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Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

bazzite.gg

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Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#331

Post by omnimus »

foxheadman wrote: post #29
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…

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.

Afaik Valve is hiring/sponsoring people that were already making the projects. So much of the work is outsourced to codeweavers and KDE.

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#332

Post by omnimus »

Gigachad wrote: post #186
mastazi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#333

Post by nickjj »

jsheard wrote: post #69
MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I hope that corporate rootkits will never be permitted on Linux in any form. Game studios need to learn that anticheat needs to live on the server side where it belongs.

Easier said than done for some genres, unfortunately. To catch things like aim assistance from the server-side you'd have to resort to handwavy statistical analysis and somehow thread the needle between catching well-crafted aimbots, but without accidentally banning legitimate players under any circumstances, even if they're extremely skilled and/or lucky. It's been tried but I don't think it's ever been very success…

I used to co-run an online gaming ladder back in the Quake 3 days.

There were aim bots and other client side hacks back then but we requested that folks record and upload demos of themselves for competitive matches. This allowed anyone to replay the game from your exact POV in-game, complete with hearing and seeing exactly what the real player saw at the time.

We all survived back then without kernel level anti-cheat tools with a very high certainty that no one was cheating.

Even if you tried to hide it, it was pretty obvious when someone was cheating. I don't recall a single unsolved case where someone was cheating and got away with it while the community really thought otherwise. This was with over 10,000 registered players and tons of active teams playing every day. No where near the scale of gaming today of course, but it's a big enough sample that the method does work for online competitive play.

Nowadays it would be even easier to detect foul play because with live streaming and human announcers, you're under a lot more analysis by the public in real-time.

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#334

Post by vilunov »

Aardwolf wrote: post #330
jtrn wrote: post #239

I have a special spot that gets extremely annoyed when I feel I have to spend a necessary time just figuring out what something is. The page suffers from "developer-brain" marketing, where they describe the technology used to build it (cloud-native images) rather than what the product actually is. Why not just lead with that it is a Linux distro/version focused on gaming. In the beginning, I thought it was new hardwa…

It says on the main page: "The operating system for the next generation of gamers" The one fault perhaps is saying "operating system" when it's a distro. Linux is the operating system

Linux is a kernel, it doesn't have a stable and rich enough set of userspace services to be considered an operating system on its own.

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#335

Post by omnimus »

bigyabai wrote: post #66
oivey wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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.

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#336

Post by sbarre »

Covenant0028 wrote: post #229
d3Xt3r wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because most companies will make decisions based on time/effort/profitability, and because client-side anticheat is stupid simple and cheap, that's what they go with. Why waste their own server resources, when they can waste the user's?

So it is the company prioritising their bottom line at the expense of their customer's computers. More simply, they move cost from their balance sheet and convert it into risk on the customer's end. Which is actively customer-abusive behavior and customers should treat it with the contempt it deserves. The fact that customers don't, is what enables such abuse.

This is such a weird take. In an online multiplayer game the cheaters are the risk to the company's bottom line.

If a game is rampant with cheaters, honest paying players stop showing up, and less new players sign up. The relatively small percentage of cheaters cost the company tons of sales and revenue.

It is actively in a company's best interest to do everything they possibly can to prevent cheating, so the idea that intentionally building sub-par anti-cheat is about "prioritising their bottom line" seems totally absurd to me.

Not to mention these abstract "the company" positions completely ignore all the passionate people who actually make video games, and how much most of them care about fair play and providing a good experience to their customers. No one hates cheaters more than game developers.

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#337

Post by oreally »

timschmidt wrote: post #171
oreally wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I don't know how you can consider something as not 'tested' without a testing framework behind it.

Perhaps you're not a software developer. Most devs understand that there's a big difference between "it worked for me a few times on my development workstation" and "it's routinely tested in all possible configurations under a variety of circumstances as part of a test harness or CI/CD process". In fairness to game devs, alt-tab'ing out of a running game would be a challenge for many testing frameworks as it's not so…

Many game devs develop on windows and for good reason in that most of their customer base are there, plus the stability of drivers there.

Your assumption of what you've been taught in compsci circles with many resources at their disposal does not hold up in places in which fast iterations are required, and with little time to set up testing frameworks because as you said they're hard to test.

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#338

Post by herewulf »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #120
d3Xt3r wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mainly an nVidia issue. On AMD, Linux is actually faster and more stable compared to Windows.

There seems to be little evidence of that, at least from a reputable source. For some games it can be. For some games Proton performs far worse than Windows. It's not steady across the board. And some have stability issues, bugs, major performance problems, or just flat out don't work. I want Proton to be the future as well, but I think it's important not to oversell it as a drop-in replacement either. EDIT: GN highl…

> I want Proton to be the future as well, but I think it's important not to oversell it as a drop-in replacement either.

Proton needs to be understood as a temporary solution to make the back catalogue on Linux comparable to Windows.

Eventually there is a tipping point and most games will have native Linux binaries. Once that happens all developers will gradually follow suit to avoid being left behind. Perhaps Valve's latest hardware efforts will finally bring this about.

Proton will still exist for older games and as hardware continues to become more powerful, loss of performance won't matter much.

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#339

Post by dangus »

EliteGadget wrote: post #280
dangus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 obvio…

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.

Re: Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

#340

Post by herewulf »

prmoustache wrote: post #63
kayson wrote: post #34

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 tho…

Honestly if the point is to run proprietary software like commercial AAA games, the supply chain is already compromised. I treat my gaming computer as a video game console, it wouldn't occur to me to share passwords, accounts, data or anything sensitive on my gaming machine. And I only connect it to the network if I need to download a game/update.

I totally agree and I have done likewise for many years now.

Consider setting up a VLAN or additional WiFi SSID if you find the network situation a hassle.

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