44 never worked for me, I had to stay pinned to 43. Maybe this one will? :/
I have been using Bazzite as my main os for nearly a year now. I tried to swap to linux a few times over the last ~15 years, and always had to go back to windows. I like the Immutable nature of it, while it does making installing some software a little harder the peace of mind I gain more than makes up for it for me. EDIT: I also like how it is Atomic and updates in one huge go, that can be rolled back if issues occur.
I like the atomic nature of it
Did you mean immutable? Never heard of an “atomic distro” before.
Atomic is all-or-nothing upgrades / block upgrades instead of individual packages
Immutable is a read-only operating system root (yes, you have access to /etc, fedora got pedantic about this)
You can have one, the other, or both, or none.
See my reply to OP for sources but there are more than just the two I referenced.
It’s what fedora calls their immutable spinoffs
No it’s not. Fedora got pedantic about the term “immutable” but there are more than a few that use Atomic or Immutable and they are different things.
Atomic is all-or-nothing upgrades, Immutable is a read-only OS structure (this is what Fedora got picky about as being ambiguous).
They refer to the same thing, but people have been preferring “atomic” over “immutable” recently.
Atomic is all-or-nothing upgrades / block upgrades instead of individual packages
Immutable is a read-only operating system root (yes, you have access to /etc, fedora got pedantic about this)
You can have one, the other, or both, or none.
See my reply to OP for sources but there are more than just the two I referenced.
Same thing, both words describe the same thing.
EDIT: I have learned not only from the dude below me, but also more reading online that indeed atomic and immutable are not exactly the same thing. Related but different. Tho my comment stands I still like the atomic nature of Bazzite, but I also LOVE the immutable part of it.
TLDR: Immutable means the core OS is read-only while it’s running, and atomic means updates swap in a whole new system all at once, so you can always roll back.
No, they aren’t. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading these comments.
Atomic is all-or-nothing upgrades / block upgrades instead of individual packages
Immutable is a read-only operating system root (yes, you have access to /etc, fedora got pedantic about this)
You can have one, the other, or both, or none.
https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-core-an-immutable-linux-desktop
https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/
What is an immutable operating system? Before we can discuss what differentiates Ubuntu Core from other immutable operating systems, we must first define the properties that make an OS immutable:
Read-only: The primary characteristic of an immutable OS is that the running system cannot be directly modified by users or applications.
Atomic updates: Updates are applied atomically; meaning they’re successfully applied all at once or not at all.
[…]
Edited for formatting.
Cool, thank you for informing me.
10 years ago, after another random Bluescreen i burned a debian install disk, deciding to install it the next time windows bluescreens on me. It took maybe a week. And then another week to start distro hopping, as debian and gaming isnt really a good combination. Hopped around spending most of my time on manjaro and arch, but the last year on bazzite was really chill. Most of the daily stuff mostly just runs. And the stuff das doesn’t is mostly play around stuff where i dont mind playing around the atomic aspect
I wonder about this change:
- ROCM OpenCL is now used over Mesa OpenCL on all non-nvidia images.
Usually I would expect the Mesa stuff to work better and in a more generic way than what one GPU manufacturer makes.
Does anyone have any pointers for the reasoning of the move?
I have it on my gaming machine. Stuff works :)
The only distro that simply never caused me any trouble at all.
Immutability is a double-edged sword tho
I had a few issues when i first started using it but that was because i wanted to tinker and i installed using the rpm-tree thing and at one point it broke updates. But it was easy to fix because of it being an atomic os and all i had to do was reinstall it with a rebase in the terminal, restart the pc afterwards and not only was i fully updated on a “fresh” install, without all of my goober breakages glommed on, i still kept all of my userdata, flatpaks, games and saves. Was great.
I really need to explore atomic for my daily driver at some point, but the tinkerer in me still loves the freedom of arch.
This is why it works great for my gaming machine and my steam deck, but I cannot use any atomic distro for my production devices.
