236
Upstream images vs bazzite: https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_upstream_with_bazzite.svg
My prediction: bazzite may have more installs than Fedora KDE by the end of the year.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
236 points (98.4% liked)
Linux
14367 readers
207 users here now
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
anyone got a lazy tldr? new distro?
Hi, I use Bazzite and is fantastic. You can you use your PC just as a console or dedicate big part of it to games. Immutable means that it takes a lot of work to mess it up. If you want a distro that just works Bazzite is the best, I've had zero problem with it and I love how simple it is.
I plan on trying out SteamOS pretty soon. I have a desktop with all the most compatible bits of hardware for it. I do wonder if I'll be able to get my Intel wifi\bluetooth and my old brother laser printer to work with it.
I would definitely recommend trying Bazzite first. It's basically SteamOS but targeted towards general hardware instead of just the steam deck and steam machine.
For a long time SteamOS didn't have printer drivers because why would a steam deck need printer drivers.
Out of all the users I've recommended Bazzite to generally people waiting for SteamOS or people wanting to escape Windows 11 with a Linux distro that "just works" are the happiest with it.
I'm sure I'd be happy with it. My desktop is like 95% just a gaming and Internet video viewing system. I have a laptop for work stuff and it's been on Linux mint for quite a while. My desktop is still rocking windows 10. I've avoided 11 completely. I'm sure bazzite would do great and it's going to get more popular due to what you've mentioned and that gamers Nexus uses bazzite for their Linux gaming testing rig. But I believe SteamOS will ultimately end up a better choice for gaming and usage between my PC and steam deck.
Also, steamos didn't have printer drivers for the longest time.... Well yeah, but up until like a month or so ago people weren't even supposed to be installing it on a desktop. It wasn't "released" for a desktop PC yet.
I agree 100 percent.
I just swapped my steam deck to bazzite :p
Lol. Do you miss out on all the shader pre caching by doing that? I've played the same game on my steam deck with shader pre caching and without, and there's a pretty noticeable difference in gameplay quality.
No steam still downloads the precache info, at least I've seen it show up the same way in the downloads window in gamescope.
Well that's surprising and cool.
It's Linux for people who don't know how to use Linux. I don't mean that in a derogatory way either.
What about the people who already have many computers for other purposes, and they just don’t feel like using the gaming machine for any of the purposes. What if they already get to tinker and tweak the other computers to such an extent that there’s no need for them to do any of that with the gaming system.
I'm a Linux user since the age of Slackware diskette installs.
I tried Bazzite, or Aurora, rather, and found that it wasn't for me. Having to spin up distro boxes or VMs to do things that are pacman -Syu some-random-app in my current distro, is just not for me.
I lived in ultrastable Debianland for years, and recently tried Script Kiddie Arch (CachyOS). I have my at-least-for-now forever home.
I have a fairly bleeding edge distro that is slick, fast, polished, friendly, and If something goes boom, I have snapper and pika backing up, so in a few minutes all is back to normal, so the main selling point of atomic/immutable distro is kind of irrelevant to me, and I don't have to live in a system where the important decisions are made for me.
I have an old iMac for that.
CachyOS is friendlier and less problematic than W11, and if you need help, it's wiki + Arch's legendary wiki + community is way more useful than your average Windows "run DISM" bullshit.
FWIW, openSUSE literally pioneered the above workflow with Tumbleweed. But that didn't prevent them from developing openSUSE MicroOS (and its desktop-adjacent siblings). So, unless openSUSE has absolutely no clue on what they're doing, there is more to it than that. Even if 'that something' isn't relevant for you (yet).
It’s Fedora for gamers.
Immutable Fedora for gamers.
It's a distro that is intended to play Steam games well. Terrible if you like tinkering or hate flat pack software. Less than an ideal development environment
its great for dev. It encourages you to use distroboxes to isolate your dev environments from each other and the host system, or even better use devcontainers for reproducible dev environments
I kinda agree, but it can also be pain in the ass. For example, using flatpak VS Code is massive pain in the ass. You end up needing to do tons of tricky workarounds for all kinds of language server/formatter/etc addons to work properly. It's okay when you only need to do it once for a single language (Rust, for example), but it becomes very annoying when every new addon you install is highly likely to need you to write some flatpak-spawn based wrapper scripts in ~/.local/bin or whatever extra userspace bin folder you added to your PATH.
Fair point, I've struggled with VSCode as well. I started looking into using a local container with VSCode's remote dev add-ons (the ones you use for sshing into a remote machine but in this case it would just be a local container), and then installing all language servers and tooling inside the container. Do you have any experience with that?
I only used something similar to mess around with Hytale modding a bit, but it was only easy because there was fully ready-to-use premade solution. But in general, if you're willing to go that way, I think the most simple option would be to create a distrobox with ubuntu/debian/fedora/arch (depending on which distro covers things you need better), install vs code there (using native package manager of given distribution), and then distrobox-export VS Code from that distrobox. Then you can simply manage everything inside of distrobox using full power of distribution you chose. To make things even better, distrobox has automatic passthrough of most hardware. For Nvidia in particular, you need to pass flag "--nvidia" when doing "distrobox-create". After that, you can even use game engines like Unity or Godot from distrobox with full GPU passthrough.
It's great for tinkering. It's just done differently than you're used to.
You can write your own systemd services and you can customize your Plasma using panel colorizer. You can go a bit further and rpm-ostree install kvantum and get even more ricing freedom. You can't however make it use other init system or other DE/WM. It's still quite good for what it is.
You're AFAIK correct on the bold part. But definitely not on the strike-through part. You're probably only limited by your creativity and the effort you're willing to put into it:
Well they basically forked Bazzite DX image and customized that... The hyprland fork author stopped maintaining it 8 months ago so it's not gonna work anymore with any recent Bazzite versions. So what they did is how Bazzite itself was created in the first place - by forking Fedora Atomic image and customizing it. I wouldn't really count this as "Bazzite supports other DE/WM", but yeah, if someone decided to go this far and make a fork like this then great, you can use it and hope they'll keep maintaining it.