But that’s a legitimate reason for it to exist. A lot of people have reservations towards Linux because they’re concerned about the gaming experience. Making it smooth and easy is a good thing. Having said that, I just installed Steam on Mint and everything ran just fine. I only play Steam games on that machine, though.

TLE did a performance test on this distro and it was pretty much the same in terms of FPS as other distros.

Without measuring any 1% lows or 0.1% lows.

I enjoy TLE’s content, but that video is far from exhaustive on this.

Unless a better comparison comes out, we should reserve ourselves from making any judgements on this particular subject.

I installed Bazzite on a sibling’s thinkpad and it was amazing. Chose KDE, out of the box, it was amazing. Fingerprint fprint was pre installed, just had to scan them in settings. Battery management and power level settings (power save or performance) were also already installed. Everything has been flawless. Even full disk encryption works amazingly well without hiccups. I remember trying it on Ubuntu and it bricked itself or something and gave up on it.

Dual booting it and installation was a walk in the park.

And way more reliability, even though it is pretty modified.

I have three questions if you have the time. Can you make it go to desktop mode by default, not big picture mode? What DE does it come with, Plasma? Does it come with Lutris or whatever? If I have an .exe installer for an old game, does it come pre-installed with tools to help create the proton wine-prefixes and everything? I imagine the last one would allow Flatpak to be used.

Thankfully, bazzite is both, the community has gotten rather large lately so support has been good.

The thing is, Bazzite isn’t really a distro in it’s own right, which they admit themselves. It is essentially Fedora with a bit extra on top, and it gets all the updates Fedora does at the same time. It seems like they’re trying to “solve” some of the issues with other gaming distros. As far as pre-installed software, it comes with Steam and Lutris pre-installed. Sure, there are some linux gamers out there that don’t need those, but the vast majority will use them. Apart from those, it has the graphics drivers pre-installed for your system, based off your iso choice. Everything else is installed by choice through a first-boot wizard.

It’s atomic! If the latest version you try has issues you can roll back to the last one that was working. It’s really cool. You cannot write to anything other than /etc and /var unless you make a reversible commit on top of the system base image.

Biggest benefit for me is automatic updates in the background which are also safe. On a normal distro, if your pc shuts down for whatever reason during kernel updates you have an unbootable system. That can’t happen on bazzite

Same here. Ir’s very bloated. You can decide on what to install,but if you do install all that bloat,you need to be prepared. I tried their AMD GPU overclock tool and after a got a black screen, I ended up with missing packages. Immediately went back to Arch.

Edit:words

I’m seriously considering Bazzite now. Can you explain whether something like LaTeX with custom packages would work? I also don’t want to redownload the LaTeX packages to vanish after a system update.

Also, I’m a tiling window user (i3). Will it be possible to use it in desktop mode?

As someone who never used an immutable distro: what are the quirks when using it?

From my experience using Plasma 6+ and a NVIDIA card, I keep HDR on on my main display (Odyssey Neo G7).

No issues with washed out colours on the desktop, everything looks fine

I can watch HDR videos using the included Haruna player or MPV.

Firefox has no HDR support outside Mac OS, so no HDR on YouTube.

For games, it depends. Some games can detect HDR and work fine, but for most I have to use gamescope, which in itself brings some issues like not having the Steam overlay, games freezing randomly or just having terrible performance due to niceness (everything has a workaround though, but that requires some tinkering). Check my comments about the issues and workarounds

For game scope running HDR, there’s a lot of people and guides telling you to use countless flags that don’t really do anything at all. The best thing to do is to read its documentation. I use the following flags as startup parameters on my Steam games:

gamemoderun gamescope  -W 3840 -H 2160 -r 165 --hdr-enabled --hdr-itm-enable --hdr-itm-sdr-nits 300 -f -e --mangoapp -- %command%

gamemoderun just enables game-mode, which can bring some small performance improvements.

-W -H -r flags are to determine resolution and desired refresh rate. You might be able to omit those flags but I have had some issues with that.

--hdr-enabled is the only flag needed to get HDR working. Nothing else. (except from enabling it on your DE)

--hdr-itm-enable --hdr-itm-sdr-nits are for inverse tone mapping for non HDR games, it’s the same as Windows Auto HDR.

-f is full-screen, but to be fair I don’t think this one is doing anything, but I need to test better.

-e is to enable Steam integration, which should be the overlay and input, but its broken (there’s a workaround, check the last comment made by me there)

--mangoapp is to run mangohud, this flag is preferred over running mangohud before %command%. It’s partially broken this way because it does not dispaly the GPU or gamemode info. Running it as mangohud works 100% fine but apparently there are some issues with it that are beyond my knowledge.

Setting up is stupid easy. What makes immutable distros potentially difficult is installing software. Anything packaged as a flatpak is stupid easy. Beyond that it can get complicated. But it’s not bad in general.

Having just switched to Linux with Bazzite two weeks ago, my biggest issues have come from Wayland support. And that’s really just because I have a specific piece of software I need that doesn’t support Wayland. And that’s a bit of an edge case and the result is more annoyance than show stopper.

The setup process isn’t really much different from other distros, quite easy. It’s documented here. If it’s still too intimidating for you, you could always do a test run in a virtual machine first, there is even an image that you can select at the bottom of the download menu on the website for virtual machines.

The nice thing is that, if you have some kind of special hardware (e.g. certain laptops, nvidia gpu…) you only need to select it the downloading menu and then you are all set with the special tweaks that the hardware requires provided by the community.

After the initial installation it’s an even better experience than other distros I have used. It gives you a first time portal, where you can choose additional applications that you would like installed. If you get your application via flatpak then you are all setup. If you need other applications not available in flathub, you will have to do some further reading in the documentation, it’s all explained there.

Having to install things mostly through flatpaks works seamlessly until it doesn’t. Then you’re stuck in dependency hell where you have to open holes in your containers to allow access to files or binaries.

I’m at a point where I layer enough software that I don’t know If there is still value added.

Flatpaks ,boxbuddy for gui RPMS, it’s super versatile once you get it

What about the installer? Anaconda isn’t great, but you only need about 1 minute to set the options to install and then let it do it’s job before rebooting.

The ELI5 for Fedora’s atomic desktops is that if Windows had an Atomic Desktop version, Program Files and most of the Windows folder would be read only, and each program you installed yourself would go into its own folder in your user directory. That’s the basic idea. It’s harder to screw up an Atomic system as long as you stick to containerized app formats like flatpak/appimage whenever possible. It makes it easier for everyone to diagnose problems, and easier for users to roll back if an update has problems. Even if you were to install it right now, you could use one simple command to “roll back” to any image from the last three months.

The benefit of Bazzite is you have all of the above, plus a lot of gaming-related stuff preinstalled which, if you were to install them yourself in a normal Fedora environment, you’d likely have to spend a lot of time just learning how they’re supposed to be configured, how they interact, which versions have problems, and how to troubleshoot problems when an update to one app breaks a prerequisite for something else; eventually you end up in config hell instead of actually using your computer. With Bazzite, the image maintainers are the ones in config hell - they work out the kinks, app versioning, communicate with upstream to fix issues, all that, so your system should be in the most functional state that a Linux system can be, so you only have to think about using your apps.

tl;dr

• Atomic Desktops are more resilient to randomly breaking from updates or user error, and are easier to revert to a prior state if problems do arise
• Bazzite is a custom Atomic image with lots of gaming stuff preinstalled and preconfigured to work properly out of the box
• If you’re a gamer and wanting to try out Linux, Bazzite is going to be the least painful way to get your feet wet.
• Immutable distros are excellent for daily driving. I daily drive one myself!