literally just learned of it through some random reddit comment (the comment was about how it really fixes issues with AMD gpu drivers).
good? trustworthy? pros and cons? good for first linux os?
i’ve been lazy and have been riding out my windows 10 extension but this actually seems really easy with clear instructions to set up a dual boot and slowly hand over more of my hdd space to it. also seems pretty secure, open source, etc but i just want to make sure it’s not sus
Can definitely recommend if you just need basic daily usage, and NVidia gaming. I’ve been using it successfully for several months, and personally lile it better than I liked Mint.
I’m planning to swap to something else, soon, simply because I have had issues with the immutability of the OS, for doing some “non-basic” things. There’s software I need that isn’t readily available via flatpak, so that alone is kind of a dealbreaker, for me, as I really don’t know how I would “properly” install non-immutableb software on an immutable OS.
if it doesn’t need system level access, you can use distrobox. It’s set up out of the box on bazzite, so they make it easy. If you have to do this for more than a few things, it might be easier to just use a normal distro.
If it does need system access, you can use layering, but that’s discouraged. The more stuff you layer the more problems can pop up, and you would be better off with a normal distro.
I’ve got it on two machines and it just works. I started with Mint on my big gaming PC and I don’t know if it was Nvidia drivers or what but it just wasn’t performing well. I had bazzite on an old work laptop and was really happy with it so i put it on the big PC. Seems to have fixed all my problems.
it’s a great windows replacement and I’m nowhere near hitting the limits other users here talk about. I’m using it as a regular desktop for web browsing and gaming, it has worked fine
Theoretically, atomic distros are ‘more limited’ because they do lock down certain directories. I don’t usually see people who have any specific cases when this actually affects them though. You can still break your install messing around if you try really hard. You can still do development (but primarily in containers).
I think the ‘learning’ someone would do on a regular distro typically means how to solve common issues that atomic distros solve for you. Like a lot of people have trouble installing Nvidia drivers, which are just already present on the image with 0 extra steps. In your example, you probably had some missing or old drivers because Mint lags behind on updates.
I use a fedora atomic distro and sometimes it’s annoying but that’s mostly because I do development and have to run my compiler toolchain in a container. I like that it’s not going to randomly break one day, whether through my fault or the maintainers’.
Don’t dual boot on the same drive. Windows doesn’t play nice with Linux on the same drive. Bazzite is probably okay for a first distro but I prefer Mint for that sorta thing. I personally run Debian on older hardware and Fedora on newer stuff that isn’t supported. Bazzite is ‘immutable’ which means it’s rather difficult to extend it’s capabilities if you might want to. I have had mixed results with it though on different machines, stability wise.
Don’t dual boot on the same drive. Windows doesn’t play nice with Linux on the same drive.
This is one to be wary of - Windows will frequently clear out the UEFI table, which means deleting all boot entries aside from its own. If your installs are on one drive, this becomes complicated to fix. I can only assume this is deliberate because there’s no reason for it other than trying to convince people trying Linux that it just randomly breaks.
If your linux install is on its own drive, you just boot from that drive in legacy mode, and GRUB will automatically restore all the UEFI entries for you before you notice.
damn that sucks i gave windows my Nme drive. i have a good ssd 1 tb also
It’s been fine for me so far after like a month? I’ve even got my navidrome server running through podman quadlets which I didn’t expect to be able to do. Did have some Wi-Fi issues early on though
It’s a good choice. based on fedora so it’s got a solid foundation.
the big question is how long it’ll stay maintained for… they seem pretty serious about it, so odds are good that it’ll be around for the long haul. but with such a short history it’s hard to say.
if you’re nervous about it you can just go for fedora kiniote which is basically the same thing without the gamer stuff.
Because of the way atomics work, they can start on Bazzite and rebase to kinoite if the project ever does stop progressing. But I don’t really know why people seem concerned about it other than the recent ‘drama’ where they kicked out a developer for being a transphobe and overall bigot.
They just formed the Open Gaming Collective to help standardize things across the Linux gaming space and had dozens of new developers jump in after recent press. Tons of older ones also returned after the bigoted dev was ousted.
ok this was the thing i was most worried about. glad to hear it can just be forked
a lot of the other discussions about it are way too hardcore for me to understand right now
It can be forked, but what I was referring to with ‘rebasing’ is that with atomic systems, you can essentially just swap your distro to a different one while keeping your user files intact. Like, with a single console command, you can swap between any of the Fedora Atomic variants on their website. Because Bazzite is just Fedora KDE Atomic + quality of life features like integrated drivers, codecs, and software, you can just rebase back to Fedora KDE Atomic/Fedora Kinoite at any time to be on the official Fedora distro and all you’ll lose is the extra stuff that Bazzite preinstalls for you.
