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 surprised people are so keen on these gaming-focused distros.
I just want a great, general-purpose computing system that can do gaming as well. 😁
It's not so much that people are focused on gaming distros, it's more that gaming distros historically haven't been much of a thing, and gamers generally had to use windows for their gaming, because the linux experience was limited and sub-optimal. Even dedicated linux users would keep a windows partition/machine that they used for gaming.
That's not true anymore, as basically anything without kernel level anti cheat works on linux, which means that a huge amount of folk that would have moved to linux earlier, but couldn't, are now coming over.
Which is to say, it's not so much that there is "so many of them", it's more that, they're coming over in a big wave, because they've been there for years, but haven't been able to move until recently, and now, they know that there are distros out there that look and feel like something they're familiar with.
I guess we have different use cases is all. People who primarily use their computers for gaming.
My PC is:
(In no particular order.)
I think a lot of people are basically looking for "Windows but not Microsoft/Windows". So it's their gaming PC where they also browse the internet/social media and watch YouTube or Twitch (sometimes at the same time that they're gaming), and maybe do some other ancillary stuff like art (digital art, 3d rendering, music, video or photo editing, etc.) or some other hobby related stuff.
So Bazzite is kinda at the center of this perfect storm where plenty of PC gamers have seen the SteamOS/Big Picture mode and gone, "If I could use SteamOS as a traditional desktop, I would in a heartbeat" while Microsoft is also fumbling harder than they ever have - which is saying a lot - and Linux is the easiest to get up and running that it's ever been - to the point where immutable distros are as plug and play as Windows. Then Bazzite comes along and says, "Hey, SteamOS isn't desktop comparable yet, so we went and made it ourselves (with blackjack, and hookers)."
Most people I know primarily use their desktop computers for games. Bazzite also works great for general purpose computing, although it isn't advertised as such.
Agreed. Bloody fantastic for general purpose. Seems like a well kept secret. A lot of people assume Bazzite is just Steam in Big-Screen mode.
For some things.
For many things it isn't. It is usable (I use it) but with a bunch of workarounds for anything embedded development-related since it needs specific vendor software with device access. I have had to use a variety of distrobox + app image solutions that are often a bit worse than a system that installs them as native apps.
I don't personally count "embedded development-related" as "general computing" so I think there's a disconnect there. 😅
It's like gaming laptops. The concept of something being "gaming" focused is nonsense bullshit pr spin.
If it's good at gaming it's basically just good at everything. But people gobble up gaming like leds on a serect lab chair.
TIL chairs have LEDs now
Universal Blue is the project which maintains Bazzite and other brilliant immutable images based on Fedora Silverblue (Gnome) and Fedora Kinoite (KDE)
Bazzite has Steam bundled in the image which is a bit better for performance, Bazzite-dx is Bazzite with devtools.
Aurora is another image made for general computing, Steam is installed as a Flatpak with a little worse performance but not much
Bluefin is your typical dev-workstation
If you’re serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.
Why is Flatpak Steam worse for performance? I've been using it for years, seemingly better performance than Windows on the same system. Something inherent about Flatpak?
Mm, I don't think I'd be willing to sacrifice my Niri workflow. Niri also supports fractional scaling and VRR, but not yet HDR, which I can live without until it's implemented. 😁
Flatpak is simply a sandboxed application, similar to a Docker container. Its better to have natively installed applications over sandboxed if you are seeking the highest level of performance.
You have essentially made all your games run within a sandboxed instance which has a limited set of binaries that emulate another mini OS within your primary OS.
If you haven't seen any performance issues, then keep on doing what you're doing, the software is very well made compared to Ubuntu Snap and likely has similar driver performance as close as possible to bare-metal
This is bullshit. Containers run natively on your system just like "native" [sic] applications.
Isn't it just library bundling? It's not like it's running inside a virtual machine or anything.
I can see the Rocket League process right there when listing my user processes, e.g.
There are so many conflicting reports regarding the performance on Flatpak, for Steam but also in general, so I don't know what to believe.
At least one source said the performance overhead is negligible on modern hardware, so I think I'm gucci.
A gaming focused distro will do everything else well too, so thats probably why.
Yeah, I'm the same, but if it's an easy way to get people into the warm embrace of Linux, then hopefully they'll look around and see other (Gen Purpose) distros exist.
To be fair some of these distros centered on gaming may really have some priorities that are more useful for gamers. Like better driver and system support. And I think they're still capable of doing well outside of gaming.
True. Let's hope it's a great stepping-stone. 😊👍
In my experience, Debian has been very low maintenance. Occasionally, you may run into an issue that would be solved by having newer packages. If that happens, consider switching to Fedora.
My Fedora installations have been pretty smooth. The only thing that always breaks randomly is the software update GUI. I just got fed up with that and ended up using the terminal for installing all updates. Apparently this distro requires a bit more maintenance.
My experience as well with my Arch installations after a decade with that distro. I run a system upgrade because I want to, not because I need to. Never does it break unless I'm careless when upgrading and not checking the news page beforehand, which you are supposed to do. As long as I play by the rules, it's super stable. (Never did it break for me anyway though. Never happened apart from hardware failure.)
Although admittedly I almost never do check the news page before upgrading, but/because there's rarely anything there. And after a while you learn to recognize the volatile packages which can break your system, so e.g. if
systemdhas an update I'll check the page before hitting enter, and so on.Remember this one from 2022?
Yeah, that one ended up being a learning experience… After recovering from that dumb misadventure, I finally learned to take those announcements more seriously.
