Bazzite just delivered over a petabyte of ISOs in a single month
That's a lot of downloading.
Bazzite is seeing an insane amount of growth right now
Traffic cost must be insane. Hope they have good hosting and won't be paying through the nose and go broke.
Should be manageable and it is probably less than you would imagine. Just checked real quick: the isos load from download.bazzite.gg, which is a Cloudflare IP. So they are either using it as CDN or even more likely use Cloudflares R2 storage for isos - which would mean they pay for storage (~15$/TB) and operations, but not for egress. This is seems ideal for few but huge files.
So for a single iso (~7 GB) they would pay 0,105$ for storage monthly and additionally 0,36$ per million of class B operations (reads/downloads). Of course they host more than one ISO, but for this example it would have been downloaded about ~150000 times to reach the petabyte.
So yeah, the ISO download is probably less of a problem. (Disclaimer: lot of assumptions, check in with a bazzite dev for clarity)
Cloudflare would host it for effectively free
This whole thread had me wondering how much I'm costing them so I could at least pay my share. A quick search got me this page to donate. There's some information about how they are using that money, but it doesn't seem like they've spent much, and it makes me feel like they've got funding from somewhere else that covers their hosting costs.
Founder here, we have a sponsorship deal with Cloudflare that thankfully covers the vast majority of this. Our hosting costs right now for everything, including the GitHub runners, are $65, with the domain being another $100/yr.
The intention with the donations is to pay for those costs, travel for Linux conventions, and for us to have a fund for additional higher cost items like eventually doing proper secure boot support. At no point will myself or others be collecting a paycheck out of those funds, and I've been paying our bills for the last 3 years or so. I'm privileged to be able to do this as a hobby and not as a job.
Thank you for thinking about us! I appreciate the sentiment
Bazzite is great. I wish I'd tried it sooner. It is great for a "steam machine" or just as a very stable regular desktop.
For general user maybe but honestly I would prefer kinoite ,I don't like bazzite replacing all their apps with gtk4 libadwaita while KDE written in qt apps looks much better that's why I switched to kinoite
My understanding is that one of the upsides to Bazzite is that Nvidia drivers are pretty easy to install and manage. That was the thing that turned me off of Fedora when I tried making the switch to that a couple years ago.
Is that easy to do in Kinoite? This is the first I’ve heard of it, and it sounds like exactly what I would want out of Bazzite.
What about steamOS for a steam machine that has all AMD hardware so Nvidia drivers will not be an issue.
I'm building an htpc that will never be used in desktop mode just couch gaming used by kids too. Still trying to decide which os to go with.
Just want to know what the downsides if any of installing SteamOS if I just want valve to handle it for me.
To my knowledge Bazzite is basically SteamOS with more flexibility under the hood if you're looking for it. By default it boots right into big picture mode. I imagine if you get an HDMI-CEC dongle it would work great as an HTPC once you get Big Picture set up with the streaming apps.
Can someone ELI5 why Bazzite is so popular? I'm a Linux longtimer (since 2006!) but never heard of Bazzite.
Along with what others have said about it being a great ootb experience for anyone looking to play games. It is also immutable so you can't fuck it up too easily. And the very popular YouTube channel gamers nexus has started doing their Linux testing exclusively on bazzite. I think the latter is playing one of the biggest parts, while the previous two points are specifically why they choose bazzite.
As I understand it, it's atomic Fedora with virtually everything you might need to game on Linux baked in (no need for layering) and more or less preconfigured. Off the top of my head, proprietary Nvidia drivers, Steam, Lutris, Hero launcher, support for Xbox One wireless controller dongle, plus a number of useful tools like Tailscale. An app with a catered list of gaming-oriented flatpacks, one click updating. Also a lot of effort into replicating the Steam Deck experience for handheld devices or devices connected to a TV.
I believe they also do Aurora, which is similarly geared toward workstations with a ton of container-related tools like distro box readily available to easily use containers instead of layering where possible. The same tools may be available in Bazzite but I never checked. I have Aurora on my laptop and use a dedicated gaming device with Bazzite.
