https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg
Graphs can be found here on their github. Since around mid November the active user count for Bazzite has gone up by around 16k active users.
Personally, my only wish for Bazzite is a Cosmic version 👼 I tried it out recently and it seems fairly impressive
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I'm three of those new installs. Bazzite has surpassed every expectation I had.
What's so special about this? Aside from the immutable thingy, of course.
It just works. It works better than Windows 11 in my experience. I can’t break it. I forget it’s there. I just do computer stuff. Like video editing, gaming, web browsing.
Probably the fact that they have many ISOs tailored for each supported hardware configuration, and they point the user to the right ISO with a clear wizard in their download page.
Also basically it is an unbreakable gaming focused OS very close to SteamOS, that you don't have to maintain, and it comes preconfigured with Steam and the right drivers for your setup. I'm not the target audience, but I see the appeal.
This, so much. I tried pop_os, mint, ubuntu, and more, but all had the problem that when I had an hour to play games, It became 55min of troubleshooting some random issue and not playing because of it.
With Bazzite i can finally use linux and just boot, play a game, shutdown. No hassle.
I think this is one of the big steps that make Linux gaming more accessible to the general public. Proton was clearly the first major step and Bazzite might be the second one.
Agreed, when SteamOS gets more general hardware supporty things will get interesting, but Bazzite is a desktop with superlative Steam support, while SteamOS is more a steam console with desktop support. When people, especially newbs, want to do desktop things with their general purpose machines, on SteamOS they're using Arch (bleeding edge, lower stability), while Bazzites get Fedora (sharp edge, higher stability and security) which should be a less painful and frustrating experience. Of course if there's a flatpak (possibly the third step) it'll be painless on either, and hey, everybody wins (except winblows) in either case.
This is why I chose it. Gaming living room computer that kids can't easily break. It just worked. Well, except for my idea to dual boot and have games pulling from an ntsf hdd. Bazzite hated that idea. So if you're using bazzite, make sure your games are on a Linux partition. Even though Linux is ok with ntsf, for some reason beyond my expertise... Games do not like it.
Steam tends to have massive issues with permissions for games on NTFS partitions. You might've run into that.
I second this, had the exact same issue but on Arch back in February. But luckily windows can be made to play nice with non-NTFS drives.
The immutable thing is nice, though it takes some getting used to. It's Fedora which I already love, without any of the hassle. Everything just works. I never realized how much time I was wasting until I didn't have to do it anymore. Every task I throw at it, it performs beautifully, even things I'm sure aren't going to work out of the box do. Every time, so far.
I was surprised how well it handles printers. We have an old Brother wireless laser mfp. It was pretty cool when it just saw the printer automatically, but I was really impressed with how easy scanning was.
I started going down the rabbit hole of manually installing and configuring it, but then tested some simple terminal command and it already saw the scanner. Ran skanpage and Bob's your uncle.
I think you are the first person to ever have had issues with printers on Linux if you are surprised by them working on Bazzite. Printers are one of the things that almost always "just work" on Linux, and are only a driver headache on Windows
You must have uncanny luck with printers then. The printer I have I bought for it's Linux support and I still have problems.