https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg
Graphs can be found here on their github. Since around mid November the active user count for Bazzite has gone up by around 16k active users.
Personally, my only wish for Bazzite is a Cosmic version 👼 I tried it out recently and it seems fairly impressive
I ended up with CachyOS over Bazzite but I’m looking into the latter for my dad since I’m guessing it’s more stable and easier.
I just… Idk, I like Arch over Fedora. I blame the little pacman eating my progress whenever I install stuff in konsole. Desktop mode to desktop mode it’s the same KDE Plasma I’d be using, though. Are there any other striking differences between Cachy and Bazzite?
Honestly it’s pretty easy to decide if you should use cachy or bazzite.
Do you use your PC for anything more then office PC or console? If yes pick cachy. If no pick bazzite.
Atomic is great till you have to do fucking anything then it’s more effort then it’s worth basically instantly. And iv seen more people break bazzite trying to do basic shit then iv seen cachy randomly explode because “arch is unstable”.
Bazzite is not a home user desktop os, no atomic os is. The entire concept is basically designed for locked down office PCs and consoles where you don’t actually do anything with the PC but use it.
If your giving a PC to a elderly family member, a child, you do actual business on it that’s mission critical. Bazzite is fucking fantastic, so long as you also never give the admin password to the user.
Seriously the entire atomic concept really is… Baffling tho… Its best use case is one that doesn’t really exist in the same context as gaming unless it’s a console. It’s baffling that bazzite is as popular as it is. If not for the simple fact there is an absurd amount of misinformation around arch and really Linux in general.
Because people cling to out of date knowledge from a decade ago because of memes.
Really 9 times out of 10 normal fedora is better for most avg users then cachy or bazzite.
AFAIK CachyOS still demands a little involvement in the OS. Like, you have to watch the logs when you update, you need keep context in mind, like knowing you’re running KDE and an Nvidia card and so on. But I feel like Bazzite would be more usable to someone who doesn’t know (and doesn’t need to know) what a filesystem or a discrete GPU are.
But in terms of stability, CachyOS has been rock solid for me. The cadence that Arch + CachyOS devs fix stuff has been utterly perfect.
So I say if your dad is more ‘software curious,’ give him CachyOS. If he doesn’t like messing with computer stuff, give him Bazzite.
I went from Arch to Fedora idk, I think over a decade ago and haven’t looked back, not sure how things are nowadays, but I switched again this year from Fedora to Bazzite and I love it. Sure, you’ve got to learn to do things a little differently, but so far it’s been great. And it forced me to use distrobox, which honestly I should have done sooner, it’s absolutely great.
I’ve been using Fedora for while but I decided to try Bazzite and for the most part it’s been a great out of the box experience. I didn’t have to mess with NVidia and Wayland as much as I did with vanilla Fedora.
It is a little wonky compared to other distros. I don’t like the way some features are managed, but for a new non-Linux user, they won’t know the difference. I highly recommend it for people that just want to jump on Steam and go.
The problem with a new user is they need more documentation and more resources which atomic distros like bazzite have less of. Making them worse.
Bazzite is for knowledgeable users who don’t want to tinker much anymore or children who aren’t allowed to modify their computer.
Very cool. I am still running Bazzite as my reintroduction into Linux as a daily and it’s been great for gaming but I will say that as more and more familiarity rolls in, I do get frustrated with it being an immutable distro and having to jump through hoops to get it do what I want.
Still I think it’s a great distro for those who don’t want to deal with MS bullshit anymore and a great friendly, works right out of the box while you learn or relearn Linux, and gets you gaming without a lot of hassle and having to deal with less than friendly Linux users.
I found, as an experienced Linux user, that with Bazzite you’ve got to forget the complicated approaches you’re used to, and go for the easy one, it usually works. Lots can be done from KDE’s system settings, or from the bundled utilities. Also I disagree with the order they chose for the application installation methods on their wiki, I think distrobox should be right after Flatpak.
Bazzite is also a bit unique in the way that it’s mostly Windows users jumping ship, and not Linux users distro-hopping. At least from what I can tell online.
I used it to jump ship from Playstation but my PC is also bazzite already.
As a normie, I love Bazzite because it’s as intuitive as Microsoft without the intrusive and monopolistic proprietary features, and Bazzite is also built for gaming.
Sample size of 1, here.
Bazzite was my initial entry-point into Linux, but I bounced off it within 48 hours as its immutable nature made it impossible for me to install the native PIA VPN client and for the life of me I couldn’t get the OpenVPN to play nice.
