Hopefully Valve will release a general version of SteamOS with Steam Machine coming (and even they are questionable with their track record)
While what you're saying isn't impossible, it's unlikely. In the event it did happen, Bazzite is a fork, a signing key, and a couple forked Fedora Copr repos away from being made completely in someone else's control.
I did voice that concern in some Bazzite-related spaces before and it felt like it got brushed off with a weird undertone.
Note that we remove rpm Firefox for security reasons. You do not want your browser to only update with your entire operating system.
It's an important question to ask.
How do you even discover the good games that are worth being played on Android?
I'm aware of https://nobsgames.stavros.io/ , but I'm afraid it might not be extremely up-to-date
And also, I think that Google Play has a much bigger problem than Steam, when it comes to old games being made unavailable (think EA's zzSunset stuff)
Both Microsoft and Sony AAA titles, most third parties publish there and most indie games release there first. Steam's library is unparalleled in the industry, the only thing it's truly missing is Nintendo's games.
Note that this was in a change proposal which was rescinded without a vote by it's proposer.
> As much as I’d like this change to happen, it’s too soon. This change would kill off projects like Bazzite entirely right as Fedora is starting to make major headway in the gaming space.
> I’m speaking as it’s founder, if this change is actually made as it is written the best option for us is to just go ahead and disband the project.
Now, whenever you would've actually shut down the project is a different story, but your messaging was very clear.
The messaging was very clear that the upstream change would make Bazzite almost untenable.
It was a criticism of Fedora, not a threat to quit.
However, this comment chain was of how vulnerable non commercial projects like it are to outside factors making causing exactly this issue, making further maintenance on the project infeasible... Consequently ending it, effectively.
There is no blame in play here. haunter merely quoted this as a reason for why theyre worried about it longevity - and considering there was a discussion about an upstream change which would've realized his worry... It seems not at all misrepresented?
Fwiw, I personally don't share the same worry as haunter, because I don't see the chosen distribution nor OS as a significant investment. I feel comfortable switching things around occasionally
I don’t interpret “an upstream change would make this project impossible to maintain” as a “threat”.
About their interpretation (threat or not threat) we can argue.
If nothing else, the only way these problems ever get solved is by bringing them up, surfacing the issues and providing an impetus to get them solved.
Did you mean diktat?
Just need the Atomic Fedora base to still be around and everything else is already pre-setup to run on GitHub infrastructure neither of which I anticipate going away soon. (Famous last words)
Calling it a superset of Fedora rather than just being its own bespoke distro can be a fine line, but really there's nothing stopping anyone from forking it and continuing on, a good few people run their own forks already to meet their own needs a bit more specifically.
I'm a fan of my Steam Deck and SteamOS, but I'd like that experience to eventually be available via community supported distros, which Valve/Igalia can rebase from, and instead focus on Proton.
Bazzite is the closest to that that we have so far.
So if Bazzite did go that way you could have fedora running in under an hour and with flatpak most thing will just work.
One `rpm-ostree rebase` from Bazzite to a server-oriented flavour of Fedora Silverblue and it's been running and updating flawlessly since then.
You can still fix them manually though, although that's probably not worth the effort in most cases
Anyways, I get that this is a "risk" to consider, but installing a new distro isn't so bad that it should prevent one from trying and using a currently extant distro if it works for them.
This is a bit of an oversimplification, but Bazzite, Bluefin, etc, are basically just Dockerfiles that use Atomic Fedora as the base image.
So you are basically getting a pre-built docker container that is "Fedora + various configs added on top", and then you are booting that docker image.
Since it's just a container file, anyone could theoretically just fork the Bazzite repo, make some changes to the Dockerfile, then push it to github + let github actions build a custom docker image.
So is that custom docker image a distro? Some would say yes, others would say no.
Tl;dr: Run Monado w/ OpenComposite for the Index, it runs way better.
Thanks for the information~
Currently I literally can’t find the time to convert my drive from master boot record to GPT for Windows 11. I can’t imagine having to completely switch operating systems/distros because it just disappeared. Worrying if it will still be around is legitimate.
I am/was a big PC enthusiast but could no longer keep up with all the stuff due to real-life, eventually even gave up gaming for a few years as I just did not have the time.
The Nintendo Switch bought me back into (limited) gaming. I liked that I could just play from anywhere in short bursts, or could just hook it up to my TV and pick up the controller for longer sessions. The best part, I never had to worry about updates breaking things, or doing system maintenance - I could just power it on and jump straight into gaming. But I still missed my old PC games, especially playing games like Diablo II and Age of Empires.
When the Steam Deck came along, it changed everything. Well, technically I didn't get the Deck, I got a GPD Win Mini instead, and installed Bazzite on to it... but same thing. I get the same convenience as I had with the Switch, except now I had the added advantage of being able to play all my PC games (yes, all of them. No, I don't play games with nasty kernel anticheats).
Regarding your concern about Bazzite completely disappearing, the good news it it doesn't really matter. Since everything you customised lives on your home drive, all you need to do is backup your home drive, and that backs up everything you'd care about. You can use this same backup in Windows (Steam allows you to easily import a library from a different drive/folder) and your Pictures/Documents etc are basically the same folder layout as Windows. I actually ended up setting a triple-boot setup of Windows, Bazzite and CachyOS on my handheld, and they all point to the same Steam Library, same Documents etc. So not only do I have tripe redundancy, it shows how portable and migratable this stuff is.
How is that longevity?
I miscounted though, I’ve been running the same OS since Windows 7. Probably 2014. I’ve been able to upgrade without having to throw away my entire operating system. Consoles aren’t a solution for longevity.
Nintendos had 3 generations in that time and Xbox has had countless churn in its hardware.
