My distro of choice is Debian (I like their philosophy and it works great on my laptop) but I have an nVidia card in my desktop PC, and driver management was kind of annoying. Decided to try Kubuntu, which worked ok, but I didn’t really love, and then I didn’t update for a bit too long and had some repo issues trying to install updates. I didn’t bother digging into what the fix would be, since I had been considering Bazzite for a while, as it has been talked about a lot for gaming.
Knowing literally nothing other than “Bazzite works out of the box with nVidia” I figured I’d give it a go. First off, I was surprised at the size of the image, and how long the install took. I did some reading about atomic distros and began to understand why things were set up that way. Seems pretty cool! I still don’t love that as soon as I logged in on my fresh install, Steam opened up and asked for a log in, but that is what I signed up for with Bazzite, I guess. The nVidia drivers out of the box worked fantastic, as advertised, and I love a good KDE desktop, so it’s not all bad.
Initially I was frustrated that some things weren’t working in the flatpak versions of the app (couldn’t get to my 3d printer using the .local address from the browser because flatpak has a bug with mDNS) and layering a package with rpm-ostree seems like overkill and not a good experience. Then I watched some videos on distrobox.
I can just distrobox create --image debian:latest debian-box and then use apt install for whatever packages I want, export them and use them as if they were natively installed on Bazzite??? And this works on any distro??? I have been using Linux exclusively for a few years (and on and off for more years), but I have been totally out of the loop with distrobox and atomic distros. This feels like the same level of magic I felt when I first dual booted Ubuntu back in the Windows Vista days. This seems like it will fix 99% of the issues I run into on Linux.
I know distrobox isn’t exclusive to atomic distros, but I wouldn’t have discovered it if not for Bazzite.
Anyway, none of this is really new info, but I just wanted to nerd out about it for a bit with people who will know what I’m talking about.
I’m gonna hate on the thing. had high hopes from all the rave reviews so my disappointment was commensurate.
you missed to state your config, and Imma assume it’s a high-end system. how do I know? because I ran it on weak hardware and it was molasses slow. Ryzen 4650u, 16 GB DDR4, 500 GB NVMe and whatever graphics it has integrated, some rando controller, connected to a 40" 4K display, let’s see what the hubbub is all about…
the install process, forgetaboutit. can’t believe they piggy-backed off of the broken-est installer out there, fedora’s calamares. dog help you if you need anything but the vanilla-est install, as any changes to partitions result in unrecoverable install errors. as I understand it, there’s a whole-ass fedora install that isn’t needed for anything but to run the installer - hence the hefty size, about twice that of a regular install ISO.
once installed, what everyone and their uncle forgot to mention during the rave reviews (and you kinda glossed over) is that a steam account is fucking mandatory. like, you can’t even log in, switch to desktop mode, change resolution, nada. if you just want local-only games - get bent, you hafta go through us to access shit on your own computer! not only does this rub me the wrong way, I got no such spy/adware on any of my other devices.
I got no windows with the mandatory online account, no Google TV with the mandatory online account, ditched Plex because it won’t run with no internet, got no Android with a Google account… why would I make an exception in this case? what, gabe the yacht owner is “our people”? he isn’t and I won’t.
it’s highly impractical for everyday use (will it behave without internet?), not to mention - it’s fucking superfluous. I got no games on there, no intention or way of getting them from there and I give a total of zero fucks about the chit-chat rooms and achievements and other crap presented therein.
handling “alternatively” acquired games is a fucking chore. switch to desktop mode, do the thing there, then manually add and tweak them in steam’s UI and add missing graphics and stuff and switch back and forth until it’s all in order - you best believe the switch isn’t instantaneous. it’s not really a huge deal as you don’t do that multiple times per day (or even daily), but I don’t see why this couldn’t have been a controller-only-interface activity.
speaking of desktop mode, this was my first contact with the immutable, atomic, cloudnative, whatchamacallit concept and for me, this thing blows elephant fucking dick. it is so slow, cumbersome, inefficient… if you thought regular dnf and flatpak installs and upgrades are slow, installing anything here takes fuckin eons. and the constant restart prompts for this and that, dios mio!
finally, everything feels sooo slow and clunky. I get that my puny hardware can’t handle modern titles, but browsing the UI and interacting with the system shouldn’t be even close to a demanding task.
so mad props to the team who made this happen, I get how this is an impressive engineering feat to weld all them things together in a sorta cohesive way, but I feel some of the things I mentioned shoulda been way more prominently featured before us clueless folk decide to switch to it.
This is not true. When you download the installer from their website there is a prompt asking you if you want a Desktop-first install or the Steam-mode first install. The desktop install boots directly into KDE or Gnome just like any other distro, and doesn’t require a steam account, but will come with the steam launcher pre installed.
I get that it’s not great UX to put install options like that in the website but If you’re going to go on a long rant about how awful it is, please at least put a fraction of that effort into seeing if you’re actually right.
If you chose to download the steam gaming mode version I think it’s understandable that the expectation is that you have a steam account. The whole point of that mode to begin with is that it replicates the experience you’d get on the steam deck, so you can make your own home-console PC or install it on a handheld like the Lenovo or ASUS ones. It’s not really designed around regular desktop use.
Side note, I haven’t used it much yet but so far bazzite has been working fine on my i7 7700hq + 1050ti laptop with the same ram and storage as yours that I got because it couldn’t run Windows 11. It should be about as powerful as yours, maybe slightly weaker on the CPU side and slightly better on the GPU side. Have you looked into it being maybe some weird driver issue with your laptop’s power management? It could maybe have something to do with that.
It sounds like maybe you downloaded the steam big picture version? The normal version just has a KDE Linux desktop like you’d expect.
I have an older Ryzen 5, 16GB of ram and an nVidia 1070, so not cutting edge for sure. I downloaded the regular desktop version, not the steam big picture console-ish version, and steam account was not required. I just closed the steam window until I was done with my setup. I haven’t seen any performance issues
Have you considered that your setup can’t handle a 4K monitor?
Your setup really isn’t that bad, it almost makes me think something is wrong with your computer if a Steam Deck is less powerful than your Ryzen 4560u and Bazzite et al. run perfectly fine on it.
oh, I’m sure it didn’t help any. wanted to switch to 1080p (although it ran a normal F41 Plasma just fine) from the get go but I couldn’t until everything was installed and I was logged in. but even then it didn’t feel drastically better. so I’m sure this runs way better on competent hardware, but for me there was no point in sticking around to tweak it as I have no use for this thing in my home.
I’d definitely suggest CachyOS if you’re looking for speed and none of the downsides of Bazzite and other immutable OSes.
But only if you’re looking for a bleeding edge, gaming-focused Linux OS. There are plenty of options in the Linux ecosystem and really all are valid unless they are significantly out-of-date.
The problem with CachyOS is that it’s arch-based, which is fine, but I wouldn’t recommend it for people who aren’t willing to deal with arch problems and be familiar (or willing to learn) using the CLI. I normally just point people to either mint or bazzite depending on how many games they play.
I agree, just was trying to recommend something that may be marginally more performant. Mint and Bazzite are solid options. I can’t wait until COSMIC matures and I can safely recommend PopOS.