Linux

Bazzite is a good HTPC or living room gaming distro. It is not an ideal all purpose desktop distro, just like a Steam Deck is not an ideal all purpose desktop system.

If you want a Bazzite-like experience that is better suited for the desktop then use Fedora Silverblue, which is what Bazzite/ublue builds upon.

I've been using bazzite for a chunk of time now on my steam deck and on my Thinkpad. You can generally do most things. Gaming obviously works fine though the Thinkpad with it's old CPU and incomplete vulkan support can't launch a lot of games but that's not a distro thing. I have been able to sideload apps onto a quest VR headset with it after some tinkering with udev rules and distrobox. I couldn't figure out how to flash the firmware of my pinecil soldering iron though. I also do all my 3d printing stuff on bazzite.

Most of the time you should be able to use distrobox to install stuff that doesn't exist elsewhere. Several things I have used an arch box to install off the aur using the included helper paru, even though flatpaks and appimage may be available. From in the distrobox, distrobox-export is available to make the software available to bazzite as if it were native.

I am! I run it both on my gaming PC and laptop.

But it doesn't seem like a "typical" distro for a daily driver? How does Bazzite for example differ from Nobara which is another gaming-oriented distro?

Well, for starters, if you get the Bazzite-deck edition, your PC boots straight into Steam's game mode - in this mode, everything runs thru gamescope so you get all the awesome benefits like being able to use FSR even with games that don't support it, HDR and more. You get a console-like experience on PC, and it's awesome.

Another cool thing about this mode is that all your updates - including OS, Flatpak, firmware/BIOS, container, Nix, pip etc - all of it is presented as if it's a Steam update like in SteamOS - and it's automatic too, and it doesn't interrupt your gaming experience. Basically a unified update backend and frontend, which is awesome.

Compared to Fedora/Nobara, one advantage this has is that the updates are image based and atomic, so when you reboot, the new update goes live instantly so there's no wait-time. Another advantage is that your previous image is available in the GRUB menu, so in case the update broke something, you can always boot from the previous image - no need to even restore anything, no need to edit your fstab etc (unlike btrfs snapshot restores where the subvolid changes). And you can also pin "good" images to your GRUB menu (and I highly recommend doing that), so you can always fall back to a known good version. This came in handy on my laptop recently where after one of the Feb updates I was experiencing some weird graphics corruption in game mode, but thanks to image pinning I always had a working image to fall back to. Also, the rebase feature allows you to go back and forth between 90 days of images (stored on github), so it's easy to switch between various versions for testing. The rebase is also interesting because with just a single command you can switch between any other Fedora Atomic distro, so if you're bored of Bazzite or you want to try out a new DE, it's just one command to switch. And with pinning, you can always switch back instantly.

Finally, there's the whole immutability aspect. Personally I'm ambivalent on this, but the fact that it allows image/atomic updates (with easy rollbacks/rebases), I think of it more as a convenience - especially on a gaming-oriented machine, where I just wanna jump straight into my games without worrying about updates and broken systems.

So having used Fedora, Nobara, and finally Bazzite, I can highly recommend Bazzite as a daily driver - and it's 100% worth switching. AMA.

Yes, and I love it.

I only use my PC for gaming and web browsing. I mainly stuck with Fedora, but also used Tumbleweed and Nobara. Regardless of which distro I used I was never fully satisfied with the initial setup or upkeep.

• Fedora was great, but I was hopping around often and there was always a setup process to get Steam and what not installed and set up.

• Nobara is a great option with gaming tools installed and setup for you. However, it's maintained by a single (awesome) dude and major upgrades often require some manual work arounds.

• Tumbleweed was great until there were updates. More times than not, updates failed due to repo or dependency issues.

Bazzite, however, is the first (and only, so far) distro where I quite literally install, reboot, launch and log into Steam, start playing games. No other setup steps were required as everything I need is baked into the image. And with the automatic updates there's been no upkeep.

Since installing Bazzite I've had no desire to try anything else, which is great. More time for gaming. 🎮

I am not a fan because they install all that WINE stuff on the system level which is a huge security degradation.

Running WINE through Bottles with the latest protonGE through PupGUI works on all distros.

If they removed that I would consider it.

Also they remove Firefox and Flatpak Firefox can only use seccomp filters, not sandboxes, which less secure. And due to an rpm-ostree issue those removed packages are never reinstallable.

I run bazzite on my steam deck and gaming pc. It’s honestly just silverblue with gaming specific options, so it’s extremely solid. Coupled with the ability to have the steam deck game mode it beats out all the competition in my eyes. Specifically I would take it over nobara having used both as nobara had some very serious stability issues over time as well as just general package drift. Bazzite has none of that.

I've been running it on my steam deck (LCD) for a while and it's great. Nearly undistinguishable from SteamOS but with neat extras. If I had an AMD GPU in my gaming PC, I'd try it out there as well to see how the SteamOS experience holds up on a desktop.