As much as I love Bazzite at end of the day it's still a custom distro and every single day there is a chance they just close the project down and move on. Happened to so many distros in the past, this is not out of question. I’m not saying “big corporate” distros are better but personally I'd rather stick to something more mainline.
Hopefully Valve will release a general version of SteamOS with Steam Machine coming (and even they are questionable with their track record)
While what you're saying isn't impossible, it's unlikely. In the event it did happen, Bazzite is a fork, a signing key, and a couple forked Fedora Copr repos away from being made completely in someone else's control.
> As much as I’d like this change to happen, it’s too soon. This change would kill off projects like Bazzite entirely right as Fedora is starting to make major headway in the gaming space.
> I’m speaking as it’s founder, if this change is actually made as it is written the best option for us is to just go ahead and disband the project.
Now, whenever you would've actually shut down the project is a different story, but your messaging was very clear.
What is the point of this line of questioning? They stated that the proposal as-written would make maintaining projects like Bazzite untenable. That's a valid thing to say and not that much of a "threat", but even if it were, most people involved here is effectively unpaid and can do whatever they want with their time.
The point is the original commenter said there’s a risk of these kinds of projects getting shut down. The creator chimed in and claimed there wasn’t much risk, and then someone posted comments from the same creator in the recent past talking about shutting the project down if an upstream change was made, validating the original comment and making the creator sound less valid.
I totally get that and personally would never hold that against him. Nor did I interpret it as a threat.
However, this comment chain was of how vulnerable non commercial projects like it are to outside factors making causing exactly this issue, making further maintenance on the project infeasible... Consequently ending it, effectively.
There is no blame in play here. haunter merely quoted this as a reason for why theyre worried about it longevity - and considering there was a discussion about an upstream change which would've realized his worry... It seems not at all misrepresented?
Fwiw, I personally don't share the same worry as haunter, because I don't see the chosen distribution nor OS as a significant investment. I feel comfortable switching things around occasionally
No that appears to be directly in line with what I said. What's missing here is your understanding of a proposal vs an actual change Fedora is going to make.
Oh no I didn't mean as a personal attack or anything so thanks for taking your time and for the reply! I know the chances are miniscule but there is that 1% in the back of my brain because it happened in the past with some distros I've really liked
The quality of games on Google Play is much worse than what is available on Steam and the variety of titles are much greater on Valve's platform too, with far less in the way of microtransactions and other exploitative behaviours (though Steam isn't free of this) and a back catalogue stretching as far back to the mid 2000s.
Both Microsoft and Sony AAA titles, most third parties publish there and most indie games release there first. Steam's library is unparalleled in the industry, the only thing it's truly missing is Nintendo's games.
Ok, but the market is absolutely flooded with exploitative stuff, laden with micro transactions and a trickle of miniscule rewards, in attempt to addict the user, rather than genuinely provide enjoyment.
How do you even discover the good games that are worth being played on Android?
I don't doubt it, but I actually really hate that the build system is a bunch of bash scripts, github actions and assuming the previous stage builds fine. Especially when the custom image forkable repo has an action commented out to squeeze more temporary storage out of GHA hosted runners because some images don't even fit on those (like the gnome-deck). I wish the entire setup was a little more decoupled and maybe allowed you to build multiple stages in one go so the entire system was more "forkable" and less spread out. I went on a bit of a wild goose chase trying to build Bazzite without the Firefox RPM removed (rpm-ostree doesn't like adding and removing and then adding packages again).
I did voice that concern in some Bazzite-related spaces before and it felt like it got brushed off with a weird undertone.
is the link to the file as it exists on "main" currently, or at a specific revision, so in three years, it will still refer to that version of the file?
Always a possibility with any distro, but the tooling around it is flexible and repeatable. If another group of people wanted to continue off where they left off it would be far more possible than a lot of the Ubuntu forks.