I'm not a Linux veteran by any means but I was hopping distros looking for something I could install on my family's computers I tried atomic Fedora. When using it for myself, I became frustrated with the number of tools I use that needed to be layered or run in a container and eventually found myself on Bazzite and Aurora. So far so good.
Besides the reasons others mentioned, it's also popular as an OS for gaming handhelds, like the Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, ASUS Ally X and what have you.
Imagine you like video games. You install Bazzite. You have Steam, with only a little checkbox (to allow playing on linux). It works, you can play, you have a "playstore" if you need something. You have really little to do if you don't go outside Steam and the playstore.
Problem generally is that the moment you do have to leave steam. It's infinitely worse and basically impossible to use for a low skilled or new user compared to other gamer distros that do the exact same thing as bazzite but arnt immutable.
Immutability is great till you need to actually do anything at all. It's such a catch 22. To a new user, it means you can't accidentally f*** anything up, but also to a new user basically means your computer is a glorified console and you can't do anything with it because you lack the skill set in knowledge to actually do anything in looking. Anything up basically isn't going to be helpful for you cuz basically every guide and written account anywhere you find isn't going to be geared towards an immutable distro.
The immutable gimmick that's currently going on right now is still way too flavor of the month for new users who are trying to learn from a ground set of nothing.
If I was giving a computer to like a kid who I didn't want to be able to do anything I would give it to them as a form of parental control more than anything.
it comes with a lot of gaming presets. I believe Steam, GOG and Wine are preinstalled and preconfigured for the most compatibility.
A lot of things are built into it to be easily installable with less user effort. Has nice defaults. I use cachyos on my pc but on my handheld a lot of stuff wasn't working by default, like the handhelds buttons/joystick. On bazzite everything works by default. (Think it's one terminal command to install what is needed for controls in cachyos, but it didn't work by default) You can still download whatever using rpm ostree, as a user idr know the difference. Grabbed gparted that way. Bazzite has the ujust command which gives you a lot of options for modifying and installing stuff easily like waydroid, emudeck, plugins, etc.
Also prefer gnome with extensions on touchscreens and handhelds, while everything else comes with kde and it's apps by default. Kde isn't bad at all and only 1 extension on pc (window thumbnails to pip any window) has me staying on gnome, but gnome works so much better for touchscreens and smaller devices.
It's the "just works" distro for people who want to play games.
It’s the most plug-and-play Linux has ever been from my experience.
Immutable distros are currently the flavor of the month and it's basically just that. Bazzite is just a worse cachyOS. But because it's immutable it's the flavor of the month and therefore it's the hype new thing.
Everyone loves the hype new thing. Even though in all realistic aspects, it's more overly complicated. It's more prone to causing issues for new users. It's less proven.
There's a good argument to be made that the project might just end up imploding in a year or two and dying out and f****** over all these new users who are flocking to it because of rampant suggestions.
Is also the general issue of Fedora and its family being prone to breaking itself from early adoption of new ideas. People love to give Arch s*** but Fedora tends to be the one that actually implodes itself for low-skilled users.
Got to love flavor of the month
Yes... ha ha ha... YES!
(i dont even use bazzite but love that for them)
I wish people stopped recommending Mint to Windows users
As someone who has gone from windows to mint, what is wrong with it? So far I have 0 issues and can run all the games I want. What am I missing out on?
Absolutely nothing. If you're vibin' with Mint, 3 Huzzahs for you! If you get curious to try something else later, that's great too!
It's not the distro you use that matters in the story of Life, it's the fact you use Linux that matters.
It suffers from the same problem all Debian/Ubuntu family distros suffer from.
Being horribly out of date. It's a very slow moving family of distros. Which can be a good thing if your work load doesn't involve new hardware and software along with a focus on stability and reliability. Since if things don't update they can't break.
This can result in support for hardware and software being upwards of two to three YEARS out of date. Which for gamers for example is unacceptable and causes issues more often then not.
It's the why fedora or arch based distros are generally speaking the better option to suggest to people. Depending on their level of intelligence, education and willingness to learn.
Bazzite and cachyOS for example are both fantastic for gamers.
Fedora or endeavour for your run of the mill office PC.