Yeah, vaguely 😅 I use syslinux for booting, habit from when I used to dual boot, so I was luckily not affected. But yes, it is definitely wise to check the news before upgrading system-critical packages!
I can't be bothered to update every day, or even every week. LOL. More like once a month or so, which means that it's usually 100 MB or more and there's at least one package that is more or less critical. When I start updating, and before hitting Y, I pause for a second and realise I should totally check the news first. Usually, it's fine, but over the years, there have been a few times when intervention was necessary.
If you only update once a month (which should be fine as well, definitely), then you only need to check the news page once a month too, less often than I do probably. 😄 Seems like a win-win. 👌
You can also selectively update packages of course, but this is strongly ill-advised unless you know what you're doing.
But like,
doas pacman -Sy firefoxshould be fine...You didn't hear it from me. 🤐🥸
The “unless you know what you’re doing” part tells me it’s totally worth it in some highly exceptional situations. You just need to be able to justify spending a few hours to figure out exactly how to do it safely.
Best thing about Linux is that you can do literally anything you want. If it works, it’s awesome. If you break your system, you get to keep the pieces and learn something new along the way.
I’m utilizing this liberty by being a lazy admin who updates things like eventually™ or soon™. Haven’t learned any hard lessons yet, so I guess it’s ok. Or maybe I just know what I’m doing…
Agreed. 😄 Arch and pacman definitely adheres to this philosophy of "unless you know what you're doing". Pacman allows this type of selective upgrade, and it allows to ignore any package you like during a system/all-package upgrade, which may or may not break the system.
You can also post-install make changes to the database of installed packages, like change the install reason for a package (as a dependency or as explicitly installed).
All these things are happily executed without warning. 😁
The reason for the need to check the news is that the system can have any combination of package versions installed, and requiring manual intervention by the user in any quirky upgrade situations helps to keep the complexity down of the system and package manager. I think it's worth the low complexity.
The overhead of checking the website is super low. It's basically the same as checking the release notes when there's a new version of Ubuntu, or whatever other software you might be curious of. Same thing.
Yea I bounced off Bazzite because I needed to run plex. And I couldn’t get a container to run reliably on it. It’s still a cool distro though.
Edit: typo
Very easy with podman / quadlets
This. If you must have rooted containers docker-compose is only a
rpm-ostree install docker-composeaway, but that's a big ass layer, you'll feel it every update, and insecure to boot (yes I know docker finally got userspace, but how many times have you seen it used? Everywhere it's root.). Run your docker-compose file through podlet, and there you go, userspace quadlets (95+% of the time, every time...). They're easy to love once you get your head around them.
Yeah, this is the "fun" of bazite. If you want to do the things it does well (desktopy things) it works well. But then things that are trivial in other distros are a pain. And the "solution" is to actually run one of those other distros in a container. It's ridiculous.
Bazite is for people who want a computer to be like an iPhone near as I can tell.
I think you as yet don't quite understand the full beauty of immutable distros. Running things in distroboxes, yeah even other distros, is not a bug, it's a feature (really) because you cannot break your main OS with a distrobox. As a developer it's a godsend, finnicky AI project that needs a specific version of python and CUDA drivers and only has instructions for Arch ? That's a distrobox, spin it up, play with it, archive it for later, put it away.
There's tiers in Bazzite, for GUI apps, flatpak, if what you want isn't there, it's in a distrobox Arch in AUR and you can integrate it as an application into the main OS. Stuff that truly needs system level access, like zsh and intel-undervolt gets layered into the main OS with rpm-ostree. There's security benefits as well like SELinux, but this post has gone on long enough.
It is so not an iPhone.
I have two computers at my main desk at home. One is exclusively used for gaming, the other is used for everything else. In theory Bazzite is perfect for me.
Why don't you do the "everything else" part on your gaming PC as well so you don't have to have two?
Performance. I’m a heavy multi tasker and I want nothing to get in the way of my frame rate.
For context my old second machine was a 2018 Mac mini with an 8th Gen. i5 and 32 gigs of ram. It wasn’t enough.
Huh.
I guess with my 16 cores and 64 GB DDR5 I don't really notice anything hampering my frame rate. 😅
But on my old PC with just 12 cores and 32 GB DDR4, I would sometimes close Firefox and all those YouTube tabs to get some memory back and make some CPU cycles available. Gosh darn Linux just handing out memory on loan rather than what's available. I don't use a swap file either. 😅
But I guess just closing stuff down isn't an option? Is it like services running?
AMDs dual CCD CPUs tend to perform worse than their single ccd models in games. You can “fix” that by running the game only on one, and push everything else to the second. But I’d much rather not deal with that. A second computer is much easier.
Plus I can fuck with computer A when computer B is still doing other things without interrupting. That alone is worth it.
Also if you’re in a game and you have a video running that taking GPU horsepower. I’m not going to have a second GPU just to avoid that.
Hey, if you have the space and don't mind the extra heat and electricity consumption 😎👌 all good by me.
That's the other thing. My new computer is a Mac Studio which takes up almost no space, and uses like 10-15 watts. Because I can just turn off my gaming computer when I'm not using it I'm saving significantly more power. Like just your CPU at idle uses more than the entire Mac actually doing things.
My second screen is a laptop (T580), also bazzite, often running moonlight to the big monitor so the main box goes to low power mode when not in use (it's also the NAS, so no sleep, but mostly lives @ ~50W, got the GPU down to 4W idle :)