Just need the Atomic Fedora base to still be around and everything else is already pre-setup to run on GitHub infrastructure neither of which I anticipate going away soon. (Famous last words)
Calling it a superset of Fedora rather than just being its own bespoke distro can be a fine line, but really there's nothing stopping anyone from forking it and continuing on, a good few people run their own forks already to meet their own needs a bit more specifically.
Bazzite is a part of the Universal Blue family, which is more of a repackaging of Fedora Atomic.
I'm a fan of my Steam Deck and SteamOS, but I'd like that experience to eventually be available via community supported distros, which Valve/Igalia can rebase from, and instead focus on Proton.
Bazzite is the closest to that that we have so far.
I don't know why people bring this up so much whenever a new Linux distro shows up. I think one of the coolest things about Linux is that normal people can feasibly roll a useful distro. How much of a longevity guarantee do you need from a distro that is used for gaming, of all things?
> How much of a longevity guarantee do you need from a distro that is used for gaming, of all things?
Games are something I do to relax. I want as little friction to play the games as possible. For tech projects and work stuff having to mess with the OS and move away from deprecated stuff isn’t such a big deal, it’s part of the work. But for games I want them to just work as much as possible, I don’t want to have to find a new distro and install it and set everything up again on my gaming PC.
Despite Windows sucking in so many ways, it is the OS with the most assurance that a game will work without fuss. I am happy to see Linux closing this gap.
I’ve been running the same gaming setup for almost 10 years. Having to upgrade or change OS is a major thing. Don’t minimize longevity.
Currently I literally can’t find the time to convert my drive from master boot record to GPT for Windows 11. I can’t imagine having to completely switch operating systems/distros because it just disappeared. Worrying if it will still be around is legitimate.
Sounds like you might be the perfect audience for consoles then. And here's the good news, that's the same audience SteamOS and Bazzite targets.
I am/was a big PC enthusiast but could no longer keep up with all the stuff due to real-life, eventually even gave up gaming for a few years as I just did not have the time.
The Nintendo Switch bought me back into (limited) gaming. I liked that I could just play from anywhere in short bursts, or could just hook it up to my TV and pick up the controller for longer sessions. The best part, I never had to worry about updates breaking things, or doing system maintenance - I could just power it on and jump straight into gaming. But I still missed my old PC games, especially playing games like Diablo II and Age of Empires.
When the Steam Deck came along, it changed everything. Well, technically I didn't get the Deck, I got a GPD Win Mini instead, and installed Bazzite on to it... but same thing. I get the same convenience as I had with the Switch, except now I had the added advantage of being able to play all my PC games (yes, all of them. No, I don't play games with nasty kernel anticheats).
Regarding your concern about Bazzite completely disappearing, the good news it it doesn't really matter. Since everything you customised lives on your home drive, all you need to do is backup your home drive, and that backs up everything you'd care about. You can use this same backup in Windows (Steam allows you to easily import a library from a different drive/folder) and your Pictures/Documents etc are basically the same folder layout as Windows. I actually ended up setting a triple-boot setup of Windows, Bazzite and CachyOS on my handheld, and they all point to the same Steam Library, same Documents etc. So not only do I have tripe redundancy, it shows how portable and migratable this stuff is.
What console line has had several generations of hardware iterations in the past decade? Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have all put out two generations at best, with plenty of games still shipping to the "old" generation even now.
They’ve all had 2-3 models in the last decade-ish. So that’s at least 1 time I would have had to have thrown everything away.
I miscounted though, I’ve been running the same OS since Windows 7. Probably 2014. I’ve been able to upgrade without having to throw away my entire operating system. Consoles aren’t a solution for longevity.
You are aware that old consoles still play games, right? My PS4 still plays all my PS4 games and lets me stream PS5 games to from my living room to my bedroom. My Xbox 360 still plays games just fine last time I checked (last June or so). Getting rid of old consoles doesn’t make sense unless you absolutely have to have the latest tech and also don’t have much storage space.
? That's not the point though? With consoles you just sign-in to your account and you're basically done, you don't Hce the hassle of dealing with migrations like a PC.
Isn't every distro a custom distro, by definition?
