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.
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’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.
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.
It’s not really surprising, Bazzite has been the talk of Linux internet for the last 18 or so months.
It's amazing. Everything works perfectly, all my favorite games run smooth and gnome is amazing.
I left Linux 10 years ago because I didn't have the time to maintain a system.
Now it's less work than Windows to set everything up
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?
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.
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.
I installed Aurora today. My first immutable experience.
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.
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
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.
Many had cool presents it seems 🤭
I'm one. I set up a Windows/bazzite dual boot situation and I've never booted windows since.
I've recently dove back into Linux and my last try was on Mint. After a few issues I went back to Windows. With the recent Microsoft news I wasn't happy using a system that could start spying on me.
It's been close to a month and aside from some specific game issues likely due to running a nivida GPU I've been enjoying my time so far.
Copy paste did take a while to get used to. Also the default screenshot tool doesn't automatically put the snip on the clipboard.
My main focus is gaming so this has been a solid operating system to use.
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.
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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