Been running Bazzite as my gaming / daily driver since the Win10/11 fiasco. Don’t think I’ll go back. Sure, I’ve run into a few small problems, but overall it just works better and more smoothly than Windows. Hell, my controllers work flawlessly on Bazzite while on Win they still struggle to work with certain games consistently.
Bazzite forever!
I just switched back to Bazzite and moved from Plex to Jellyfin. What an easy setup process.
I just love Bazzite. For daily driving I use another distro, but for my gaming PC below my TV I chose Bazzite and it keeps happily chugging along. I never had any problems, it goes out of my way, never bugs me and does what it needs to do. I honestly never even noticed it updating before (it does though!). I was even able to swap from a NVIDIA GPU to an AMD one and could do the rebase with no issues and minimal knowledge. Steam launches in Big Picture mode and I get the full console experience. And if I feel like mouse and keyboard is needed I can just stream using sunshine to my other PC. It is not that hard, Microsoft.
Background updates are a big pro! And not just the OS, it uses TopGrade to upgrade Flatpaks, Brews, etc.
What happened in May to cause those weird spikes in multiple distros? And some weird dips near the middle of August.
People fed up with Enshitiffication, aka Microsoft making people mad, my guess.
Let a thousand penguins bloom
Love my Baazite. The immutability is a bit annoying.
I’m much happier using homebrew and pip to install things. If I absolutely need to modify system files, I’ll use rpm-ostree.
I feel like it’s been a good thing that my first instinct isn’t to modify system files anymore.
I thought the immutability was the reason it was peoples choice over a distro like cachyos.
It is for me, only Ublue distros at home.
For me and my needs it is lol
If its just a gaming PC you really don’t need much outside of the discover store, steam, and a web browser so its fine and probably just a safe move especially if its a shared PC.
Its only really annoying if your gaming rig is your main rig too.
Not quite. I’ve run into a gaming case where immutability becomes a problem: Syncthing.
If you want to synchronize emulator saves between devices then Syncthing is great at that, but it takes a lot to get around the immutability without relying on unmaintained flatpaks (aka Syncthing-gtk). At least not on Steam Deck, which doesn’t have Syncthing baked into the main distro
I just install the service via brew and use syncthingy for gui 🤷♀️ one command, brew install syncthing, one click to install syncthingy. You could also run the podman service for it if you want more protection
Brew is native on bazzite
No idea what syncthing is, are there issues with the brew version? Looks pretty straight forward.
Wait, what issues? I have it running on my Steam Deck with Bazzite and my PC with Aurora. I didn’t have any issues.
Bazzite probably has Syncthing baked into the distro, like Nobara does. That is not the case with SteamOS, so it gets wiped with each OS update
Setup the headless syncthing container it works great.
Have you tried Distrobox?
without relying on unmaintained flatpaks
https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.github.zocker_160.SyncThingy, this one has separate support for Steamos
Syncthingy is just a dashboard. It doesn’t have the service packaged in, you have to set it up separately as a systemd service if it isn’t already included in your distro, which will get rewritten by SteamOS
Maybe this is true for SteamOS, but I am mostly was replying about “great at that, but it takes a lot to get around the immutability without relying on unmaintained flatpaks”. I use immutable Distro, there is maintained syncthing available as Flatpak, and i did not experienced any problems related to using immutable distribution with syncthing specifically, so eh.
It can be both
I use it as my work desktop is precisely to stop me pissing about with it. Play with stuff on an appropriate server is the lesson I am trying to teach myself.
It is sort of working.
Only the main OS image is immutable, but there’s distrobox, homebrew, virtual machines (now moved to bazzite-dx, only a rebase away), lots of ways to install stuff in userspace.
Distroboxes are actually a really good developer workflow (except for system level stuff) once you adapt, install everything needed for a project, develop, archive the environment, all without touching the main OS. Obscure old project with instructions only for Arch, needing old python and CUDA versions, no problem. Super versatile and you never boot to a broken system.
In a pinch you can also change the image with rpm-ostree install.
immutability is one of the reasons I like it.
I tried it and I wanted to uninstall Steam because I use Lutris and don’t want something proprietary potentially collecting data. I’m sure it’s possible to do, but I couldn’t be bothered because it’d be going against the grain. I like the concept otherwise, especially for a gaming distro. An immutable gaming / HTPC distro with Plsma Bigscreen and no Steam would be the bees knees.
Aurora is what you want. Same family of OS, different flavor. It’s what I use for my PC and my wife’s laptop.
Thanks, Aurora looks more attractive than Kinoite since it’s more batteries included like Bazzite. As far as Bigscreen, I think that might be possible with rpm-ostree, though my experience with this distro family is limited and not sure how much of a headache that would create.
In general you want to avoid layering packages if possible. But it’s not the end of the world. You can always build your own custom image that updates whenever the base image updates if you need something more customized.
Good thing the server logo has a penguin on it I didn’t put it together immediately and assumed their user base was full of aquatic birds
Thank Jay2Cents for that.
