So I've been using it for a week or so, tried some other distros on the side, also tried some very dangerous things like rebasing from KDE to Gnome. I'll present my impressions as lists of good and bad things. Also keep in mind I've been mostly using Gnome in the past, so some of this feedback might be more about KDE / Plasma 6 in general, rather than Bazzite itself.
Bad:
- The most shocking issue I figured only yesterday is that games didn't use my NVIDIA GPU and instead used integrated one, I simply didn't expect NVIDIA edition of gaming-tailored distro could fuck up this, until I tried some heavier games yesterday and checked glxinfo after being unsatisfied by performance - only to find out it was indeed the case, workaround/fix can be found here.
- Transparency and blur work in a rather tricky way and by default blur is set to maximum that makes transparency not visible at all, took me a while to figure this out.
- Aurorae window decoration themes don't support "draw border on maximized and tiled windows" and there are no workaround without doing things that are very unsafe/unstable in context of atomic distro like Bazzite so for the rice I wanted I had to stick with builtin Breeze theme which is old and limited in many ways, I pretty much had to achieve everything with color scheme + panel colorizer alone.
- I don't remember how exactly this happened, but killswitch option in Linux ProtonVPN client somehow got broken in a way that I couldn't connect to internet at all because killswitch was activated and couldn't disable killswitch at the same time, I had to create another user and remove previous one. It also bombarded me with some errors regarding "kdewallet" that I don't understand. Worth noting, I've been using this client with killswitch on many Gnome distros before and never had this issue anywhere else.
- When using external monitor, some apps and games don't perform the same. For example, Blender's viewport feels less smooth/snappy than on internal monitor.
- By default mouse acceleration is on, which makes it feel weird/bad in some games and graphic programs, I believe it makes more sense to have it off by default and I'm not sure why even include that option in gaming-focused distro, I can't imagine anyone wanting to use it. Gaming is all about raw input (imo).
- Builtin terminal is rendered in its own style completely ignoring theming, I didn't like it at all. I was able to install alacritty via rpm-ostree though and it works just fine.
Good:
- All my favorite windows-only games installed from the first try with zero workarounds. And after fixing the issue with wrong GPU, performance in games is awesome, feels like it might actually be slightly better than on Windows.
- After discovering panel colorizer and figuring some quirks of Plasma 6 theming, especially in context of immutable distro, I was able to achieve look and feel I'm very happy about.
- I really like the idea of immutable/atomic distro, and ecosystem for using it here is solid and mature. It feels like system is very safe and bulletproof.
- Even though it's not recommended but rebasing from KDE to Gnome did work well with maybe some minor issues which I'm not even sure weren't just Gnome issues. In the end I didn't like Gnome version more than KDE one and decided to clean up my partitions and reinstalled KDE version again.
- I also briefly checked some alternative distros like Nobara, but nothing impressed me more than Bazzite.
- Volume and brightness controls, bluetooth, network manager, disks utility, and after some tweaking dolphin - everything works smooth, everything supports scenarios I want to use, and most of those feel better and more advanced than Windows or Gnome alternatives.
- Builtin ujust utility is neat and has a lot of optional tools installable in one command, like "ujust bazzite-cli", which installs and intergrates other utilities like atuin, fzf, ripgrep.
- I feel rather happy about it now, and I don't expect it to break anytime soon or have any major issues for me. Time will tell though.
