Bazzite Post-Mortem
ba.antheas.dev
ba.antheas.dev
However, my current understanding is that the project remains active, so titling this article "Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over. It's certainly what I immediately assumed made it newsworthy.
is it? outside of autopsies, i think i have only ever seen it used as a synonym for "incident report". i dont think ive ever associated the term specifically with the end of a project.
e.g. cloudflare uses the tag for all of their incident reports (https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/post-mortem/), not as a signal that they are closing shop
That's what a post-mortem implies to me in the tech industry. A thing happened, it's over now, here are the lessons we learned to take into the future.
I'm aware about the use in incident reports of course, but then you still don't call it "<project name> Post-Mortem" but use a more specific namespace.
People should stop using it as a synonym, then. The Latin effectively means "after death", meaning its a poor synonym for "what happened wrong recently".
language evolves over time
post mortem is even in dictionaries (meriam, oxford, american heritage) as "an analysis or review of a finished event"
Calling it a post-mortem while others are continuing the project still seems kind of petty, though.
Doesn't look like he was, but then looking at the actual commit list: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/commits/main/?before=e49... He definitely had more than the 14 commits listed. They might've lost their email due to the conflicts & lost ownership over the commits?
Looking around a couple of adjacent communities, it seems the Bazzite maintainers might have acted in the best community interest on this one, so I'm optimistic things will continue in a positive way. Still, might make me a little less full-throated about recommending Bazzite, knowing there's such drama under the surface.
Maybe it's my "Am I out of touch ? No it's the children who are wrong" moment, but I really think OSS projects would benefit from ditching discord.
I didn't want to ask something and interacting in pseudo-realtime with another human being (that could potentionally laugh at me for asking a n00b question).
News groups were a little better for this, but the real progress was when you could search them or later read the answer in Stack Overflow. And the final step here is a LLM agent that has a web/doc search tool and can answer more difficult questions.
https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS...
The most salient part:
> Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
All of the things listed in the blog are personal and technical disagreements, nothing morally reprehensible, no disrespect, nothing that would make anyone want to burn bridges like this.
It's fine to leave a project and to publicize disagreements but this comes across as spiteful.
There is also a suspiciously long delay in closing the shell terminal which feels like it is storing or sending something but I have yet to debug it. This does not occur on any other of the many Linux distributions I have tested.
It is a snappy and decent distro otherwise. Good thing they are removing drama, something that almost nuked Mint not long after its inception.
I've been using Bazzite for almost a year and I have no idea what this is referring to
sudo ujust upgrade
sudo bootc upgrade
There's also Silverblue which is ready to go out of the box (unless you have Nvidia), Nobara which adds some gaming things. And on a different vein CachyOS is making waves with some gamers (but it's Arch based instead of Fedora and not atomic/immutable).
I would still like to see most users pick established distros, as contributions there have a higher impact on the ecosystem. But self-named gamers are probably harder to reason with.
Personally I find that sticking to distros backed by companies or very large communities is just easier in the long term (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch).
Even if you ignore any gaming optimizations, etc., this alone makes it a significantly better option than the official Fedora Atomic images.
I get that the distribution is geared towards steam+proton usage, but I was disoriented to see that one creates "an operating system for gamers", which will most certainly run a lot of windows executables, and then won't include wine in it. There is lutris preinstalled and the documentation also hints towards installing winezgui from their appstore (which is what I did), but I wonder why wasn't that obvious for the developers of bazzite that after installing the system, user would just want to download a game, double click the executable and play.
On the other hand, wine tends to be quite heavy package (503MB installed size according to arch repo), perhaps that's the reason for not including it.
I have heard that CachyOS (Arch) and Nobara (Fedora) are two other decent options.
Guess I gotta go back to cachy and try again. Bummer
what gets missed is that bazzite is, to borrow video game parlance, a mod of fedora's atomic desktops. every piece created to build and maintain the system is on github. it's not rocket science, it's a collection of dockerfiles, rpm specs, config files and github actions workflows. and fedora is not going away any time soon.
might need to hold off on that, as much as it pains me, with all the weird & sloppy updates windows is pushing out.
If we take the post as truth (it's not clear to me whether we can), then Bazzite will get iffy kernel updates that will particularly break handhelds. But desktop will be more stable and you could even turn off automatic updates for 6months and see how things look after.