I like bazzite. It’s not for my desktop, but I do like it.
I put it on my old and dying LCD steam deck. It did good, fixed some problems, extended the life of the thing a bit.
old and dying LCD steam deck
Umm, the steam deck hasn’t existed long enough for that to be a thing, it only came out 4 years ago. I have mine from September release year and use it every day, fresh as the day I got it. I’d be pretty hacked off if it seemed ‘old and dying’ already! And it’s my only decent computer, I need it to be going for several more years 😅
Cool story. I must be imagining it.
Not denying it could be faulty, obviously. Just wouldn’t be accepting it as just ‘age’
What issues did your LCD deck have?
Random freezes during gameplay, games sitting on the Steam loading screen and never starting (restart steam deck and they load straight away),
Poor performance in kodi, taking 5 minutes or longer to load media list, video stuttering, audio not working on particular files.
Re-flashing steam os never solved anything, but just recently went with bazzite instead and it’s working nicely.
Dang that sounded annoying, glad Bazzite helped your deck. Good to know if mine ever acts up the same
Idk if I like bazzite or not. I started my Linux change around 5 months ago I think. Started with cachy os. I think it was going fine but something slowly broke so I changed to bazzite 2 months ago I think.
The fun part is it’s quick to just distro hop. I have my backups all okay so that helps a lot. When everything works both was working fine and easy I feel.
But when something starts to get wonky, I’m kind of struggling a bit more with bazzite due to the atomic nature. Idk that’s just the vibe I’m feeling.
Can I ask about your experience with Cachy? I just finished my first pc build and went with bazzite for gaming, but have been toying with the idea of running Cachy instead
I’ve been thinking how to reply to this. IDK how to make it coherent so I’ll just dump my ramblings. So sorry to subject you to the song of my
peoplebrain.So basically I decided one day I just wiped Windows off my machine for forgotten reasons and replaced it with cachyOS. the installation was pretty straight forward since I’m doing basically a clean install. I also forgot why I decided to wipe CachyOS and install bazzite 2 months ago.
I think using both cachy and bazzite as is, like installing doing basic things such as installing from their respective software store, it is identical. no fussing about. cachy has more options out of the box that they show you while bazzite is a bit more streamlined. it’s when you brought your Windows tinkering monkey brain and want to monkey around that there might be some problems I feel like.
cachy being arch derived, there’s always the arch wiki to plumb the depths on to learn and do almost anything. so I’m pretty good at following instructions like that.
so because of my tinkering monkey brain, the additional layers on bazzite of using mostly flatpaks, how to control and extend configurations on them, and all that somehow short circuits my brain a bit somehow.
in other rambling points, bazzite is definitely has a lot better presentation out of the box. cachy’s choice of their software store is uh, very software engineer aesthetics and UX.
I couldn’t get cachy to stick to using colemak for everyday usage, and have steam games default to qwerty when playing them and have to change keyboard layouts before I start the game. on bazzite I didn’t have to do that, most of the time.
I think next I want to try nobara, another gaming focused distro, but this time it’s full fedora, not the atomic fedora based bazzite.
Ive heard very good things about CachyOS, tho I have not personally tried it. Seems to be the gaming distro of choice when people want a more normal linux, aka not atomic.
Yeah I’ve read good things as well. I’m not familiar with Arch at all, but it sounds like Cachy might be a good stepping stone. I did Ubuntu for many years, bazzite just recently and only because it was less intimidating than Cachy when I just wanted to get it up and running haha. But now that I’ve settled in, I find myself thinking I might try dual booting it just to see 🤔
I installed it but left soon enough. Weird, inconvenient ways of installing software. Many workarounds built in. I like the idea of immutable distro but this seemed like an accumulation of fixes on top of it.
Were you using an AMD graphic card with HDMI 2.1 connection to a monitor/TV?