The only issue is if you are trying to go from KDE to Gnome or vice versa because they store config files in the same place. So it’s technically recommended to re-install if going to a different desktop environment, but I’ve had no issues going from KDE to Niri to Cosmic and back.
But tldr: you can just move back to the official distro if anything ever happens to Bazzite with a single rebase command.
It’s a good first linux OS. It’s the easiest way to get a stable linux distro with a bunch of quality of life tweaks OOTB. I greatly encourage it for new users.
The limitations are greatly exaggerated, but you basically can’t mess with system stuff. It makes it stable, but if you want to dive into linux and tweak it until things start to break, it’s not the distro for you.
You can do more advanced stuff, but it requires learning containers. Which is useful if you ever want to try services with docker containers.
I’ve been running a simliar distro called bluefin, basically bazzite but without all the gaming tweaks/software added by default, for about a year and have no complaints. It’s been the most trouble-free distro i’ve ever used.
Been using it for quite a while now, landed on it after distro hopping between openSUSE, Arch* and some other stuff. Linux in general has improved by leaps and bounds since the last time I tried it, but Bazzite is by far the most “just works” distro I’ve tried. It’s Fedora Kinoite based, so there’s a lot of support out there, but bear in mind that it’s atomic and immutable, which functionally means that making changes to system files and installing random .RPMs from say, GitHub won’t work the way you might think (but you probably shouldn’t be doing that anyway). You need to do things the Bazzite/Kinoite way as opposed to the Fedora way. Similar, but not the same. This means Flatpak, AppImage, containerised everything. Podman instead of Docker (functions more or less the same though). But you only really run into those issues if you’re trying to do weird shit like me.
As a daily it’s pretty damn slick. I run AMD GPUs wherever I can (my main rig is an RX6650XT) and haven’t run into a graphics driver issue at all.
*btw
Its legit and its definitely a good enough distro to do most things you could conceivably want to do. You download the ISO with the AMD gpu drivers and it just works.
Dual booting and trying it out sounds like a good / safe bet.
I haven’t tried it, but the whole immutable distro idea is just really appalling to me by the sound of it.
Maybe it’s a good thing if you want a console like experience and don’t do technical stuff on your computer, but personally I find CachyOS much better for a quick gaming setup that’s also good for all around usage.
Also Mint is the best for newcomers imo, but I don’t know if the driver versions are good enough for heavy gaming, and you also have to do yourself a lot of the optimization stuff that comes preset with CachyOS.
Arch-based distros are not a great recommendation for new users. I’ve been daily driving Arch for 4 years and have had plenty of issues that required getting my hands dirty in the console and Arch wiki, which I very much enjoy, but it’s not for everyone. Also, remember that part of the Arch update process includes checking the news page to see if there are any updates that require manual intervention. Probably not something that Linux newbies want to deal with.
I went from windows straight to cachyos and have been on it for over a year. Im a complete linux noob and it has been fantastic
I tried Bazzite, but my online games (overwatch, sf4 and umvc3) were all laggy as hell. When I tried solo player games (just cause 4 and Romeo is a dead man) they would either crash or not display cutscenes.
It’s a great idea, but the tech isn’t ready.
I think your graphic card or something just might not be well supported in linux. Can’t say since I don’t know your computer, but older nvidia cards are the most problematic because nvdia doesn’t open source the driver and dropped support for older cards.
I doubt you’ll give it another try since windows works well enough for you, which is fair enough. Some systems just don’t play well with linux. But for anyone else having these problems:
The cutscene problem can be fixed by using proton-ge. It is a problem with the normal proton not being allowed to support some video codecs.
protondb has suggested settings for most games. Or you can just search for “steam deck” + whatever game you want to run to check for any compatability problems.
Are you on a different distro now in which that doesn’t happen? Or did it happen on every Linux install? I’m not saying you did anything ‘wrong’, but “the tech isn’t ready” doesn’t square with me since I’ve been running Bazzite for a few years now (after multiple other distros), first on Nvidia then on AMD, with minimal issues. I know some specific hardware configurations can be weird, but it’s usually similar across any distro in that case.
I tried bazzite, ubuntu and linux mint with the same problems for all those distress. I just the bullet and reinstalled windows. Gotta have my treats…
Proton will often perform slightly worse than Windows, but at times can perform better. This isn’t surprising as you’re adding a layer of complexity.
The tech is absolutely there. Some devs have been lazy, and refuse to support Linux, but that’s nothing new.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