I think Bazzite has a very smooth experience for Windows gaming and even if you decide that you don't like it or that the distro really is falling apart, you'll have gotten the best Linux-gaming experience and can evaluate other distros more clearly.
I decided to try Fedora Kinoite for my gaming machine (to have something with less “maybe not maintained one day stuff” out of the box and a long term community of maintenance), and have been happy.
If you have normal hardware, something like like Fedora Kinoite should be mostly equivalent.
Replacing something that's SOTA with something that still uses X11 and years old software isn't it (it makes Debian Stable look modern).
This is the thing so many people recommend?! No wonder Linux is unpopular.
Also there like 20 competing ways to install packages now. Used to just be apt.
This is very incorrect. There's been far more for 35+ years
* apt/.deb
* yum(dnf)/.rpm
* Tarballs
* Ports trees
* Flatpak
* Snap
* Etc, etc, etc
rpm was a thing that existed but wasn't a Mint way of installing. Tar, yes. I can see why you'd consider a tar a package, but I was thinking of things actually designed for packages, and tar isn't really an extra thing to learn and deal with. Port tree, idk never heard of that.
These were designed to solve different problems.
PS - Just avoid snap. Fuck snap. All my homies hate snap.
Flatpak otoh is software basically delivered in a container with some security restrictions. It works great, but you may want a GUI problem called "flatseal" to enable access to certain parts of the host filesystem, device access, etc depending on specifics of what the particular application is supposed to do. That's a bit of a security boundary (good).
Flatpak does solve several big issues with the minor and only occasional need to use flatseal to enable access to say something in /proc /dev etc
Snap happened in 2014
Flatpak in 2015
So you've got about 10 years of catch-up ;)
You don't understand. This won't be "sorted out", this is a feature.
Maybe it's just not for you, and that's ok.
Professionally I've only ran into a handful of Ubuntu installs.
Dozens of SUSE
Hundreds of thousands of RHEL.
So if I wanted to help someone new, I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu because it would be somewhat of a dead end.
Fedora gives you familiarity with the largest deployed commercial Linux, while still getting the newest packages out there through either fedora yum or flatpak. Best of both worlds.
It's also a fucking system daemon that runs in the background. Avoid.
Flatpak is available on every distro.
Send Xorg to a nice farm too. Or Wayland. Whichever the bad one is. Competing window servers is a way bigger problem.
dismalaf: I definitely don’t care about gestures on my desktop computer.
Imagine going from a modern OS to one that doesn't have touchpad gestures in 2026. Yeah there's workarounds but having to config that isn't a good user experience.
Mint won't even boot for me because it doesn't support my year old GPU (9070 XT). That's a huge miss when someone is looking at an OS primarily for gaming.
For gaming specifically, I've heard good things about Nobara (dev is a RedHatter, though it's his personal project) and CachyOS.
AFAIK, removing Antheas from Bazzite opened the door to discussions for forming the OGC. Prior to that, Antheas had created such difficult situations that many of the member groups in the OGC did not collaborate with Bazzite because of his presence. Whether or not the OGC actually works (ex: getting patches upstreamed faster), only time will tell.
Sounds like good news to me.
I got another one:
Look, follow the money, Microsoft knows Windows 11 on handhelds is a dumpster fire right now, and they are not ready to drop their own "Xbox Portable" yet
So how do they keep the market from moving to the alternative SteamOS/Valve?
They trojan horse the "alternative"
Think about it: Bazzite pops up, gains massive community "trust", every traditionally pro-MSFT media talk about it, and then coincidentally becomes the loudest voice trashing GPD's HW support, why would they do that?
It's a classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish play
FUD: Use Bazzite as an "undercover" $MSFT project to make GPD look like a risky, unoptimized mess
Damage: GPD takes the hit because they are actually trying to innovate, while the "community" devs (who are definitely on a $MSFT gang) tell everyone to just buy an Rog Ally ($MSFT Partner) or wait for the next Microsoft Xbox handheld
Pivot: Once GPD is sidelined as a "niche hobbyist risk", Microsoft drops a polished Handheld UX for Windows, Bazzite magically "loses funding" or support, and everyone gets funneled back into the Game Pass ecosystem on "approved" hardware
Bazzite isn't a "community project", it's a trojan hose
GPD bet on the wrong horse thinking that community was neutral
also if you wanna support linux on gaming, just buy hardware that support steamos like steamdeck, steam machine, steam frame, legion go s, rog ally.