If you want an alternative to SteamOS (or Steam Deck OS as Valve sometimes decides to call it) for your Steam Deck, desktop PC or living room gaming machine - Bazzite is an interesting pick. Much like ChimeraOS, it aims to give you a good gaming experience.
As a reminder though: technically, Bazzite is not what you would call a traditional "Linux distro". It's built on top on Fedora, ublue-os/main and ublue-os/nvidia giving you good hardware support with the upstream projects handling things like maintenance and security updates with Bazzite simply expanding it into something better for gamers.
This "Phase II" of Bazzite upgrades the base to Fedora Linux 39 and they say it's "now at a point where it is completely functional as is on standard hardware (and the Steam Deck.)" and while the original focus was on providing something like SteamOS but be more flexible the scope has expanded to work on much more hardware.
Some of the features it offers:
- Proprietary Nvidia drivers pre-installed.
- Full hardware accelerated codec support for H264 decoding.
- Full support for AMD's ROCM OpenCL/HIP run-times.
- xone, xpadneo, and xpad-noone drivers for Xbox controllers.
- Full support for DisplayLink.
- Includes Valve's KDE themes from SteamOS.
- LatencyFleX, vkBasalt, MangoHud, and OBS VkCapture installed and available by default
- Support for Wallpaper Engine. (Only on KDE)
- ROM Properties Page shell extension included.
- Full support for Winesync/Fastsync/NTsync.
- Distrobox preinstalled with automatic updates for created containers.
- Automated
duperemoveandrmlintservices for reducing the disk space used by wine prefix contents.- Support for HDMI CEC via libCEC.
- 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.
- Uses Google's BBR TCP congestion control by default.
- Input Remapper preinstalled and enabled. (Available but default-disabled on the Deck variant)
- Bazzite Portal provides an easy way to install numerous applications and tweaks, including installing CoreCtrl and GreenWithEnvy.
- Nix package manager with Fleek optionally available for install via Bazzite Portal.
- Brew package manager optionally available for install via Bazzite Portal.
- Waydroid preinstalled for running Android apps. Future releases will offer to set this up for you through Bazzite Portal. (Not available on Nvidia builds)
- Manage applications using Flatseal, Warehouse, and Gear Lever.
- OpenRGB i2c-piix4 and i2c-nct6775 drivers for controlling RGB on certain motherboards.
- OpenRazer drivers built in, Select OpenRazer in Bazzite Portal or run
just install-openrazerin a terminal to begin using it.- OpenTabletDriver udev rules built in, with the full software suite installable via Bazzite Portal or by running
just install-opentabletdriverin a terminal.- GCAdapter_OC driver for overclocking Nintendo's Gamecube Controller Adapter to 1000hz polling.
- Out of the box support for Wooting keyboards.
- Built in support for Southern Islands (HD 7000) and Sea Islands (HD 8000) AMD GPUs under the
amdgpudriver.- A fix is available for a TF2 bug that makes the game crash on launch -
just patch-tf2-tcmalloc- XwaylandVideoBridge is available for Discord screensharing on Wayland. (Only on KDE)
Bazzite itself is split across multiple versions, depending on what type of experience / device you're going to be using it on but in a single download where you will pick inside the installer what you wish to install either the Desktop variant or Steam Deck/HTPC.
So if you choose the version for a console-like experience like the Steam Deck it will directly boot into a Gaming Mode just like SteamOS on Steam Deck does so you'll get the Big Picture Mode experience.
The Steam Deck / HTPC version also includes various other enhancements like options to install Decky Loader, EmuDeck, RetroDECK, and ProtonUp-Qt, among numerous other useful packages on installation. There's also upgraded Mesa drivers, a custom update system to deal with OS / Flatpaks / Nix packages (Via Fleek) and Distrobox images to be updated directly from the Gamemode UI, built-in support for Windows dual-boot and much more.
See their full announcement here.
Anyone been using Bazzite? What do you think to it?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Mohandevir Nov 10, 2023
Quoting: dubigrasuQuoting: MohandevirI miss the old bpm, in that regard.I miss it too. For all its sins (read bugs) it had a warm feeling to it. The new one feels cold, clinical, impersonal. I'm getting used to it, but in one place is still sorely lacking, and that is controller settings. The old BPM visual and intuitive gamepad settings were replaced with a cumbersome and convoluted mess of nested menus over menus. Probably useful for Steam Deck I suppose, where screen estate is premium, but, at least for me, useful only for basic profiles, the more advanced the profile I'm trying to set, the more lost I get.
Luckily I've kept an old Steam client from before the new interface and I use that to set new profiles, heck I still frequently game on that.
I get your point, the old BPM was nice, but it lacked in many features though. For my part, the old BPM supported older hardware. Now, with wayland being badly supported by Nvidia... I can't use it anymore.
Quoting: MohandevirIt lacked features because it was abandoned, at some point they realized they have to shift all focus towards the future (and still unknown to us) SteamOS 3 gamepadui, and kept the old one barely alive. Probably the last ever feature implemented was the SteamPlay section, but beside that it was left to slowly rot away, while only the desktop client received the shiny new features. As a side note though, there's one thing that you can still do it in the OLD BPM, but not in the new one, that is upgrading/downgrading SC's firmware. They did released a small tool for that, but is Windows only. Granted, I rarely used it.Quoting: dubigrasuQuoting: MohandevirI miss the old bpm, in that regard.I miss it too. For all its sins (read bugs) it had a warm feeling to it. The new one feels cold, clinical, impersonal. I'm getting used to it, but in one place is still sorely lacking, and that is controller settings. The old BPM visual and intuitive gamepad settings were replaced with a cumbersome and convoluted mess of nested menus over menus. Probably useful for Steam Deck I suppose, where screen estate is premium, but, at least for me, useful only for basic profiles, the more advanced the profile I'm trying to set, the more lost I get.
Luckily I've kept an old Steam client from before the new interface and I use that to set new profiles, heck I still frequently game on that.
I get your point, the old BPM was nice, but it lacked in many features though...
BlackBloodRum Nov 12, 2023
A nice way to troll MS (In screenshot)
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