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Want to try something a little different? Bazzite was recently announced as a custom Fedora 38-based Linux image designed to bring the best Linux gaming to PCs and Steam Deck. The developers note it's built from ublue-os/main and ublue-os/nvidia using Fedora technology so you'll get expanded hardware support and plenty of drivers included.

A bunch of features they say to expect from it:

  • Proprietary Nvidia drivers pre-installed.
  • Full hardware accelerated codec support for H264 decoding.
  • Full support for AMD's ROCM OpenCL/HIP run-times.
  • xpadneo driver for wireless Xbox One controllers.
  • Full support for DisplayLink.
  • Includes Valve's KDE themes from SteamOS.
  • LatencyFleXvkBasaltMangoHud, and OBS VkCapture installed and available by default
  • Support for Wallpaper Engine. (Only on KDE)
  • Distrobox preinstalled with automatic updates for created containers.
  • Automated duperemove services for reducing the disk space used by wine prefix contents.
  • System76-Scheduler preinstalled, providing automatic process priority tweaks to your focused application and keeping CPU time for background processes to a minimum.
  • Customized System76-Scheduler config with additional rules and CFS parameters from Linux-TKG.
  • Uses Google's BBR TCP congestion control by default.
  • Input Remapper preinstalled and enabled. (Available but default-disabled on the Deck variant)
  • Helpful first-start installer provides an easy way to install numerous applications and tweaks, including installing CoreCtrl and GreenWithEnvy.
  • Nix package manager optionally available.
  • Waydroid preinstalled for running Android apps. Future releases will offer to set this up for you. (Not available on Nvidia builds)
  • OpenRGB i2c-piix4 and i2c-nct6775 drivers for controlling RGB on certain motherboards.
  • GCAdapter_OC driver for overclocking Nintendo's Gamecube Controller Adapter to 1000hz polling.
  • Out of the box support for Wooting keyboards.

Including Waydroid configured by default is a pretty interesting choice, could expand what you can do on Steam Deck rather a lot don't you think? There's a lot of things there making me quite keen to try it out on one of my Steam Decks. Tempting…

They include various tweak between using it on desktop and Steam Deck. For example the Steam Deck release gives you the ability to install the likes of Decky Loader, EmuDeck and ProtonUp-Qt during the setup. You get the latest version of the Mesa graphics drivers, easy update rollbacks if something breaks, a custom update system to let you upgrade  the OS, Flatpaks, and Distrobox images to be updated directly from the Gamemode UI and much more.

Quite an exciting idea overall!

See the release announcement.

Update: as a clarification, this is not a "new distro" but doing a bunch of fancy customizations directly on top of Fedora. The text was edited to reflect this.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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10 comments

Viesta2015 Aug 23, 2023
looks fun... if i had a second steam deck.
TheSHEEEP Aug 23, 2023
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A new distro?!

Liam Dawe Aug 23, 2023
A new distro?!

That made me laugh more than it should have.
twinsonian Aug 23, 2023
Cant wait to give this a go -- but have been pretty happy with nobara too.
pb Aug 23, 2023
Official SteamOS for desktops when?
voytrekk Aug 23, 2023
I thought this would be worthless at first since Nobara already exists, but there does not seem to be any gaming, desktop focused immutable distros at the moment.
Liam Dawe Aug 23, 2023
Update: as a clarification, this is not a "new distro" but doing a bunch of fancy customizations directly on top of Fedora. The text was edited to reflect this.
Villian Aug 23, 2023
I thought this would be worthless at first since Nobara already exists, but there does not seem to be any gaming, desktop focused immutable distros at the moment.

literally https://universal-blue.org/ lol
udekmp69 Aug 23, 2023
Very interested to see how this goes on desktop especially since it can work on all 3 major GPU vendors (AMD, Intel, and Nvidia) from the looks of it. I think a lot of people are awaiting a SteamOS general release, but this might be the best that we have until it is properly out. Universal Blue projects are quite underrated I feel, but it's all new stuff in the desktop Linux scene.
fenglengshun Aug 24, 2023
I've been building my ublue image based on Bazzite for a month now. It's pretty good. A few weird things, like how mesa version that the Bazzite image can sometimes conflict with something else from rpm-fusion if you build your images with a bunch of extra stuff (usually resolves itself within 2-5 days). Also, some of the configs are different from Kinoite, and that required me to re-configure my konsolerc.

But overall it's been pretty good. After I tested Bazzite for a month on my PC, I reinstalled my KDE Neon laptop to my ublue-bazzite image and the CPU scheduler (which borrows system76's) works better for me, and it has all of the configs I want built in.

I definitely recommend people to look up making your own ublue image with their automatic setup. Whether you use the Web UI or CLI, it was very easy, the repo and recipe are laid own in an easy to understand format, and it solves most of people's issues with immutable distro with how you can bake in changes to the image so you can still be a tinkerer, with a side of backup in the form of 90-days backup via GitHub Containers Registry for your image (also makes tracing bad updates easy too - just go through each days till you get where the bad update starts).

On another note... can we get an update to the distro list now pls? There's been a ton of cool and exciting project lately that I hope would be added to the list... though maybe it can be divided between .deb, .rpm, .pkg (Arch), and other families, for statistics purposes?


Last edited by fenglengshun on 24 August 2023 at 8:20 am UTC
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