Currently on CachyOS, and seems to run just fine - giving an end user just enough rope 😅
Plus it’s Arch underneath the hood too, so I can still cheekily say that I run Arch!
ETA: I wonder if/how long I would count as part of this Bazzite cohort?
PIA VPN
Holy mother of blob, Batman
Yeah, getting PIA running without the native client has been a bit rough. These days I’ve just gotten use to starting a terminal as soon as I log-in, but I probably need a more permanent solution. maybe it’ll be switching to cachy as well.
Yeah I struggled with reading my rom library over SMB so also had to install something else.
you can layer vpns via rpm-ostree install [.rpm location]
I don’t think PIA uses RPMs
mullvad is a better choice anyways. you can also download a wireguard config and load it directly into the network manager
While I agree, it’s a pretty lame thing to say “This doesn’t work for your use case? That’s because your use case is wrong” If the distro doesn’t support PIA, then that is an issue with the distro, not the user.
I’m in this picture. Installed bazzite on steam deck and it’s fucking awesome!
What does it do better than SteamOS on the Steam Deck itself?
Genuinely asking as I didn’t really see any need to switch even as the compulsive tinkerer that I am…
Generally no… Cachyos steam deck version is better in basically every test iv seen them compared head to head in.
Bazzite is more or less the default choice cause it’s a flavor of the month more then it makes any kind of actual sense.
If your going to bazzite your typically better off staying on the stock OS.
Being able to install it yourself on any device seems like a big advantage :P
Got it, thank you.
I don’t have any device, I specifically own a Steam deck and if that’s the main benefit, I probably don’t want it on my other devices (I use Arch, btw).
Should’ve added “on the Steam Deck” in the first place, sorry 😅
Haha yeah, I’m not super up-to-date on Bazzite, but I believe it doesn’t add much on a Steam deck. (And if you don’t want your other devices to boot up into Steam, you probably don’t want it there either.)
I think its a new shiny thing but I expect most users to go back to ordinary Linux, and in a year there wont be many still using bazzite. But thats fine. I love playing with new tools myself. But most of them are just temporary and then its back to what works the easiest.
But this is what makes Linux fun. Its not just one system. Tons of desktops, tons of apps, tons of configs.
Long time Debian user, short time Arch user, even shorter Fedora user.
I Switched a few devices over to Bazzite this year, and it’s genuinely game changing. A distro that just works, and stops me from breaking core system stability? But also allows me to install stuff using rpm-ostree and add other distros using distro shelf?
Don’t get me wrong I love compiling from source on Arch, but god damnit, sometimes I need an OS with guard rails, and it won’t be Windows or MacOS for damn sure.
This isn’t your average Glupshitto Linux
You act like arch is gentoo :P compiling on arch is like a blue moon event. You complie on arch about as much as you would on fedora.
People have been saying this for a year, and the line only keeps going up.
Yeah ok. Well we will see. Im sometimes wrong. :)
Personally I tried Bazzite because it was the recommended distro for a gaming device, and I liked it so much that it quickly became my main.
Bazzite may present a bit more friction if you want to do something “advanced” that would otherwise be trivial on other distros perhaps with just a couple terminal commands, but it makes all the “simple” things super-duper easy, and the system is almost impossible to break.
I would say this model makes sense for “ordinary” users that just need a computer to read email, view cat videos, open office documents, and in the specific case of Bazzite also gaming. In my specific case I also needed to write code (I use VSCode + Godot), besides the initial friction of learning to work with containers and SELinux, Bazzite seems to be fit for coding.
Thus, I hope immutable distros will stay and thrive. I hope that one day someone will make a distro that you can just set and forget on your grandma’s laptop, and I think this distro should be immutable, like Bazzite.
For development there’s also Bazzite-dx
Is that 0,0002 % market share?
I actually want to completely undo DirectX and it’s box.
No words can express my disgust for this gaming monopoly infrastructure.
What I would like to know is what data they use as a reference to produce that graph and whether that data can be audited.
Probably data from their Bazaar or I heard some other Fedora tool. I believe the growth, its actually good and not in a gimmicky way.
I’m three of those new installs. Bazzite has surpassed every expectation I had.
What’s so special about this? Aside from the immutable thingy, of course.
It just works. It works better than Windows 11 in my experience. I can’t break it. I forget it’s there. I just do computer stuff. Like video editing, gaming, web browsing.
Probably the fact that they have many ISOs tailored for each supported hardware configuration, and they point the user to the right ISO with a clear wizard in their download page.