Anyways, I get that this is a "risk" to consider, but installing a new distro isn't so bad that it should prevent one from trying and using a currently extant distro if it works for them.
I'm not sure I'd define the atomic Fedora variants as "distros" in the traditional sense.
This is a bit of an oversimplification, but Bazzite, Bluefin, etc, are basically just Dockerfiles that use Atomic Fedora as the base image.
So you are basically getting a pre-built docker container that is "Fedora + various configs added on top", and then you are booting that docker image.
Since it's just a container file, anyone could theoretically just fork the Bazzite repo, make some changes to the Dockerfile, then push it to github + let github actions build a custom docker image.
So is that custom docker image a distro? Some would say yes, others would say no.
Ironically, I'm considering installing Bazzite alongside NixOS because it's proven to be nearly impossible to run SteamVR properly with how Steam is packaged
From what I’ve seen so far from people I know who run Valve Indexes, Linux SteamVR performance is pretty poor compared with Monado+OpenComposite. Hopefully this situation changes with the release of the Frame, in which case I (and likely others) will be revamping the SteamVR package and NixOS modules as Monado may not fully support it for some time.
Tl;dr: Run Monado w/ OpenComposite for the Index, it runs way better.
They mean "custom" as "pre-configured to do <X>" where X is gaming. Generally most distributions are not pre-configured outside of a general suite of standard applications.
I wonder if people would be willing to pay 10€/$ for a yearly update so that there could be some commercial force behind a distribution that would provide security and stability for desktop users. with windows, you pay one large amount upfront. with macos, you get it with hardware. so having something like this, i think, has a potential to succeed and a place in commercial market.
People who are not new Linux users might prefer a distro which is part of the same "family" of distros they are already familiar with.
Steam OS I believe is based on Arch. Bazzite is based on Fedora. Personally I have experience with Debian distros so if I wanted a gaming-focused distro I would pick maybe something like Pop OS.
Pop!_OS isn't good for gaming thanks to being quite behind in package versions. You're better off going with a dedicated gaming distro (which offers recent packages) such as PikaOS if you want a Debian base.
I have both a steamdeck on SteamOS and a pc on Bazzite and they both work exactly the same. They both run literally the same steam UI and both run flawlessly so I couldn’t even tell you which one I’m using if you just showed me a screen and controller.
There is difference in the desktop part. SteamOS has KDE as gui and Bazzite you can pick Gnome. Another major thing is that Bazzite is better prepared for desktop use - it has many ways how to instal packages and dev tools. I run bazzite and webdev on it comfortably.
I tried Pop before Bazzite on my PC back in April and maybe I’m just bad at Linux, but it was a pain in the ass for gaming at first boot. Bazzite ran Expedition 33 out the box. Didn’t have to download drivers, didn’t have to configure anything, it just worked.
There are limitations but if you want a gaming machine, bazzite is a no-brainer to me. Poo is very impressive but I just don’t want to fight my OS constantly when it comes to gaming.
Sadly SteamOS doesn't support full disk encryption, which is inexcusable for an OS used on a portable device, that some also use to remote access their desktop (through Steam Link/Moonlight).
It’s not in a consumer friendly state yet, but I’ve been using my steamdeck with encryption for a month now with zero issues. I guess technically this is not “full” disk encryption since it’s just the home dir, but I only care about protecting my personal info which is all in the home dir anyway.
It doesn't need to, if your disk supports OPAL2 - just set the password in BIOS and encrypt the drive, it's fully transparent to the OS and as a bonus, there's virtually no performance hit unlike software-based encryption like LUKS.
You are relying on every single ssd to have a secure implementation of encryption which is just never going to be true.
I’m not familiar with how the process works, but if you are setting the password somewhere, it’s exposed to being extracted. You want the password to be something you type in on boot.
Unless your threat model includes state-sponsored attacks, the encryption is good enough for most people, especially considering its primary use-case (gaming). And there's nothing stopping you from using a secondary secure container if you do intend to store that level of sensitive data (eg: VeraCrypt volume for plausible deniability).