Because it happened to me that the HDMI connection stopped working after a Bazzite update, and I had to downgrade to Bazzite 44.20260802 (see the Github ticket here), which seems to be the last stable release without the problem.
My understanding is that the problem is still present in Bazzite 45… and it likely won’t be resolved until the next Kernel update (7.3.1) lands. The good news is that it just recently was updated on the unstable branch… I haven’t tested but if the issue is fixed there, I’m hopping it will be ready by the end of this month, since they normally roll updates every few weeks.
No, I’m still on a nvidia card and I’m not sure what version hdmi my monitor is
My comment is more general vibe of my experience with bazzite. similar to what Staff below me said, sometimes it just have some weird inconvenient ways to do things when I need to, for example, use the terminal to look up some folders or change things. idk I admit I’m still not too good doing things in the terminal but adding another layer of having to learn what an immutable distro adds on top seems to be tripping me more.
Staff criticized a very specific thing, not a vibe: the approach for installing software.
You don’t really need to use the terminal at all if you just stick with the software that’s available in flatpak / bazaar. If you had to use the terminal then that means you most likely wanted to install software / tweak stuff outside of the intended channels.
I don’t think Bazzite is very suitable as an all-purpose distro or a distro for people who want to tweak or use the terminal much, it was originally designed as a SteamOS distro (before Valve made available their own SteamOS image), intended to be installed in Steam Deck / Steam Box style devices. I use it in a living room PC for gaming and watching videos and it works perfectly for this usecase. For desktop / laptop I run a different Linux distro.
I see I misunderstood what Staff said, thanks.
Yeah, I think you’re right. Maybe bazzite isn’t for me. I just have that tinker itch every now and then.
And hey, a live service game I’m playing recently had a massive hack that many people affected had to reinstall their OS just for self assurance. That somehow also could affect people running Linux. So I might as well hop to another distro this weekend.
I do not have an Nivida card, but I udnerstand Nvidia on bazzite (and linux in general) is tougher than AMD to get things working nicely. As for the terminal, I have never once NEEDED to use to terminal in the last year. I have of course used it to do things, but it was rarely the Only way to do what I was trying to do.
Maybe what I am about to say is unpopular, but once I stopped trying to install programs that dont have a flapak from the bazzar store, my life got easier. Of course to counter that statement, I have several programs that are appimages that I control via Gearlevel, then a few windows apps running via faugus.
Also if anything tells you to use lutris, it is wrong, lutris imo is crap, and should not be sued ever; Lutris has not worked once for me.
Last time I tried to install bazzite, it told me to f off because I have other distros installed. Is that still the case?
I used it a few years ago multibooting and it I don’t recall it complaining then
As far as I know Bazzite just needs to be on its own drive. It doesn’t or didnt play nicely with any other OS on the same physical drive; I Know that is the case for windows. Bazzite should not be installed on the same drive as a windows install. I am making an assumption that holds or at least held true for other linux distros as well.
I personally dont have any other distros installed so I cannot be sure on the above.
I have my main distro installed on one nvme, and have 4 50Gib partitions set aside on another for playing around with up to 4 other distros. No microslop. No other distro that I have tried had an issue with that set up.
I will check it out again some day on my old (pre nvme) pc instead. Much easier with 2.5" drives
This kind of immutable distros require a very specific partitioning scheme. I tried a couple years ago trying to match the requirements while preserving/reusing my other volumes but it was too finicky and the installation kept failing. I ended up just installing it on its own in a different device that is more fit for purpose (a small PC plugged to my TV). It works great for that use case, but it’s not worth experimenting with it beyond that, imho.
Doesn’t sound worth it for me, I always want a back up distro on a different drive, just in case I stuff anything up, and I do like to occasionally install other distros just to check them out. The majority play well together.
I’m pretty certain that Fedora (immutable ones) mentions this, as well as Bazzite does probably, that it should not work with other OS installs on the same drive/partition.
I think they fixed that IIRC. Not agreat experience
