what something is. The page suffers from "developer-brain" marketing, where they describe the technology used to build it (cloud-native images) rather than what the product actually is. Why not just lead with that it is a Linux distro/version focused on gaming. In the beginning, I thought it was new hardware, then I actually thought it was a streaming service. the website does a poor job of simply stating what it actually is. Then again, I might be stupid, but the problem is that a lot of people are stupid. And I guess many non-developers are going to have a hard time just figuring out what the hell this thing is. I’m probably being too cranky now, but the page reads like a combination of the worst from developers-speak combined with the rest of marketing-speak.