Also, the password isn't stored anywhere, you get prompted by the BIOS upon every boot to unlock the drive.
Luks can use hardware offload description via opal if configured accordingly. You are also at the vendors firmware implementation in terms of security.
I personally don't keep anything sensitive on steam deck or heck, any device related to "gaming". Modern games are nothing but spyware and even more reasons if you are pirating
SteamOS is only going to support other hardware by coincidence. Valve is unlikely to put in resources beyond the hardware that they want to support. It's also unlikely to change the whole "firmware restore, entire drive" approach. They're not going to put in the resources or support work into making and maintaining a full distro by themselves.
A community distro (be it a console-like gaming focused distro or not) is going to be the way to be the way to go for the foreseeable future. I'm pretty happy with running EndeavorOS w/ KDE, Steam, and Heroic. The Steam client with Proton is where most of the magic happens in Linux anyway. If I wanted to get fancy, I could set up GameScope with Steam Big Picture to take a SteamOS/Bazzite approach.
I don’t see why Valve wouldn’t try to support lots of hardware. Small time outfits like CachyOS can do it, why wouldn’t they? I think their motive with the Steam Box is hardware sales. It seems like they’re trying to shift the gaming ecosystem away from Windows.
Probably for the same reason they don't support every Arch package on the Steam Deck out-of-the-box; it breaks easily and it's not their job to fix it.
Additionally, I think Valve doesn't want to end up over-committed to replacing Windows. They can handle the storefront side and do a decent job with handling the runtime, but actually committing to a desktop alternative to Windows would be spreading their resources thin. It feels like a smart call to not jump into that arena if your hardware products don't need it.
Lots of assumptions that could be totally wrong. Custom distros are not new operating system - majority of hw support is because linux supports it. It would probably be more work for Valve to support only their hw instead of keeping what linux/arch support.
I am also not sure why you think they wouldn't want to end up replacing Windows. Thats exactly what they've been trying to do since microsoft included their store in windows. That is more than a decade long plan in motion which already failed once but they are still at it.
They're not assumptions, I outlined in my comment it was my thoughts and beliefs.
> Custom distros are not new operating system
Nothing is. Windows uses old DOS code, macOS uses BSD code, nobody's OS is truly written "from scratch" in 2025. Just because you can recycle old programs doesn't mean writing an OS is easy.
> majority of hw support is because linux supports it. It would probably be more work for Valve to support only their hw
And much of Linux hardware support is not in-kernel, period. Valve could not flip a switch and start supporting Asahi Macs or Nvidia's proprietary UNIX drivers; they would be committing to patching and maintaining all of their future quirks and surprises. Not even Valve should be wasting their time doing that.
> I am also not sure why you think they wouldn't want to end up replacing Windows.
They do! But "wanting to replace Windows" and "wanting to write the replacement for Windows" are two different things. Valve's current software team has a headcount lower than 500, they aren't equipped to compete with Microsoft even if they wanted to. It's much easier for them to ship all-in-one style devices that keep expectations low and replicate Windows' most desirable features.
> which already failed once
Steam Machine was a home console, it did not replace Windows for anything that wasn't directly ported to Linux. The lesson from this era is simple; supporting Linux is hard. It's hard for developers, hard for consumers and especially hard for Valve.
I’ve recently moved between two other steamos-like distros and it’s such a non-event. You just log into Steam, pair controllers and download the games. Your saves are managed for you.
It is a fork of Fedora, one of the most stable distros out there. It is more geared towards regular users when compared to Arch on which SteamOS is based.
I am a long time Arch user but I totally understand why they went with Fedora for Bazzite.
SuSE would be a better option then, IMO. Not only have they been around much longer (1994 vs 2004), they offer much better support compared to Canonical. And as a bonus, you don't need to put up with any of the continuous enshittifications Canonical subjects you to (Snaps, increasing poor quality code etc).