Also basically it is an unbreakable gaming focused OS very close to SteamOS, that you don’t have to maintain, and it comes preconfigured with Steam and the right drivers for your setup. I’m not the target audience, but I see the appeal.
This, so much. I tried pop_os, mint, ubuntu, and more, but all had the problem that when I had an hour to play games, It became 55min of troubleshooting some random issue and not playing because of it.
With Bazzite i can finally use linux and just boot, play a game, shutdown. No hassle.
I think this is one of the big steps that make Linux gaming more accessible to the general public. Proton was clearly the first major step and Bazzite might be the second one.
Agreed, when SteamOS gets more general hardware supporty things will get interesting, but Bazzite is a desktop with superlative Steam support, while SteamOS is more a steam console with desktop support. When people, especially newbs, want to do desktop things with their general purpose machines, on SteamOS they’re using Arch (bleeding edge, lower stability), while Bazzites get Fedora (sharp edge, higher stability and security) which should be a less painful and frustrating experience. Of course if there’s a flatpak (possibly the third step) it’ll be painless on either, and hey, everybody wins (except winblows) in either case.
This is why I chose it. Gaming living room computer that kids can’t easily break. It just worked. Well, except for my idea to dual boot and have games pulling from an ntsf hdd. Bazzite hated that idea. So if you’re using bazzite, make sure your games are on a Linux partition. Even though Linux is ok with ntsf, for some reason beyond my expertise… Games do not like it.
Steam tends to have massive issues with permissions for games on NTFS partitions. You might’ve run into that.
I second this, had the exact same issue but on Arch back in February. But luckily windows can be made to play nice with non-NTFS drives.
The immutable thing is nice, though it takes some getting used to. It’s Fedora which I already love, without any of the hassle. Everything just works. I never realized how much time I was wasting until I didn’t have to do it anymore. Every task I throw at it, it performs beautifully, even things I’m sure aren’t going to work out of the box do. Every time, so far.
I was surprised how well it handles printers. We have an old Brother wireless laser mfp. It was pretty cool when it just saw the printer automatically, but I was really impressed with how easy scanning was.
I started going down the rabbit hole of manually installing and configuring it, but then tested some simple terminal command and it already saw the scanner. Ran skanpage and Bob’s your uncle.
I think you are the first person to ever have had issues with printers on Linux if you are surprised by them working on Bazzite. Printers are one of the things that almost always “just work” on Linux, and are only a driver headache on Windows
You must have uncanny luck with printers then. The printer I have I bought for it’s Linux support and I still have problems.
It’s not really surprising, Bazzite has been the talk of Linux internet for the last 18 or so months.
buy, buy, BUY!
How do you know how many active users?
fedora distros have a thing called countme that pings their servers so they can measure general trends in how many people are using the OS and the various spins, which can be helpful for determining what to focus on. some amount of the userbase opt out of it
And this is on by default?
It is on by default, but can be disabled in your repo config: https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/conf_ref.html
The feature works by adding a flag to one random http request to a fedora repo every week. Fedora then aggregates the http logs that have been flagged to derive their metrics. You can opt out of sending the flag, but if you’re querying fedora repos then you still end up in their http log.
But saying it pings their servers isn’t quite a fair statement as it’s not some background service that opens a network connection, it sounds to me at least like it’s data that is sent to the Fedora repos once a week when you update your system?
Clients (DNF, PackageKit, …) have been modified so they add a countme variable in their requests to mirrors.fedoraproject.org once a week. This ends up in our webserver log data which lets us generate usage statistics.
Would be glad to be corrected on this though as I am a long time Fedora user now and I’m not overly fond of my data being collected by big corpo; it’s why I left Windows in the first place 🙄
I feel like people lately go a bit overboard when it’s about protecting their “data”.
As far as I see all it does is just send one single number that shows that there is someone using this specific operation system and it does not include any personal or unique to the user information.
In my opinion this does not even qualify as “my data”
That’s cool. I don’t really have a problem with that, just curious.
I’m surprised people are so keen on these gaming-focused distros.
I just want a great, general-purpose computing system that can do gaming as well. 😁
A gaming focused distro will do everything else well too, so thats probably why.
It’s not so much that people are focused on gaming distros, it’s more that gaming distros historically haven’t been much of a thing, and gamers generally had to use windows for their gaming, because the linux experience was limited and sub-optimal. Even dedicated linux users would keep a windows partition/machine that they used for gaming.
That’s not true anymore, as basically anything without kernel level anti cheat works on linux, which means that a huge amount of folk that would have moved to linux earlier, but couldn’t, are now coming over.