There is a serious argument to be made that the mass adoption of bazzite and the general flavor of the month affection for immutable distros is very likely going to cause issues for loads of users down the road.
So bazzite being overly popular is somewhat concerning. Flavor of the month distros have a bad tendency to implode randomly.
There's nothing wrong with Mint, it's solid. If it works for you don't stress about it
The only thing is that it's based on Ubuntu LTS so it's packages can be a bit old. Doesn't really matter much unless you have very new hardware and need the hardware support. Then something Fedora based like Bazzite would be better.
For getting newer software you can use flatpak/Flathub.
Bazzite is also "immutable" which makes it harder to break on a system level, but also harder to tinker on a system level. Mint is a "normal" distribution in that regard. Mint does have Timeshift for taking system level snapshots, on the off chance that an update or your tinkering breaks something. Its worth checking that Timeshift is set up for automatic snapshots
If you have 0 issues and aren't bored with it either, keep using it. It's completely fine.
People often have various reasons for not using it. E.g they want more up-to-date packages so they go with a rolling release distro, or they want to use a different package manager, or they want an immutable distro. Mint is just a generalist distro that works fine for most people, but doesn't excel at any particular thing. Same as Ubuntu LTS, but with a nicer UI and less commercialization, so I see it as a great alternative to Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu non-LTS may be more up to date though.
mostly customizability and good support for new hardware
if you're running a pc with no major components newer than ~2-3 years old then mint is fine
the idea that it's "bad for gaming" is nonsense unless you're running near-bleeding edge hardware or are exceptionally sweaty about eking out an additional couple of frames per second
I'm perfectly fine with Mint as a recommendation. It's not what I would choose, but it does work for a large portion of people without issues.
I am very glad that I hardly ever see Manjaro recommended to new comers anymore though - that's a curse/trap. There are so much better "Arch but easier" distros now that are rock solid.
I recently got a mini PC for couch gaming / HTPC functionality, and I installed Mint without ever booting Windows. I’ve been using Mint for a while after years of distro hopping, but I’m having issues with Bluetooth XBox controllers randomly disconnecting. Maybe this is the excuse I’ve been looking for to try Bazzite, although I might just need to get a USB dongle with a chipset known to work on Linux. What I’m really waiting for is an immutable distro with Plasma Bigscreen.
Fedora Kinoite is, probably, the best recommendation.
If you're looking for the immutable Plasma experience, Kinonite IS the best choice. Bazzite, Aurora, and I think Zoran, are reliant on whatever their foundation distro is doing. Other than having some presets you might like, they offer little else.
But if you like one of them, more power to you, use it and enjoy!
Why though? I don't like it personally but it's my #1 recommendation usually. (can't recommend slackware to noobs)
If they have issues they're gonna ask me for tech support, and I don't know how to use immutable distros (lol)
mint aint that bad
besides it not supporting Wayland (ig X11 is better for beginners??)
Not really. Beginners don't know the difference.
I think cinnamons a better de to demo linux than gnome. I do use it now but itd turn ppl away (like me initially). Kde these days is def a better choice, but it was kinda easy to delete all your panels and end up with nothing last time I used it. Should really prevent you from deleting your last one.
Mint's mouse acceleration was what killed it for me. Setting acceleration to "constant" still felt rubber-bandy and fucked up, and there's no obvious "Off" option. That was a hard stop. It never felt like I was using my PC but instead a rubber-bandy immitation. I immediately switched. It's frustrating considering that the rest of the OS seemed OK, I could have seen myself using it if not for that.
Bazzite immediately felt "good" to use right out of the box. No baked in acceleration weirdness. Kudos to the team for really putting in the effort to make this old gamer feel right at home in it. Now going on over a year of it and still loving it.
I‘m one of them. I already only used Windows for gaming and seeing where this OS is going, made me try Linux again and this time might be the first time I might stick with it, thanks to Bazzite.
Games run incredibly well and compatibility is surprisingly good at this point. The only exception are games with invasive anti-cheat like the new Battlefield. But I guess it’s just a pro that I won’t buy a game that essentially has malware included with it.
