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
What I would like to know is what data they use as a reference to produce that graph and whether that data can be audited.
buy, buy, BUY!
The universal blue distros are the fastest I've been able to have a usable computer up and running and doing what I want it to do. They are fantastic.
There are no official cosmic variants anymore, but there are things like Origami that you can rebase to, if you want to try. Can't vouch for their stability, but it's an option. If support is dropped you can rebase back to regular bazzite. Rebasing is easy and pretty safe, it basically acts like an update and switches out the system files, but you should back up your config files just in case the different DE's don't play nice with each others config settings. From what ublue developers have said this can cause problems or annoyances.
Or you could develop your own derivitive with bluebuild or something. I'm not sure how involved that requires you to be, but it's probably easier than learning nixos.
How do you know how many active users?
fedora distros have a thing called countme that pings their servers so they can measure general trends in how many people are using the OS and the various spins, which can be helpful for determining what to focus on. some amount of the userbase opt out of it
And this is on by default?
It is on by default, but can be disabled in your repo config: https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/conf_ref.html
The feature works by adding a flag to one random http request to a fedora repo every week. Fedora then aggregates the http logs that have been flagged to derive their metrics. You can opt out of sending the flag, but if you're querying fedora repos then you still end up in their http log.
But saying it pings their servers isn't quite a fair statement as it's not some background service that opens a network connection, it sounds to me at least like it's data that is sent to the Fedora repos once a week when you update your system?
Clients (DNF, PackageKit, …) have been modified so they add a countme variable in their requests to mirrors.fedoraproject.org once a week. This ends up in our webserver log data which lets us generate usage statistics.
Would be glad to be corrected on this though as I am a long time Fedora user now and I'm not overly fond of my data being collected by big corpo; it's why I left Windows in the first place 🙄
I feel like people lately go a bit overboard when it's about protecting their "data".
As far as I see all it does is just send one single number that shows that there is someone using this specific operation system and it does not include any personal or unique to the user information.
In my opinion this does not even qualify as "my data"
That's cool. I don't really have a problem with that, just curious.
It’s not really surprising, Bazzite has been the talk of Linux internet for the last 18 or so months.
I'm three of those new installs. Bazzite has surpassed every expectation I had.
It's a little strange how these numbers are relatively far off from what the Steam Hardware Survey suggests. On there, Linux is 3.2% of the userbase and Bazzite is 5.5% of that, so Bazzite is about 0.176% of the total userbase. Steam has about 70 million daily active users, so Bazzite's share of that would be about 120 000.
could be bazzite users are more/less likely to take the hardware survey or are likely to opt out of countme.
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. 😁
A gaming focused distro will do everything else well too, so thats probably why.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fedora installations have been pretty smooth.
ended up using the terminal for installing all updates.
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 systemd has 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.
Huh I guess it's "normal" but I hadn't heard of Linux OSes tracking active user telemetry. Turns out this is a fedora / rpm mechanism that tracks the ip addresses of people updating their system. Something to think about. Archlinux for example does not do any form of this tracking as far as I can tell
Debian has an option to anonymously report packages installed. There's a question about this at install time and at any time you can install or uninstall the popularity-contest package.
In Debian, that’s opt-in, whereas in Ubuntu it’s opt-out. Tells you something about the core values, doesn’t it?
iirc it doesnt track ip, it just sends a ping for counting, the unique ID is when you installed your distro. its easy to opt out of. in the past it used IP but they changed it because they didnt like the privacy implications of it. regardless, you should use secureblue if you want a fedora atomic image focused on privacy and security. personally i consider the risk of being included in the count negligible (and on par with pinging timeservers imo, so unless youre making your computer completely silent its kinda nonsensical to worry about) so i keep it running. you still ultimately pull data from fedora/bazzite servers for updates (and thus, show IP) so i dont really understand consternation over this.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/counting/
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/infra/sysadmin_guide/dnf-counting/
In my mother language, kinoite sounds like "what a night", ans I can't read it without some giggling >.<
Also, TIL that kinoite is a mineral
Wikipedia: Bazzite is a Fedora-based[1] Linux distribution designed to be similar to Valve's SteamOS 3 while still functioning as a normal computer.[2][3][4] It offers support for handheld PC devices, including the Steam Deck.[5][6][7][8] Bazzite is named after the mineral of the same name, as Fedora Atomic Desktops historically had used a mineral naming scheme.[9] It aims to deliver a seamless out-of-the-box experience for both casual and advanced Linux gamers.[10]
Been a happy Bazzite users for over a year. Not much of a gamer but NVIDIA drivers that don't require tinkering during updates (like with immutable Fedora) and being able to just use the old install until broken updates (sleep mode maybe once?) is sooooo convenient! Also people on their Discord (yeah, I know ...) are generally super helpful.
I'm not wild about it for desktop, but I did convert a laptop into a gaming PC for the living room (for lighter titles). I went with Bazzite for the Steam-deck like features and it has been great.
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.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
