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
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.
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 ntfs 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 ntfs 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.
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
It’s not really surprising, Bazzite has been the talk of Linux internet for the last 18 or so months.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
A gaming focused distro will do everything else well too, so thats probably why.
I ended up with CachyOS over Bazzite but I'm looking into the latter for my dad since I'm guessing it's more stable and easier.
I just... Idk, I like Arch over Fedora. I blame the little pacman eating my progress whenever I install stuff in konsole. Desktop mode to desktop mode it's the same KDE Plasma I'd be using, though. Are there any other striking differences between Cachy and Bazzite?
Edit: it was good to bring it up here, y'all are very knowledgeable on these things. It sounds to me that I need to get bazzite for my dad mostly because he won't want to fuss or work on it and that I made the right call for myself since Cachy (and Arch in general) gives more flexibility. Frankly I might not even give him desktop mode default, he strictly wants something to play from bed in full on retirement mode.
AFAIK CachyOS still demands a little involvement in the OS. Like, you have to watch the logs when you update, you need keep context in mind, like knowing you're running KDE and an Nvidia card and so on. But I feel like Bazzite would be more usable to someone who doesn't know (and doesn't need to know) what a filesystem or a discrete GPU are.
But in terms of stability, CachyOS has been rock solid for me. The cadence that Arch + CachyOS devs fix stuff has been utterly perfect.
So I say if your dad is more 'software curious,' give him CachyOS. If he doesn't like messing with computer stuff, give him Bazzite.
I went from Arch to Fedora idk, I think over a decade ago and haven't looked back, not sure how things are nowadays, but I switched again this year from Fedora to Bazzite and I love it. Sure, you've got to learn to do things a little differently, but so far it's been great. And it forced me to use distrobox, which honestly I should have done sooner, it's absolutely great.
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.
Sample size of 1, here.
Bazzite was my initial entry-point into Linux, but I bounced off it within 48 hours as its immutable nature made it impossible for me to install the native PIA VPN client and for the life of me I couldn’t get the OpenVPN to play nice.
Currently on CachyOS, and seems to run just fine - giving an end user just enough rope 😅
Plus it’s Arch underneath the hood too, so I can still cheekily say that I run Arch!
ETA: I wonder if/how long I would count as part of this Bazzite cohort?
Yeah I struggled with reading my rom library over SMB so also had to install something else.
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’ve been using Bazzite for a while and mostly happy with it. So from 2026 and on, I’ll start donating a Windows license amount of money to Bazzite and other fundementals every year. Because fuck Windows, that’s why.
As a normie, I love Bazzite because it's as intuitive as Microsoft without the intrusive and monopolistic proprietary features, and Bazzite is also built for gaming.
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]
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
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/
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.
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.
I'm in this picture. Installed bazzite on steam deck and it's fucking awesome!
What does it do better than SteamOS on the Steam Deck itself?
Genuinely asking as I didn't really see any need to switch even as the compulsive tinkerer that I am...
Very cool. I am still running Bazzite as my reintroduction into Linux as a daily and it's been great for gaming but I will say that as more and more familiarity rolls in, I do get frustrated with it being an immutable distro and having to jump through hoops to get it do what I want.
Still I think it's a great distro for those who don't want to deal with MS bullshit anymore and a great friendly, works right out of the box while you learn or relearn Linux, and gets you gaming without a lot of hassle and having to deal with less than friendly Linux users.
I found, as an experienced Linux user, that with Bazzite you've got to forget the complicated approaches you're used to, and go for the easy one, it usually works. Lots can be done from KDE's system settings, or from the bundled utilities. Also I disagree with the order they chose for the application installation methods on their wiki, I think distrobox should be right after Flatpak.
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.
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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