Thanks, Steve
I'm out of the loop here, what's the context?
Gamer's Nexus has heard a lot of interest in their community about gaming on linux. So they've been working with Wendell from Level1Techs to put together a Linux benchmarking workflow. They chose Bazzite for those efforts.
Gamer's Nexus likes to make frequent use of a clip from an Intel presentation where one of the presenters says "Thanks Steve," because the main personality on Gamers Nexus is Stephen Burke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOx4_8ajZ8
Watch around 00:45 ☺️
Mostly all thanks to Gamers Nexus, I'd wager.
Also thanks to windows for continuing to double down on being dogshit
That contributed to all Linux. Gamers Nexus exclusively using Bazite for their Linux game testing is giving them specifically, a big bump.
I am looking forward to GNU+Linux usage share numbers a year from now. I think it is very likely to pass 5%.
I'm doing my part.
I set up bazzite in a VM and passed my GPU thru it.
Now I've got a nuc clone in my office with bazzite on it as well and it's just a moonlight client. But it's silent. Or damn close. The GPU is two floors away, I hear nothing!
That was two separate downloads, too...Nvidia-gnone and gnome-standard.
I was on Nobara a couple months ago and liked it...but a colleague piqued my interest on immutable distros and now here I am.
Immutable?
Really hard to fuck up
System files are a read-only container, protecting you from issues such as sudo rm -rf /etc
This is amazing news. Hopefully they're getting enough donations to cover this.
Eh costs likely basically nothing. They appear to use cloud flare CDN which has unlimited bandwidth.
So really all they're doing is getting their money's worth from their subscription. Lol
I had such a good experience switching to bazzite (from arch btw) that I put Aurora on my wife's Ryzen 2500u laptop when windows 10 was taken out to a nice farm.
That went well until she said her friend's kids couldn't play games anymore. I quickly and flawlessly rebased it to bazzite and set up games.
A few hiccups with lacking Microsoft Office and having to learn the alternatives was the only issue she has had but that only took a few days for her to get down.
I kept breaking my fedora install so I went to bazzite that month lol
I distrohop every now and then, but usually when I have a convincing argument for it. Anyone want to try to convince me to switch either of my computers (one on Tumbleweed and one on NixOS) to Bazzite?
its closest to nixos in functionality, but basically its just a very simple distro that doesnt require much work to maintain and comes with lots of useful premade scripts and configurations for gaming and making immutables easy to work with. if thats what youre looking for thats what its good for.
If you've got actual work to do, don't.
I've got Bazzite on my TV PC, and it's pretty cromulent for that, but Flatpak alone doesn't have everything I need to do actual work.
Installed this on my Legion Go recently, it's amazing.
Reddit apocalypse
Thanks gaming jesus
How is Bazzite for NVIDIA users?
It's been working perfectly for me with no tinkering.
At most you might have to switch to the closed driver image
I put it on my gaming desktop and ROG Xbix Ally X and love it. Works great. The Windows Rog Xbox Ally X portable experience sucks. Also I'm not missing the intrusive updates and AI junk jammed into absolutely every Microsoft product.
While I didn't use Bazzite I did put Steam OS on my wife's Ally. Yes the windows handheld experience is (was) atrocious
It's been flawless for me with similar performance (slightly better in some areas) than Windows.
I've been using Pop OS and it's been pretty good but I'm not super tied to it, would Bazzite be better at all?
If it's doing what you need it to do, no reason to rock that boat! It is fun to try out other distros without distro hopping, just to see what's out there. That's what a good thumb drive is for!
True and fair enough! I suppose it's working well enough as is
If you want a console like experience on your PC then use bazzite. If you want the same experience but with out the console lock down use cachyOS.
Depends on how much you do with your PC really. Like bazzite has one of the best out-of-box experiences there is. Basically everything is preset up. But if you need to say, leave the steam ecosystem. Things become infinitely more complicated than any other distro to do anything with that is both the benefit in downfall of an immutable distro. It makes sure you can't f*** anything up but it also means you can't f*** anything up if you get what I mean.
