Bazzite is an alternative OS to SteamOS for the deck and other handheld PCs. Unfortunately due to a mistake, anyone who installed Bazzite before July 3rd 2024 won’t get automatic updates.
If this affects you, I’d suggest checking out the article to get instructions on fixing it.
If you use Bazzite anywhere, you need to apply this fix.
I had to fix this on my desktop and laptop.
As someone who’s never heard of Bazzite until this thread, what is the appeal of using it on desktop?
It’s an atomic variant of Fedora that satisfies all necessities for gaming with Linux, like coming with built in drivers and the option to install stuff like Steam and Discord during initial startup.
Atomic varieties of Linux are really cool, they are much less prone to breakage because all updates happen at once or not at all. They are just generally more stable and you can rollback easily if necessary.
Personally I just like Fedora, so my preconfigured options are either Bazzite or Nobara. I also prefer the stability of atomic variants. It’s just a solid base to work with, regardless of if you’re using a desktop or a handheld.
Also if an update gets completely borked while installing (i.e. you lost power), then it just boots into the version you were running previously thanks to the A/B update scheme. It’s neat.
Is there a benefit in using it over the default OS?
Including the xone kernel driver for proprietary Xbox dongles is quite nice
(you can connect Xbox gamepads via bluetooth but that will often times give you a higher input lag for Xbox pads anyway)It has all the advantages of steamOS, can boot straight into game mode, supports Decky plugins, etc.
However it also supports installing traditional Linux programs permanently (which steam OS generally won’t let you do), and has other benefits too.
Because it’s based on fedora atomic it uses rpm-ostree, which lets you layer packages to persist between updates. Good for stuff that isn’t available as a flatpak or doesn’t work as well when installed as a flatpak. Beyond that not much, maybe if someone doesn’t trust Valve with their OS?
On SteamOS you can still kind of have non-flatpak packages persist by using distrobox.
It’s still a sandbox, just one that hasa bit more latitude in what you can install than a flatpak.edit: distrobox seems more integrated with the host OS than I thought
