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PayPalAn exciting new announcement is the formation of the Open Gaming Collective, a collaborative organisation between many names in the Linux sphere.
This working group pulls together the likes of Bazzite & Universal Blue, ASUS Linux, ShadowBlip, PikaOS, Fyra Labs along with ChimeraOS, Nobara and Playtron. Their mission? From the new website:
For too long, the Linux gaming ecosystem has been fragmented. Individual distributions have spent countless hours duplicating efforts on kernel patches, input tooling, and essential packages. The OGC changes the game by centralizing efforts around critical components like gamescope and hardware drivers.
An announcement for this was posted up on the official Bazzite forum, with Bazzite founder Kyle Gospodnetich mentioning:
The Open Gaming Collective (OGC) is a collaborative organization bringing together key projects in Linux gaming, including ChimeraOS, Nobara, Playtron, Ultramarine & Fyra Labs, PikaOS, ShadowBlip, ASUS Linux, us here at Bazzite under Universal Blue, and more partners to be announced soon.
The goal of the OGC is to centralize efforts around critical components like kernel patches, input tooling, and essential gaming packages such as gamescope. Instead of each distro maintaining separate patches and fragmented hardware support, improvements can now be shared across the entire ecosystem. In short: a win for one project becomes a win for everyone.
The OGC’s kernel efforts operate on an upstream-first approach, meaning all patches shipped by the OGC will be at least in review for eventual inclusion into the Linux kernel.
This means better hardware compatibility, fewer duplicated efforts, and a more unified Linux gaming experience for everyone.
A similar announcement was also posted up on the Fyra Labs blog.
For those just joining us - Bazzite is a version of Linux (just don't call it a distro…) specifically designed to making a great gaming experience for desktops and handhelds. Many people use it as an alternative to SteamOS on various devices, I also personally use Bazzite on my Legion Go and it's great!
This news all sounds quite exciting, and it's nice to see some Linux developers determined not to keep reinventing the wheel and actually come together for the greater good. We have so many projects doing the same thing just a bit different - so this sounds overall really great. Pooled resources to make Linux better for everyone.
Part of this includes some changes for Bazzite outlined by Gospodnetich in the forum post:
HHD will receive no further updates and will be phased out in favor of InputPlumber, the same input framework used by SteamOS, ChimeraOS, Nobara, Playtron GameOS, Manjaro Handheld Edition, and CachyOS Handheld Edition.
- Features you rely on (Such as RGB and fan control) will be integrated into the Steam UI, while features not supported by the Steam UI will receive a clean, streamlined overlay similar to the current HHD experience.
- Don’t worry, if your specific hardware needs to stay on older libraries a little longer our rollback and pin system has you covered. We’ll be triaging issues as they appear.
Bazzite will adopt the OGC kernel, ensuring continued support for features like secure boot, expanded controller support, steering wheel support, and more; all maintained collaboratively within the shared kernel project.
Gospodnetich also mentioned they'll be "sharing patches we’ve made to various Valve packages with the OGC and attempting to upstream everything we can".
The Bazzite team are also testing replacing Lutris with Faugus Launcher, a newer game launcher but they said they will provide "at least six months of advance notice" if they decide to make it the default.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Since every single environment is unique and must be maintainable conveniently and independently of the vendor.
Meanwhile, this is incredible indeed, of course! Let's wish them success, stability, less piracy and more prosperity, peace, and safety to eventually unveil even more miracles of ineffably magnificent art of people in the infinity of the world...
fenglengshun 
8 hours ago
I did saw one person complained about CachyOS not supporting HHD, that it meant that it's less flexible than Bazzite, and they're right but it is clearly a double-edged sword given the maintenance burden of not using what everyone else is using.
The rest of the Open Gaming Collective is interesting. Notably, CachyOS isn't on that list, despite Nobara which had been based on a lot of what CachyOS did (and PikaOS I think is based on Nobara) being on the group.
Oh, and Faugus is good but I had issues with portals on Game Mode but I was also using a jank NixOS + Jovian setup on my ROG Ally so idk. Still, dropping Lutris? Hm, has Lutris Flatpak version matured enough? I feel like Lutris is still a core of getting many non-Steam non-Heroic games running.
no shit sherlock
Last edited by elmapul on 29 Jan 2026 at 2:37 am UTC
Quoting: fenglengshunThe rest of the Open Gaming Collective is interesting. Notably, CachyOS isn't on that list, despite Nobara which had been based on a lot of what CachyOS did (and PikaOS I think is based on Nobara) being on the group.I feel like this is due to the nature of this project vs Arch, the reluctance to make software decisions for the user, and the rolling release model. OGC is probably looking to implement concepts more in-line with their members(Bazzite, Nobara, et al) and that's always been quite opposite to the way Arch/CachyOS operates.