While cachyOS has the exact same out-of-box experience with the sole exception of you have to push one button and type in your password. And if you do need to leave the steam ecosystem, it's at the end of the day a normal distribution so you can just do whatever you want.
The downside is you can do whatever you want so you can break s***.
Basically comes down to bazzite is basically old Windows. You are not allowed to do anything really without a lot of jumping through hoops. It means you're going to get a consistent experience and it's going to be reliable, but only within the operating parameters set out by the distribution.
While cachyOS is basically all of the same upsides but without any of the guardrails. So if you want just a good out of box experience it's there. All the compatibility is the same if not generally better in the real world. But again, if you're stupid or unable to read basic instructions there's a good chance that you break something and you'll have no idea how to fix it. Short of a reinstall.
I would give a child bazzite 100% of the time. Immutable this shows work is a fantastic form of parental control. Because while the barrier exists and will prevent most kids from doing something stupid with their computer, it's not insurmountable and you still can do whatever you want with your computer. It's just not easy.
But in either case, I would choose literally shooting myself in the foot before using anything in the debian or Ubuntu family if my primary goal is gaming. I love Debian but it in its family of distros are so out of date and require so much f****** to actually bring in newer packages and make sure that they actually compete even half as well as a fedora or arch-based option that it's not worth the hassle. You're far more prone to breaking a Debian mint popos install. Trying to make it equivalent to bazzite or cachy for gaming. Than you are breaking an arch install by just randomly installing packages from the aur without reading anything.
Hmmm I'm not super into Bazzite being more locked down. I might have to look into CachyOS tho
Why do people use PopOS? I genuinely don't get it.
Cosmic is subjectively the best DE out there. Popos 24 is scheduled for release in a week, it’s awesome.
It’s a Ubuntu fork so it’s easy to follow Ubuntu based guides. Starting with 24 they’re going to stay much more in sync with Ubuntu LTS.
Besides that, modern kernel, out of the box nvidia and disk encryption. Oh and pop is maintained by system76 that ships actual hardware (laptops and desktops) so it’s in their own best interest to have good modern hardware support. It’s a fantastic distro
Idk, it was recommended as a more entry-level distro for people who are used to Windows and Ubuntu. Seems pretty good and looks pretty professional
Bazzite is good for gaming, do you game?
Yes I do, and Pop OS seems to do a pretty good job. AMD drivers are so easy it's awesome
Does this count torrent downloads?
probably not
Aurora sitting down there at the bottom of the desktop OSs. I'd love to some of the Bazzite users migrate to Bluefin or Aurora.
If you're not aware, switching between different Universal Blue OSs is super easy, with one caveat. Switching from a GNOME OS to a KDE OS or vice versa is problematic.
Switching from a GNOME OS to a KDE OS or vice versa is problematic.
I did that a few times already on different installs and never had any problems, besides the window decorations/ theming being off and needing to set them again. What issues could be expected?
Gamers rock
Atleast 20 of those are mine, I simply delete the ISO after flashing and ive absolutely flashed one singular USB 10 times with the same nvidia build, let alone other ones
They should use this technology we used purely for uh... "Linux ISOs' back is the day.
BitTorrent.
afaik theyre parasitizing microsoft this way by compiling and distributing everything on github, makes it cheaper too. they have a way for local computers to distribute software as peers at least so you only really need to download it once if your server or w.e. runs it too
What's the appeal of Bazzite over regular Fedora immutable version? I've personally never had an issue running Steam on Fedora, then again I wouldn't consider myself a "gamer," certainly not my biggest requirement as far as computing is concerned.
they have nice scripts and tweaks, and afaik steam as a flatpak runs a bit weird so youd have to layer it whereas it comes prebaked on bazzite.
Plasma/KDE as a first class citizen.
KDE is second-class to GNOME on Fedora.
KDE is second-class to GNOME on Fedora.
It is? I ask because I've always used Fedora KDE and honesty it's been the best KDE experience I've had. Now I'm curious how much better the Fedora GNOME experience might be if it's prioritized so much more, but I've never seriously used GNOME so I don't think I can make a fair assessment. In what ways is KDE deprioritized?
Meh, flavor of the month.
