New Major Features for 3.0
- Upgraded to Fedora 40
- KDE Plasma 6 - GNOME 46 - Linux Kernel 6.8 - AMD/Intel GPU driver upgrades
- Ayn Loki Max Pro support
- Ayn Loki Zero support
- Improvements for supported handhelds
- HHD Overlay is now stable
- Gyro support parity with Lenovo Legion Go
- Charge limits set for Lenovo Legion Go
- ASUS ROG Ally custom TDP that use the kernel driver
- Custom fan curve support for ASUS ROG Ally
- Added CDEmu
- Added Ollama ujust command
- Added fastfetch
- Added zoxide
All of that, and more details about the rest can be read on the announcement page here —> https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/announcing-bazzite-3-0/1218
I’ve had a lot of experience with Linux and I use Nobara currently. My only catch with Bazzite is that I didn’t know the first thing to do. It somehow felt as if most of my experience in Linux was just useless.
Not saying it’s a bad thing, I just decided I’d stick to Nobara for now and try learning Bazzite in the future to give it a fair shake.
I’m also a tweaker. I like to play with ZRam and add other things to the OS, like a custom kernel with BCacheFS-Git to support my gaming darastores. I suspect some of my creature comforts may be harder to get.
You could give the uBlue builder a shot, which can do exactly that.
But I think NixOS is a better choice for a tinkerer like you :)
In case, like me, you hadn’t heard of Bazzite before:
Bazzite is an OCI image that serves as an alternative operating system for the Steam Deck, and a ready-to-game SteamOS-like for desktop computers, handheld PCs, and living room home theater PCs.
It’s basically Nobara, but properly done. (If you choose the desktop version)
It gets updates automatically (max one day after upstream Fedora), has everything you want ootb in the first start wizard, is more secure, and much more.
I was very sceptical at first, but after trying it out, I really noticed some minor performance improvements in games and many QoL improvements, e.g. the preinstalled LACT, which allows me to set up fan curves and over-/ underclock my GPU.
Setting up my new PC took me about half an hour maximum.
9/10, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a smooth gaming experience.
But then why don’t you simply develop a toolkit that installs all those things and sets things up properly on a standard fedora install?
This seems something with too big of an attack surface.
That would be very very hard and unreliable.
Bazzite is more than just “preinstalled Steam”, it has a list of tweaks, optimizations and additions so long you can’t even finish reading it all! 😅
This includes a different kernel, pre-configured containers, and much more.
If you do that on a regular system, configuration drift would quickly destroy any good experience in no time and result in a huge mess.uBlue provides a solid base distribution (pretty much stock Fedora) and applies exactly your way, but in upstream, and then copies that new image to millions of PCs. By doing that, you can provide many many identical copies that are the same everywhere and always up to date, without the burden of maintaining a whole distro like on Nobara.
The hard and boring work of maintaining a distro is on the shoulders of the Fedora team, and you only have to maintain your own changes.This seems something with too big of an attack surface.
Not really.
- Most stuff is installed in containers
- The pros of image based distros still apply here in terms of reliability, security, etc.
- Its no more than a few hours away from upstream stock Fedora
- Most apps (Lutris, OBS, etc.) are optional and opt-in, if you just click “next, next, next” in the installer you’ll get a relatively vanilla experience compared to stock Fedora
This really caught my eye, but does it make sense for an older PC?
It won’t transform the old device into a gaming beast, but if you do some lighter gaming with it, why not just try it? :)
If you don’t like it or want something more vanilla/ general purpose, you can always rebase to other Fedora Atomic variants, e.g. Silverblue, Kinoite, uBlue community images (Secureblue, Deepin, etc.) anytime you want! This changes the “flavor” (basically like switching from Linux Mint to Kubuntu by reinstall) without loosing any data or settings with one command. It’s so fucking great!
Bazzite is my first true experience with an immutable distro, and wow, what a magical moment it was.
I’ve been eyeing on fedora 40’s release for some time now because it fixes all the Wayland problems for Nvidia cards. One night my grandma needed some help, so I walked away from my PC, it automatically suspended, came back 30 or so minutes later, and when I logged in I was just automatically on KDE 6 with fedora 40, didn’t even reboot.
This is truly the year of the Linux desktop.
Are u sure it didn’t shut down when you were away?
uBlue updates itself, yes, but the updates are staged and need a reboot to apply.
I’m running Fedora 40 on my PC and my laptop. Now, having read how much most of you like the experience, I guess I’m moving my laptop to Bazzite. I did install Bazzite on my Steam Deck, but the experience was worse than with SteamOS for the Stadia controllers, which is what I use (not that the experience is stellar or anything on SteamOS, but Bazzite never once reconnected without having to re-pair, SteamOS at least does like 60% of the times.)
If you are like myself and use your PC mainly for gaming, and your laptop just for casual use (watching videos, writing notes, etc.), then you can also take a look at Bluefin (Gnome) or Aurora (KDE).
It’s a “replacement” for the stock Fedora Silverblue/ Kinoite with QoL stuff and on the spectrum between Bazzite (“bloated”) and the uBlue base image (extremely lean, missing a few standard apps by default) and gives you the choice between “I’m a casual user” (-> only what you need) and the “developer edition”, which includes some IDEs and stuff.
I like it a lot and think of it as “Bazzite, without gaming stuff”. Maybe you’ll like it too!
My case is the opposite. I game on my laptop or my Steam Deck, and work on my PC. I installed Bazzite on my laptop yesterday right after going over this thread. On my PC I also tinker quite a bit, so I just have plain Fedora Gnome on it. I’m going to spin a VM with Bluefin to play with it a bit. Thanks for the tip. One thing that could be an issue with Bluefin, and maybe you can enlighten me here, is that according to this video on their site, they have done away with OS-tree? Because that would make this entirely based on FlatPaks and no other options, which is a huge block for me.
they have done away with OS-tree? Because that would make this entirely based on FlatPaks and no other options, which is a huge block for me.
I don’t understand exactly what you mean with that, but I think you are afraid of any restrictions.
- uBlue (Bluefin, Bazzite, etc.) is still Fedora Atomic, just like Silverblue. It’s just that they take the OG image, rebuild it based on some instructions, and then redistribute it. It still has OSTree and all other stuff.
- You aren’t set on Flatpak, but you definitely should use it on image based distros. Flatpaks are great and convenient, that’s why they’re getting more and more popular, also for devs. Because of that, the default (and only) way of installing apps via software center is Flatpak. If you don’t like that, you can still use Distrobox (e.g. with Pacman, DNF, etc.), Nix, Brew, or any other package manager you like, b but that’s more for CLI-users.
- I mostly work graphically, but if I have to do some CLI stuff, then I enter my Arch-Distrobox. I never encountered any problems or restrictions there tbh
- And you can still layer (install rpm packages on the host system) via rpm-ostree if you really need it, but it’s not recommended and only there for essential stuff. Use containers instead.
I use rpm-ostree on Bazzite. What put me off was when the guy in the video (I’m assuming he’s one of the maintainers) said “you have FlatPaks, and that’s it”. But if OStree is still there, I’m golden to take it for a spin.
I’ll spin the VM and see if I encounter any blocks. And you are absolutely correct, I am afraid of any restrictions.
Compared to Bazzite, there shouldn’t be (m)any differences. You can see Bazzite just as a gaming-oriented Bluefin
