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Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

bazzite.gg

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Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#31

Post by iLoveOncall »

carlosjobim wrote: post #24
iLoveOncall wrote: post #13

While I understand the point of Linux distros overall, because they allow very specific usage like embedded, etc., I really don't get the point of those generalist but slightly specialized distributions focused on a single aspect that consumers use a computer for. I'm far from a Linux super-user, I only use it for my servers and Raspberry Pis, but even I would rather pick Debian and install the necessary stuff by han…

It's common for people to have both a PC and a game console. Even a PC, an iPad and a game console. Right tool for the right job, not a bad idea.

Yes of course, but if you have a PC that's good enough for gaming, it's also good enough (more than good enough) for all your other PC needs.

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#32

Post by pedrogpimenta »

spiralcoaster wrote: post #26
haunter wrote: post #21

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…

Right, because the idea of Linux has always been about sticking to big corporate distros whenever possible

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".

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#33

Post by uncletaco »

haunter wrote: post #21

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…

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.

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#34

Post by kayson »

I really want to use Bazzite but I also have concerns about their supply chain. Last I checked, they automatically update all packages in their releases. Many of them are from copr, including kernel patches. The release notes do list package version changes, but as far as I can tell there is no human review.

I realize that, in a way, it's no different than installing from AUR or ppa's, but something about both of those (and the fact that package installs are manual) feels safer than copr packages with fewer eyes on them...

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#35

Post by LelouBil »

mikae1 wrote: post #9
LelouBil wrote: post #2

Great distro ! I have been using it for the last 2 years on my Framework laptop 16 without any issues. I even have a "fork" of sorts that adds Hyprland + all of my "desktop" config, which I think as being part of the OS. I really think immutable distributions are the future of linux desktop, and maybe distributions that use OCI images, beacause they are a lot easier to work with than say, NixOS for example. If you wa…

I'm an https://getaurora.dev user and I agree uBlue is awesome. I'd like to create a custom image too, but it doesn't seem quite as easy as you say: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IxBl11Zmq5w

The actual process for the image is really just what I said. In the video he sets up a github actions automatic build, and adds signing with cosign (which are also all steps you really want to do) but to have custom stuff in your base os is really as easy as a Dockerfile (or should I say Containerfile ?)

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#36

Post by tmoertel »

hokumguru wrote: post #20
mikae1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an https://getaurora.dev user and I agree uBlue is awesome. I'd like to create a custom image too, but it doesn't seem quite as easy as you say: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IxBl11Zmq5w

While the video is long, the actual process of setting everything up only took me about 20 minutes. The template they offer is extremely convenient.

I will offer a second positive but more reserved data point. It took me closer to a day to get my custom Bazzite build working.

Switching over to my images using bootc failed because of what I eventually tracked down to permissions issues that I didn't see mentioned in any of the docs. In short, the packages you publish to Github's container registry must be public.

Another wrinkle: The Bazzite container-build process comes pretty close to the limits of the default Github runners you can run for free. If you add anything semi-large to your custom image, it may fail to build. For example, adding MS's VSCode was enough to break my image builds because of resource limits.

Fortunately, both of these issues can be fixed by improving the docs.

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#38

Post by dangus »

haunter wrote: post #21

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…

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)

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#39

Post by iotku »

hokumguru wrote: post #20
mikae1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an https://getaurora.dev user and I agree uBlue is awesome. I'd like to create a custom image too, but it doesn't seem quite as easy as you say: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IxBl11Zmq5w

While the video is long, the actual process of setting everything up only took me about 20 minutes. The template they offer is extremely convenient.

There's also BlueBuild [1] which abstracts the process of building your own images away further into yaml configurations.

It takes away a tad bit of the direct control of the process, but covers the majority of things you would want to configure.

[1] https://blue-build.org/

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#40

Post by tombert »

I just reinstalled my NixOS gaming thing with Jovian from scratch. Not much of a reason, other than I wanted to do things a bit more "correct" this time (e.g. tmpfs root).

I did briefly consider Bazzite, but the thing that stopped me was that I wasn't sure how well it would work with an eGPU. With Jovian and NixOS, it is ultimately still just NixOS minimal under the covers, and that is low-level enough for me to play with boot parameters and kernel modules to get the eGPU working, and it wasn't clear to me that it would be that straightforward with Bazzite.

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