Which is to say, it’s not so much that there is “so many of them”, it’s more that, they’re coming over in a big wave, because they’ve been there for years, but haven’t been able to move until recently, and now, they know that there are distros out there that look and feel like something they’re familiar with.
I guess we have different use cases is all. People who primarily use their computers for gaming.
My PC is:
- My media server
- My workstation when WFH
- My entertainment center if the TV is busy
- My gaming PC
- My hobby development PC
(In no particular order.)
Most people I know primarily use their desktop computers for games. Bazzite also works great for general purpose computing, although it isn’t advertised as such.
For some things.
For many things it isn’t. It is usable (I use it) but with a bunch of workarounds for anything embedded development-related since it needs specific vendor software with device access. I have had to use a variety of distrobox + app image solutions that are often a bit worse than a system that installs them as native apps.
I don’t personally count “embedded development-related” as “general computing” so I think there’s a disconnect there. 😅
Agreed. Bloody fantastic for general purpose. Seems like a well kept secret. A lot of people assume Bazzite is just Steam in Big-Screen mode.
Universal Blue is the project which maintains Bazzite and other brilliant immutable images based on Fedora Silverblue (Gnome) and Fedora Kinoite (KDE)
Bazzite has Steam bundled in the image which is a bit better for performance, Bazzite-dx is Bazzite with devtools.
Aurora is another image made for general computing, Steam is installed as a Flatpak with a little worse performance but not much
Bluefin is your typical dev-workstation
If you’re serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.
Why is Flatpak Steam worse for performance? I’ve been using it for years, seemingly better performance than Windows on the same system. Something inherent about Flatpak?
If you’re serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.
Mm, I don’t think I’d be willing to sacrifice my Niri workflow. Niri also supports fractional scaling and VRR, but not yet HDR, which I can live without until it’s implemented. 😁
Flatpak is simply a sandboxed application, similar to a Docker container. Its better to have natively installed applications over sandboxed if you are seeking the highest level of performance.
You have essentially made all your games run within a sandboxed instance which has a limited set of binaries that emulate another mini OS within your primary OS.
If you haven’t seen any performance issues, then keep on doing what you’re doing, the software is very well made compared to Ubuntu Snap and likely has similar driver performance as close as possible to bare-metal
Flatpak is simply a sandboxed application, similar to a Docker container. Its better to have natively installed applications over sandboxed if you are seeking the highest level of performance.
This is bullshit. Containers run natively on your system just like “native” [sic] applications.
They literally say they are a fucking container tool like Docker in their own FAQ , you silly person.
Read again. You completely misunderstood.
Yeah, I’m the same, but if it’s an easy way to get people into the warm embrace of Linux, then hopefully they’ll look around and see other (Gen Purpose) distros exist.
To be fair some of these distros centered on gaming may really have some priorities that are more useful for gamers. Like better driver and system support. And I think they’re still capable of doing well outside of gaming.
True. Let’s hope it’s a great stepping-stone. 😊👍
In my experience, Debian has been very low maintenance. Occasionally, you may run into an issue that would be solved by having newer packages. If that happens, consider switching to Fedora.
My Fedora installations have been pretty smooth. The only thing that always breaks randomly is the software update GUI. I just got fed up with that and ended up using the terminal for installing all updates. Apparently this distro requires a bit more maintenance.
Fedora installations have been pretty smooth.
ended up using the terminal for installing all updates.
My experience as well with my Arch installations after a decade with that distro. I run a system upgrade because I want to, not because I need to. Never does it break unless I’m careless when upgrading and not checking the news page beforehand, which you are supposed to do. As long as I play by the rules, it’s super stable. (Never did it break for me anyway though. Never happened apart from hardware failure.)
Although admittedly I almost never do check the news page before upgrading, but/because there’s rarely anything there. And after a while you learn to recognize the volatile packages which can break your system, so e.g. if
systemdhas an update I’ll check the page before hitting enter, and so on.Remember this one from 2022?
Yeah, that one ended up being a learning experience… After recovering from that dumb misadventure, I finally learned to take those announcements more seriously.
Yeah, vaguely 😅 I use syslinux for booting, habit from when I used to dual boot, so I was luckily not affected. But yes, it is definitely wise to check the news before upgrading system-critical packages!
I can’t be bothered to update every day, or even every week. LOL. More like once a month or so, which means that it’s usually 100 MB or more and there’s at least one package that is more or less critical. When I start updating, and before hitting Y, I pause for a second and realise I should totally check the news first. Usually, it’s fine, but over the years, there have been a few times when intervention was necessary.
