Bazzite Linux 44 lands for desktop gamers and it's a big release

Bazzite Linux 44 has landed now that Fedora 44 has been released, and with it plenty of nice changes for gamers wanting a good Linux distribution.

Currently, only the desktop edition appears to have been fully released so if you're on handhelds you'll have an extra wait. Writing in an official announcement Bazzite founder Kyle Gospodnetich mentioned: "For our deck users, we will be opening Bazzite 44 builds for deck in testing in the near future. We are slow-rolling this update due to the nature and amount of changes present in it to ensure that the vast majority of our existing users have a good experience. We’ll update you on our progress in the coming weeks and look forward to testing it with you!"

What's new in Bazzite 44:

• KDE Plasma 6.6 w/ new Plasma Login Manager
• GNOME 50
• OGC Kernel 6.19.x, with 7.0 coming in the near future. (Yes, we will include the Valve VRAM patchset with 7.0)
• Mesa 26.0.5
• Bazaar 0.7.15
• Ptyxis has been dropped from our KDE images, and the new Konsole terminal is available with container support.
• SBOMs (Which now power our changelogs), Build Attestation, OpenSSF security scanning, and signed ISOs.
• Built in support for Elgato 4K capture cards
• Images reduced by 1GB thanks to moving in-image QEMU and ROCM to Bazzite-DX for users who need them
• Access to the latest and greatest ASUS Linux patches for use with ASUSCtl (A brew package for this is being explored to make it even easier)
• New brew installer for Sunshine via ujust. Sunshine is no longer preinstalled in-image.

Bazzite is my top recommendation for gaming handhelds and TV PCs, as it makes a lot of the setup really simple. It stays out of the way and gets you gaming quickly - exactly what you want.

I have it on my Lenovo Legion Go (1st generation) and it has overall been an excellent SteamOS-like experience. Don't really have anything bad to say about it, everything just works smoothly and I've put many hours gaming into it thanks to Bazzite.