this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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Bazzite sees a massive jolt in installs in late June and early July, catapulting it to over 86k active devices. It has doubled the number of active devices since November. (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@literature.cafe to c/linux@programming.dev
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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.

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[–] delcaran@feddit.it 5 points 14 hours ago

My experience with Bazzite was good but far from perfect. It worked out of the box, but was really slow compared to a Fedora Kinoite installed on a lower-spec laptop. Then I have some issues with flatpaks, but that was my fault for not understanding the system and being to used to a traditional linux (I'm coming from Slackware and Debian). But the last straw was the driver/kernel combo which broke some of my games: they work day 1, starts to crash after an update and no load at all after another upgrade. It was because my PC was really old and the hardware and the drivers are not supported anymore on the main kernel, so it's kind of a ME problem and one which I would have with other modern distros, but is also a problem that is harder to fix on Bazzite then other distros. Not impossible, but harder beyond what was my available patience.

So I switched to Debian stable, everything works, my PC is faster then ever and I have no fear of broken updates.

Bazzite is really great, but it's not for everyone.

[–] Dvixen@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

My daughter's computer programming classes (Year/Grade 11) use Bazzite. Asked her teachers about the choice, and their selling point was old/low end laptops would run it - making it easier for parents cost wise. A nice change from previous years needing Windows or Chromebook.

[–] rozodru@piefed.world 31 points 1 day ago (3 children)

"wHy NoT jUsT uSe fEdOra?" or "iTs LInuX for PeOple ThAt dOnT kNoW HoW to UsE LiNuX"

shut up.

it's an easy and straight forward introduction to linux OR simply an easy to install distro for people who simply want to game and not tinker.

I have my main machine as a dual partition. my main daily driver is FreeBSD. for gaming my other partition is Bazzite and that's all it's for. gaming. I don't want to install fedora and do more tinkering. I just need a distro that I install and forget about so I can open steam and play something. that's it. Bazzite achieves that for me.

[–] KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 day ago

I daily drive bazzite

I just treat it like an atomic distro that happens to be good for gaming

I use it for development and other general use cases

I can use disposable distroboxes without worrying about updating or breaking my base system it's nice

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 day ago

Yup! I've been running Linux on my machines in some way or another for 20 years. I've worked as a systems administrator and in ops teams. So I'm not a Linux beginner, and I'm not afraid of a shell.

But I play steam games online with friends. I had a Windows 10 PC in my house specifically to be the gaming PC, I would turn it on, play a game, then turn it off. I didn't do anything else with the machine, but when I was running it I wasn't at work, I wasn't tinkering, I was relaxing.

So anyway Microsoft botched Windows 11, big surprise, and people were talking about the Linux gaming revolution, and I was like "Hot Damn, if there's a Linux gaming revolution I want to be part of it!", so I installed Bazzite and... yup. I'm part of it.

I haven't had a single issue since, at least with my machine and the games my friends play. I've been able to basically treat the system like it's a console. I boot it, navigate it with a controller, then I turn it off. Delightful!

So thanks to everyone involved in making it a great experience!

[–] greasewizard@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 day ago

Exactly. I do the same thing.

I even put bazzite with KDE on my mothers computer because she started complaining about windows being slow and seeing ads on her start menu. My mother isn't very tech saavy, but bazzite was perfect for her use case and it just works. So far no complaints at all in about 6 months.

[–] MightyLordJason@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

This issue is keeping me from installing it on my dual-AMD gaming laptop. Bazzite installs fine but boots to a black screen because it can't find any displays.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/1469

Does anyone know whether any progress has been made?

SteamOS runs fine but is limited to only the iGPU (I think)

[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 9 points 1 day ago (4 children)

anyone got a lazy tldr? new distro?

[–] utnapishtim@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I just swapped my steam deck to bazzite :p

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

No steam still downloads the precache info, at least I've seen it show up the same way in the downloads window in gamescope.

[–] OnfireNFS@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 16 hours ago

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.

[–] utnapishtim@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I agree 100 percent.

[–] krashmo@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It's Linux for people who don't know how to use Linux. I don't mean that in a derogatory way either.

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 3 points 23 hours ago

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.

[–] elucubra@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] throwaway403@programming.dev 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

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

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).

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It’s Fedora for gamers.

[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago

Immutable Fedora for gamers.

[–] psud@aussie.zone 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] lil_baka@ani.social 1 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

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.

[–] chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's great for tinkering. It's just done differently than you're used to.

[–] lil_baka@ani.social 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] throwaway403@programming.dev 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

You can’t however make it use other init system ~~or other DE/WM~~.

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:

[–] lil_baka@ani.social 1 points 3 hours ago

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.

[–] msokiovt@lemmy.today 0 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah... this is exactly why: Wayland-only, systemd, potential for digital ID. Yes, it's got some decent merit, but Wayland combined with systemd (which are linked) kinda turn me off.

[–] lil_baka@ani.social 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

This is one of the reasons I switched to Gentoo in early May. The way systemd managed that userfield situation wasn't nice at all. There is no reason to assume they will not do the same when asked to implement something worse. On the other hand, if they declined that change, it would mean they would most definitely decline a worse change. It is a great motivation to move away. There are way more reasons to move away from systemd, yet I wasn't aware before this happened, so it was also a trigger to do some deeper research on other technical concerns as well.

[–] msokiovt@lemmy.today 0 points 1 hour ago

I read that Gentoo was completely compromised by Google moles, since ChromeOS is based upon Gentoo, just proprietary slop.

This was part of the reason why I switched to Artix, just because it fits my needs.

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