If you only update once a month (which should be fine as well, definitely), then you only need to check the news page once a month too, less often than I do probably. 😄 Seems like a win-win. 👌
You can also selectively update packages of course, but this is strongly ill-advised unless you know what you’re doing.
But like,
doas pacman -Sy firefoxshould be fine…You didn’t hear it from me. 🤐🥸
Yea I bounced off Bazzite because I needed to run plex. And I couldn’t get a container to run reliably on it. It’s still a cool distro though.
Edit: typo
Very easy with podman / quadlets
This. If you must have rooted containers docker-compose is only a
rpm-ostree install docker-composeaway, but that’s a big ass layer, you’ll feel it every update, and insecure to boot (yes I know docker finally got userspace, but how many times have you seen it used? Everywhere it’s root.). Run your docker-compose file through podlet, and there you go, userspace quadlets (95+% of the time, every time…). They’re easy to love once you get your head around them.
Yeah, this is the “fun” of bazite. If you want to do the things it does well (desktopy things) it works well. But then things that are trivial in other distros are a pain. And the “solution” is to actually run one of those other distros in a container. It’s ridiculous.
Bazite is for people who want a computer to be like an iPhone near as I can tell.
I think you as yet don’t quite understand the full beauty of immutable distros. Running things in distroboxes, yeah even other distros, is not a bug, it’s a feature (really) because you cannot break your main OS with a distrobox. As a developer it’s a godsend, finnicky AI project that needs a specific version of python and CUDA drivers and only has instructions for Arch ? That’s a distrobox, spin it up, play with it, archive it for later, put it away.
There’s tiers in Bazzite, for GUI apps, flatpak, if what you want isn’t there, it’s in a distrobox Arch in AUR and you can integrate it as an application into the main OS. Stuff that truly needs system level access, like zsh and intel-undervolt gets layered into the main OS with rpm-ostree. There’s security benefits as well like SELinux, but this post has gone on long enough.
It is so not an iPhone.
Distrobox is not a feature of immutable distros. It runs just fine on Debian. As does flatpak.
Duh, but it shines in immutable. Enjoy your debian, I like it too, for servers.
I have two computers at my main desk at home. One is exclusively used for gaming, the other is used for everything else. In theory Bazzite is perfect for me.
Why don’t you do the “everything else” part on your gaming PC as well so you don’t have to have two?
Performance. I’m a heavy multi tasker and I want nothing to get in the way of my frame rate.
For context my old second machine was a 2018 Mac mini with an 8th Gen. i5 and 32 gigs of ram. It wasn’t enough.
Huh.
I guess with my 16 cores and 64 GB DDR5 I don’t really notice anything hampering my frame rate. 😅
But on my old PC with just 12 cores and 32 GB DDR4, I would sometimes close Firefox and all those YouTube tabs to get some memory back and make some CPU cycles available. Gosh darn Linux just handing out memory on loan rather than what’s available. I don’t use a swap file either. 😅
But I guess just closing stuff down isn’t an option? Is it like services running?
AMDs dual CCD CPUs tend to perform worse than their single ccd models in games. You can “fix” that by running the game only on one, and push everything else to the second. But I’d much rather not deal with that. A second computer is much easier.
Plus I can fuck with computer A when computer B is still doing other things without interrupting. That alone is worth it.
Also if you’re in a game and you have a video running that taking GPU horsepower. I’m not going to have a second GPU just to avoid that.
Hey, if you have the space and don’t mind the extra heat and electricity consumption 😎👌 all good by me.
That’s the other thing. My new computer is a Mac Studio which takes up almost no space, and uses like 10-15 watts. Because I can just turn off my gaming computer when I’m not using it I’m saving significantly more power. Like just your CPU at idle uses more than the entire Mac actually doing things.
My second screen is a laptop (T580), also bazzite, often running moonlight to the big monitor so the main box goes to low power mode when not in use (it’s also the NAS, so no sleep, but mostly lives @ ~50W, got the GPU down to 4W idle :)
It’s a little strange how these numbers are relatively far off from what the Steam Hardware Survey suggests. On there, Linux is 3.2% of the userbase and Bazzite is 5.5% of that, so Bazzite is about 0.176% of the total userbase. Steam has about 70 million daily active users, so Bazzite’s share of that would be about 120 000.
could be bazzite users are more/less likely to take the hardware survey or are likely to opt out of countme.
