We recently had the exciting news that Valve plans to expand SteamOS onto more devices, starting with supporting more handhelds, which caused plenty of people to be curious about the future of the popular SteamOS-like Bazzite Linux.
A lot of people have been waiting for Valve to release SteamOS properly to try Linux because they've seen how good it is on Steam Deck, so it's great to see that begin to be answered. Part of what made Bazzite so popular though is that it's an easy to use SteamOS-like while people were waiting on SteamOS.
The founder of Bazzite, Kyle Gospodnetich, took to Reddit to assure people it's not going anywhere:
I've been getting asked this a lot so I just wanted to drop a pin to help squash any speculation here.
The Bazzite team is extremely excited for the upcoming expanded launch of Steam OS. Obviously, none of us would be here if not for Valve lighting the way. That being said, we strongly believe Bazzite has a continued role to fill in a post-Steam OS future. A desktop release of Steam OS appears to still be a long way away, and handheld support is almost surely going to be focused on partnered devices first and foremost, and not on the breadth of devices we support today.
Additionally, the first builds of Bazzite were designed for the Steam Deck, which of course runs Steam OS. Bazzite was born out of supporting users with Steam OS in the Steam Deck Discord, and is designed to make up for some of the shortcomings of Steam OS, such as immutability preventing package installs when needed, lack of printing, lack of secure boot, lack of drive encryption, and so on. We also ship a number of helpers and extra packages to make non-Steam gaming easier and faster to get up and running, and are in a position to more quickly work with the community on improvements -- all of which will continue to differentiate us.
It's also important to note that Bazzite is a project and a delivery mechanism, not a product. Developers and users alike can fork, contribute to, and expand Bazzite. This is what makes us Cloud Native and what we're trying to push for the Linux desktop.
We will continue to build Bazzite out long into the future. Thank you.
Well, there you have it, the future of Bazzite continues to be bright. So you can use it without worries.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
With SteamOS' code being finally available for them to look into the Bazzite project should be able to improve even more.
Various others are already using it.
Arehandoro 8 hours ago
And once all that is done, there's still plenty that needs to be done on the desktop front for it to compete. We can't even be sure if they actually want to do a dedicated desktop version. Maybe it's gonna stay a console OS primarily and leave the general desktop space for others.
Otherwise, if Linux can have many distros, then it shouldn't be any different on the gaming side as well since it's great to have many choices to choose from if you didn't want to use Bazzite and wanted another SteamOS like variant.
CyborgZeta 4 hours ago
Bazzite has a nice introduction that makes it easy for someone to install emulators and the like, which SteamOS doesn't have. That's in addition to things mentioned in the Reddit post like printing support. Also, Bazzite is way more up to date on Plasma and other KDE software than SteamOS. It's actually kind of surprising how behind Plasma is on SteamOS, considering the Arch base.
Essentially, I think Bazzite is better than SteamOS if you want something that can serve as a general purpose desktop OS in addition to gaming. That's why I'll keep running Bazzite on my desktop, even if SteamOS expands beyond handhelds into desktop.
Caldathras 1 hour ago
I don't really understand what Bazzite being Cloud Native means. Does this mean that Bazzite is unable to function if the computer is offline (i.e., no network or internet connection)?The author says that "Developers and users alike can fork, contribute to, and expand Bazzite. This is what makes us Cloud Native". No, that's what makes them an open source project. The author used a buzzword they didn't quite understand.
I don't really understand what Bazzite being Cloud Native means. Does this mean that Bazzite is unable to function if the computer is offline (i.e., no network or internet connection)?
It works without internet connection yes. Cloud-native is a term that gets thrown around certain industries that boils down to how the OS is built and the tooling used. Bazzite is built and deployed in Github and that's how they do their upgrades too. It's a little confusing and not something most people commonly say. If you are familiar with continuous development and continuous integration (CD/CI), then it's the same stuff going on here with Bazzite.
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