That doesn't mean that there won't be contribution to what OGC is trying to accomplish. I imagine there will be a fair amount of borrowing from the CachyOS developers' work on their kernel and schedulers. Which is great. With Clear Linux now defunct there aren't exactly many choices for advanced kernel tech that's sufficiently tested for an end user's environment.
The_Real_Bitterman 5 hours ago
This really sounds like a self inflicted issue caused by point-releases and their cravings to package everything downstream instead. Then call it a win to form an organization to fix what they caused themselves...
I mean nobody prohibited them to push their modifications to the mainline kernel even before.
While I also came to learn that all these "gaming tweaks" and "optimisations" usually don't deliver any real differences or significant improvements over something not having these "gaming optimisations".
https://xkcd.com/927/
Quoting: The_Real_Bitterman"Reduce duplicate efforts", "replacing Lutris with fagus launcher" ... Nobody forced them not to use Flatpaks...Flatpak launchers have many issues including gamescope/scopebuddy not working and using their own outdated Mesa, as well as being affected by the Nvidia Flatpak driver issues, this is why a built in launcher is greatly preferred
This really sounds like a self inflicted issue caused by point-releases and their cravings to package everything downstream instead. Then call it a win to form an organization to fix what they caused themselves...
I mean nobody prohibited them to push their modifications to the mainline kernel even before.
While I also came to learn that all these "gaming tweaks" and "optimisations" usually don't deliver any real differences or significant improvements over something not having these "gaming optimisations".
Last edited by Stella on 29 Jan 2026 at 7:32 am UTC
Gaming critical software for me also includes wine, wine-staging, umu, proton, LACT, coolercontrol, DXVK, VKD3D , Mangohud, Goverlay, LinuxGamingBenchmark,CapFrameX,Heroic-Launcher, Lutris, Playnite, VR-Stuff , OBS,OpenRazer, OpenRGB and more besides the drivers.
Last edited by tpau on 29 Jan 2026 at 8:18 am UTC
fenglengshun 42 minutes ago
Quoting: The_Real_Bitterman"Reduce duplicate efforts", "replacing Lutris with fagus launcher" ... Nobody forced them not to use Flatpaks...The issue with Lutris is that, as far as I'm aware, there are still things that don't work as well with its Flatpak version vs Native version. The one thing that I recall was that Steam can't control / monitor the run status of games run by Flatpak Lutris - which could be an issue for a distro where user is expected to be on Steam's Game Mode a lot of the times.
This really sounds like a self inflicted issue caused by point-releases and their cravings to package everything downstream instead. Then call it a win to form an organization to fix what they caused themselves...
I mean nobody prohibited them to push their modifications to the mainline kernel even before.
While I also came to learn that all these "gaming tweaks" and "optimisations" usually don't deliver any real differences or significant improvements over something not having these "gaming optimisations".
For a distro based on Fedora Atomic that is meant to be as battery-included (ready-to-use) as possible, it does need to include a lot of things. This is their goal - and for the most part the issue has been the sheer amount of devices they support.
Which is where kernel is an issue. I used NixOS with nix-cachyos-kernel flake. Even with THAT there are still a number of things that don't work and performance was garbage (it was already garbage with the default kernel tbh). And that's with a kernel based on the distro that is most focused on performance. As soon as I actually switched to CachyOS itself, everything becomes so much faster. Even back on Bazzite, I've had days where after a while my ROG Ally slows down and I need to restart - something which hasn't been an issue with CachyOS as I left it for the past few days to sync files from my server and download my games from Steam. At the same time, Bazzite also did some work with HHD which requires working some custom kernel and config stuff - those are getting semi-abandoned, but not fully as they do want to bring things like ROG/View Button Switching even after the InputPlumber migration.
At the same time, these are versions of the kernel for specific usecase. Linux is still predominantly used for servers - Valve and everyone else do try to upstream what they can, but obviously not everything can make it upstream. Nevermind the need to just move fast and support hardware if we want people to take Linux seriously as a desktop OS and not just get easily dismissed with, "Yeah, it's cool, but it doesn't support my hardware until months later, so it's a useless OS for me."
It does matter - a lot of these does matter. I used to be someone who scoffed at all these custom stuff but after trying to do it myself, I really do appreciate how well they make these things as ready-to-use as possible even for newbies.
Quoting: tpauOften you have hardware that has no or just out of tree drivers, so i welcome any concerted effort to change that.I agree, while I could just use Fedora Kionite and customize that, I can't really be bothered to do that when someone else already has done the hard work for me. When I'm tired after a long work week, I just want to play games and have a reliable working OS, and Bazzite provides just that.
Gaming critical software for me also includes wine, wine-staging, umu, proton, LACT, coolercontrol, DXVK, VKD3D , Mangohud, Goverlay, LinuxGamingBenchmark,CapFrameX,Heroic-Launcher, Lutris, Playnite, VR-Stuff , OBS,OpenRazer, OpenRGB and more besides the drivers.
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