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.
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.