Hi, I'm the founder.

While what you're saying isn't impossible, it's unlikely. In the event it did happen, Bazzite is a fork, a signing key, and a couple forked Fedora Copr repos away from being made completely in someone else's control.

Always a possibility with any distro, but the tooling around it is flexible and repeatable. If another group of people wanted to continue off where they left off it would be far more possible than a lot of the Ubuntu forks.

Just need the Atomic Fedora base to still be around and everything else is already pre-setup to run on GitHub infrastructure neither of which I anticipate going away soon. (Famous last words)

Calling it a superset of Fedora rather than just being its own bespoke distro can be a fine line, but really there's nothing stopping anyone from forking it and continuing on, a good few people run their own forks already to meet their own needs a bit more specifically.

Bazzite is a part of the Universal Blue family, which is more of a repackaging of Fedora Atomic.

I'm a fan of my Steam Deck and SteamOS, but I'd like that experience to eventually be available via community supported distros, which Valve/Igalia can rebase from, and instead focus on Proton.

Bazzite is the closest to that that we have so far.

The nice thing about atomic distros is switching operating systems is as easy as typing 'ostree rebase', and registering a secure boot key.

So if Bazzite did go that way you could have fedora running in under an hour and with flatpak most thing will just work.

Isn't every distro a custom distro, by definition?

Anyways, I get that this is a "risk" to consider, but installing a new distro isn't so bad that it should prevent one from trying and using a currently extant distro if it works for them.

I don't know why people bring this up so much whenever a new Linux distro shows up. I think one of the coolest things about Linux is that normal people can feasibly roll a useful distro. How much of a longevity guarantee do you need from a distro that is used for gaming, of all things?

Sadly SteamOS doesn't support full disk encryption, which is inexcusable for an OS used on a portable device, that some also use to remote access their desktop (through Steam Link/Moonlight).

People who are not new Linux users might prefer a distro which is part of the same "family" of distros they are already familiar with.

Steam OS I believe is based on Arch. Bazzite is based on Fedora. Personally I have experience with Debian distros so if I wanted a gaming-focused distro I would pick maybe something like Pop OS.

I wonder if people would be willing to pay 10€/$ for a yearly update so that there could be some commercial force behind a distribution that would provide security and stability for desktop users. with windows, you pay one large amount upfront. with macos, you get it with hardware. so having something like this, i think, has a potential to succeed and a place in commercial market.

I’ve recently moved between two other steamos-like distros and it’s such a non-event. You just log into Steam, pair controllers and download the games. Your saves are managed for you.

"Custom Distro"? That's every distro mate

SteamOS is only going to support other hardware by coincidence. Valve is unlikely to put in resources beyond the hardware that they want to support. It's also unlikely to change the whole "firmware restore, entire drive" approach. They're not going to put in the resources or support work into making and maintaining a full distro by themselves.

A community distro (be it a console-like gaming focused distro or not) is going to be the way to be the way to go for the foreseeable future. I'm pretty happy with running EndeavorOS w/ KDE, Steam, and Heroic. The Steam client with Proton is where most of the magic happens in Linux anyway. If I wanted to get fancy, I could set up GameScope with Steam Big Picture to take a SteamOS/Bazzite approach.

Weird question probably but outside of the super esoteric distros running a bespoke package manager what stops someone who installs a distro like bazzite from just continuing to update packages? If they use apt for example then they'll still get updates when the repos are updated and most of these distros reuse existing software repositories.

What you just said is the reason why I use Ubuntu for my company and not something else. It is about risk of lack of support obviously.

Right, because the idea of Linux has always been about sticking to big corporate distros whenever possible

Universal Blue is under very little risk of just shutting down operations without warning (as opposed to a hype-based BFDL kinda situation like Omarchy). I'm a happy Bluefin user and would wholly recommend people step up to help out with the distro if possible.

Since I primarily use bazzite to play Steam games it honestly doesn’t remotely concern me. I can just redownload the games on another distro.

I don’t see what the point is of bringing this up.

1. It’s not exactly some fly by night thing at this point, it’s extremely popular, which means the likelihood of having maintainers and sponsors step up with, at the very least, an easy migration path is high.

2. You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?

3. Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)

Any operating system could close down and move on. I'm 100x more concerned that Windows is going to become a cloud service than I'm worried about Bazzite shutting down.