The funny thing about SuSE, and admittedly I haven't touched it for over a decade now: Everyone I knew who used it touted that it had great enterprise support as a reason for using it, but everybody I knew that used SuSE used OpenSuSE. This was over ~20 years of providing Linux support, RHEL-based and Ubuntu were by far the distros we dealt with the most.
One issue I had with OpenSuSE was that once a new release drops you have around 6mo to migrate all your machines over to it. Which, for most businesses, is a pretty short timeline, in my experience.
I've always preferred authoring RPMs over debs, but Caninical having basically one distro without the forks, I think is a huge benefit for a business using them.
These days, since it's all about containers, I'd recommend openSUSE microOS, which is a minimal immutable rolling OS that's suitable as a container host. https://microos.opensuse.org/
Weird question probably but outside of the super esoteric distros running a bespoke package manager what stops someone who installs a distro like bazzite from just continuing to update packages? If they use apt for example then they'll still get updates when the repos are updated and most of these distros reuse existing software repositories.
Bazzite works a bit differently as it's an immutable distro. Whilst updates for normal/user-level packages (Steam etc) will continue to work (as these are Flatpaks), your core system packages won't and you can't just change your repo to say Fedora's repos, as system updates are image-based and are pulled directly from Bazzite's github repo (which in turn pulls from Feodra).
The good news is, you can easily rebase to any other uBlue or even Fedora Atomic distro with just one or two commands, or if you're technical, you can even fork Bazzite's repo and build your own Bazzite (they even provide instructions on how to do this, it's very very simple, relatively speaking).
Universal Blue is under very little risk of just shutting down operations without warning (as opposed to a hype-based BFDL kinda situation like Omarchy). I'm a happy Bluefin user and would wholly recommend people step up to help out with the distro if possible.
I'm a big fan as well, but couldn't some clueless IBM exec decide to ruin all the parts of Fedora that Bazzite relies on? What if IBM/RH throw their financial weight behind something like the proposal to drop multiarch packages (breaks Steam)?
Well, the idea of Linux was "a better minix" and "I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones".
Not necessarily a corporate distro, but there is somewhat more sustainability in a project based on Debian or Arch than an individual with a bunch of organically handmade scripts.
I don’t see what the point is of bringing this up.
1. It’s not exactly some fly by night thing at this point, it’s extremely popular, which means the likelihood of having maintainers and sponsors step up with, at the very least, an easy migration path is high.
2. You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?
3. Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)
> You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?
In 2009 the CentOS maintainers was AWOL and nobody had any idea where they went and had no access. This caused issues with releases obviously.
There been quite a number of times where people have died, just got bored, had health issues and a project just stops and sometimes people don't access to things.
> Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)
That sounds all horribly complicated.
I have a dotfiles, 5 bash scripts and a ~/bin folder for anything outside of package manager. I migrated my laptop to Arch recently from Debian and fixing the scripts was literally copy the script, and do a find and replace (I literally put pacman instead of apt install and most of it worked).
It not that much of a big deal to move between distros.
It’s not horribly complicated. I have a single 3 line script capturing the current state of my homebrew, flatpak, and rpm-ostree state that runs before Pika Backup backs up my entire home directory.
You have 5 bash scripts and various dotfiles. That sounds a lot more complicated.
Bazzite is really not much different to any of the atomic fedora distributions.
The only thing more complicated about immutable Linux is that you have to rethink how you install packages a little bit, as you’re generally using installation methods that offer isolation from your base operating system.
The big upside of this is that essentially all of your modifications are confined to your home directory, and of course system updates and rollbacks are trivial.
The complexity is hidden. I don't require all the gumph. I just gave bash and a Debian install. Pretending the rube goldberg machine isn't one because you've hidden it behind a facia doesn't mean it isn't one.
When all of that complexity doesn't work (which sooner or later it will), it will be more difficult to fix.
Any operating system could close down and move on. I'm 100x more concerned that Windows is going to become a cloud service than I'm worried about Bazzite shutting down.
Hopefully Valve will release a general version of SteamOS with Steam Machine coming (and even they are questionable with their track record)