Games are something I do to relax. I want as little friction to play the games as possible. For tech projects and work stuff having to mess with the OS and move away from deprecated stuff isn’t such a big deal, it’s part of the work. But for games I want them to just work as much as possible, I don’t want to have to find a new distro and install it and set everything up again on my gaming PC.
Despite Windows sucking in so many ways, it is the OS with the most assurance that a game will work without fuss. I am happy to see Linux closing this gap.
A community distro (be it a console-like gaming focused distro or not) is going to be the way to be the way to go for the foreseeable future. I'm pretty happy with running EndeavorOS w/ KDE, Steam, and Heroic. The Steam client with Proton is where most of the magic happens in Linux anyway. If I wanted to get fancy, I could set up GameScope with Steam Big Picture to take a SteamOS/Bazzite approach.
Additionally, I think Valve doesn't want to end up over-committed to replacing Windows. They can handle the storefront side and do a decent job with handling the runtime, but actually committing to a desktop alternative to Windows would be spreading their resources thin. It feels like a smart call to not jump into that arena if your hardware products don't need it.
I am also not sure why you think they wouldn't want to end up replacing Windows. Thats exactly what they've been trying to do since microsoft included their store in windows. That is more than a decade long plan in motion which already failed once but they are still at it.
> Custom distros are not new operating system
Nothing is. Windows uses old DOS code, macOS uses BSD code, nobody's OS is truly written "from scratch" in 2025. Just because you can recycle old programs doesn't mean writing an OS is easy.
> majority of hw support is because linux supports it. It would probably be more work for Valve to support only their hw
And much of Linux hardware support is not in-kernel, period. Valve could not flip a switch and start supporting Asahi Macs or Nvidia's proprietary UNIX drivers; they would be committing to patching and maintaining all of their future quirks and surprises. Not even Valve should be wasting their time doing that.
> I am also not sure why you think they wouldn't want to end up replacing Windows.
They do! But "wanting to replace Windows" and "wanting to write the replacement for Windows" are two different things. Valve's current software team has a headcount lower than 500, they aren't equipped to compete with Microsoft even if they wanted to. It's much easier for them to ship all-in-one style devices that keep expectations low and replicate Windows' most desirable features.
> which already failed once
Steam Machine was a home console, it did not replace Windows for anything that wasn't directly ported to Linux. The lesson from this era is simple; supporting Linux is hard. It's hard for developers, hard for consumers and especially hard for Valve.
Steam OS I believe is based on Arch. Bazzite is based on Fedora. Personally I have experience with Debian distros so if I wanted a gaming-focused distro I would pick maybe something like Pop OS.
There are limitations but if you want a gaming machine, bazzite is a no-brainer to me. Poo is very impressive but I just don’t want to fight my OS constantly when it comes to gaming.
I’m not familiar with how the process works, but if you are setting the password somewhere, it’s exposed to being extracted. You want the password to be something you type in on boot.
Also, the password isn't stored anywhere, you get prompted by the BIOS upon every boot to unlock the drive.
FDE would be nice though.
It’s not in a consumer friendly state yet, but I’ve been using my steamdeck with encryption for a month now with zero issues. I guess technically this is not “full” disk encryption since it’s just the home dir, but I only care about protecting my personal info which is all in the home dir anyway.
1. It’s not exactly some fly by night thing at this point, it’s extremely popular, which means the likelihood of having maintainers and sponsors step up with, at the very least, an easy migration path is high.
2. You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?
3. Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)
In 2009 the CentOS maintainers was AWOL and nobody had any idea where they went and had no access. This caused issues with releases obviously.
There been quite a number of times where people have died, just got bored, had health issues and a project just stops and sometimes people don't access to things.
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/07/30/130249/CentOS-Proj...
> Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)
That sounds all horribly complicated.
I have a dotfiles, 5 bash scripts and a ~/bin folder for anything outside of package manager. I migrated my laptop to Arch recently from Debian and fixing the scripts was literally copy the script, and do a find and replace (I literally put pacman instead of apt install and most of it worked).
It not that much of a big deal to move between distros.
You have 5 bash scripts and various dotfiles. That sounds a lot more complicated.
Bazzite is really not much different to any of the atomic fedora distributions.
The only thing more complicated about immutable Linux is that you have to rethink how you install packages a little bit, as you’re generally using installation methods that offer isolation from your base operating system.
The big upside of this is that essentially all of your modifications are confined to your home directory, and of course system updates and rollbacks are trivial.
When all of that complexity doesn't work (which sooner or later it will), it will be more difficult to fix.
I don’t mean to say “my choice of distro is better than yours” because I know atomic Linux isn’t for everyone. But if we are talking about complexity specifically, this is an advantage to immutable distros.
Your Debian system never exactly matches any specific build that’s been tested and verified by your distro’s contributors.
Even worse when you run dist-upgrade. I think every Debian/Ubuntu user has been burned by that process at least once in their lives, some people avoid it entirely and clean install.
In Atomic Linux anything breaks there is a single command to revert back to the last system image. Rollback reboot and you’re done:
rpm-ostree rollback
If I have some kind of issue I have an exact release that every other user has with the exact same set of system and included packages.
One issue I had with OpenSuSE was that once a new release drops you have around 6mo to migrate all your machines over to it. Which, for most businesses, is a pretty short timeline, in my experience.
I've always preferred authoring RPMs over debs, but Caninical having basically one distro without the forks, I think is a huge benefit for a business using them.
The good news is, you can easily rebase to any other uBlue or even Fedora Atomic distro with just one or two commands, or if you're technical, you can even fork Bazzite's repo and build your own Bazzite (they even provide instructions on how to do this, it's very very simple, relatively speaking).
I am a long time Arch user but I totally understand why they went with Fedora for Bazzite.