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 š¼ I tried it out recently and it seems fairly impressive
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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. š
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.)
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.
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
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. š
A gaming focused distro will do everything else well too, so thats probably why.
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 youāre serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.
Generally your life is improved any time you choose to not engage with gnome or it's nonsense. It's a good rule of thumb for everything Linux related.
Gnome is just bad apple.
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. š
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
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.
This is bullshit. Containers run natively on your system just like "native" [sic] applications.
They literally say they are a fucking container tool like Docker in their own FAQ , you silly person.
Thatās not what the FAQ says, rather it says Flatpaks are often sandboxed but not fully containerized. Containers donāt need to have a performance penalty because they run on the same kernel as the host. Container tech applies a chroot, disables some capabilities within the container and thatās about it. They are in contrast to virtual machines that need to boot an entire additional OS before doing anything.
Looks like I don't understand how it works and should simply shut the fuck up instead of spreading nonsense.
That's not what they were refuting. They were just saying that containers run on the metal just like any other software.
š
Read again. You completely misunderstood.
What's a container that doesn't run natively on the system called?
There is no such thing.
Containers are just separated from the rest of your system by cgroups. You can even see the executable running in containers with
psandtop. They're native binaries running on the same kernel as the rest of your system.āļø
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. šš
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 experienceā¦ After recovering from that dumb misadventure, I finally learned to take those announcements more seriously.
Yeah, vaguely š 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. š Seems like a win-win. š
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. š¤š„ø
The āunless you know what youāre doingā part tells me itās 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, itās awesome. If you break your system, you get to keep the pieces and learn something new along the way.
Iām utilizing this liberty by being a lazy admin who updates things like eventuallyā¢ or soonā¢. Havenāt learned any hard lessons yet, so I guess itās ok. Or maybe I just know what Iām doingā¦
Yea I bounced off Bazzite because I needed to run plex. And I couldnāt get a container to run reliably on it. Itās 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.
Distrobox is not a feature of immutable distros. It runs just fine on Debian. As does flatpak.
Duh, but it shines in immutable. Enjoy your debian, I like it too, for servers.
It "shines"? It's the same thing.