Anyone on Tildes tried Bazzite or similar Fedora Atomic distros?
I have been planning to make the switch to Linux as a daily driver for a while and have researched many different distros. I have seen a lot of discussion online about Bazzite and other similar distros based on Fedora Atomic. It sounds like it would be more stable, and less likely for you to accidentally break something, but installing software other than Flatpaks requires running it in some kind of container such as Distrobox. Some people say it's annoying, others say it's good since you mess up the container rather than your system.
I have used SteamOS on Steam Deck, and notice that things have "just worked" more than what I have personally seen with "normal" distros on laptops or desktops. For example, I've never really had any issues installing things and running software on SteamOS, but someone I know using Mint has seen seemingly minor things cause massive glitches on their system, or they've run into strange difficulty just installing certain programs like Steam. Would one of these types of distros, especially Bazzite which specifically is trying to be like SteamOS, be closer to that Steam Deck experience?
Has anyone here tried one of these distros and had any thoughts? Anything you loved, or was anything a deal breaker?
I've been using Bazzite and Aurora for 15 months. I started with Bazzite on my desktop but needed dev tools (VSCode, Podman, virtualization) so migrated to Aurora-dx.
Benefits:
Drawbacks:
Only one I've experienced that isn't something that is more or less my doing, and it's more learning curve stuff than technical debt on the ublue project:
The recommended solution, and so the learning curve, is that if you need system-level packages that don't exist in the image already, you need to build and deploy it yourself. This can be done by somebody with minimal Linux experience in less than two hours, and only needs you to click a button on Github to keep the job running every few months if you make no changes. I do this here to add Waydroid to my system, and need to dedicate the time to get Mega(.nz)'s packages up and running properly. Adding anything that exists in the preconfigured repos is as easy as adding
rpm-ostree install <package>and running the automation if you need a build right now.I run my entire music production environment (Renoise + Bitwig+ Sononym + Cardinal + VSTs + Supercollider/TidalCycles) in an Arch distrobox and it has some minor issues, like some apps can't open file navigation screens in certain contexts (I need to figure out why), but it hasn't hampered my productivity with this. I still game on my Aurora install with Steam and Heroic Flatpaks and have had no issues, except with steamtinkerlaunch configuring Vortex, which I'm not that into anyway.
I don't want conventional distros to go away. I run Debian Trixie on an old (2012) Macbook because Aurora has weird issues, and love the broader Linux community, but Aurora is how I've been able to jump into Linux full-time with no issues.
Note, I'm something of a True Believer in this project, but am also willing to discuss any problems with the above, or broader issues. I started using Fedora Atomic after looking to force myself full time, doing an experiment with Kinoite, then finding Bazzite was, in fact, a full desktop OS, then ublue, and Aurora, and did it to see if it would work. The rest is basically history, as it was surprisingly easy, functional, and unrestricted. For me, OS upgrades are the worst part, especially with Linux distros, so not having to clean anything up between updates/upgrades has been a godsend. The rest is just minor tinkering I'll gladly do on any given day.
I also left like three comments across the thread, but this whole project, for me, feels like when I first discovered Linux 17 years ago, so I like helping people understand more about it, and try to understand what issues people might have, even if I'm just a user.
I made the swap to Linux in '19 (Manjaro at first, then Arch, so the Deck was up my alley and also a huge selling point for me), but honestly - if you're wanting to go Linux, most mainstream distros are pretty user friendly. That being said, the Deck runs KDE in desktop mode (it's a desktop environment [DE] thing, not a distribution thing), which I suspect is what you're looking for, just for a SteamOS DE.
As I run Arch, I was actually using the LTS (long term, so not the bleeding-edge updates) for a while, but nothing really changed. I've had more experience with Debian (which includes Ubuntu, *buntu, and also Mint) before Arch before I made my swap (and that comes with a huge grain of salt, because now I try to do everything manually and understand what's going on, vs just having everything "just work" [which, ironically, doesn't work at all half the time on my windows work laptop lulz... but anyway I digress]) and I'd venture that almost any distro these days can easily provide a seamless slide into Linux from Windows. If you're coming from Mac, I dunno about that, but I highly suspect (and recommend!) you could easily get a USB and test drive any distro you want. Play around with it. Also if you're anything like me, you might have some extra hard drives sitting around (likely does not apply to laptops), and you could install and test drive more than just a temp situation. But as I said, I suspect you want the desktop environment feel of SteamOS, which is what I feel people should be chiming in for...
Also, best of luck, and please come to the better side. We still have cookies and are more awesome. :)
ChimeraOS is the most like SteamOS, in that it’s way more locked down to make it harder for you to break things. But afaik the UI is heavily controller-focused, not sure if that’s what you want for a desktop install.
Bazzite allows you to step back into normal fedora mode fairly easily, for better or for worse.
You're gonna need to explain this because I've been using Universal Blue images for a while and am not aware of any way in which this is true, unless it's a misunderstanding of rpm-ostree.
I know with SteamOS you can simply turn off the btrfs lock and futz around with the Arch internals, but rpm-ostree is pretty locked down to my knowledge. I hope I don't come across as at all hostile, but I'm curious, simply because there may be something I don't know about.
Not familiar with Bazzite, but I did switch to Fedora KDE in October and can provide some insights. Overall, I would not stress too much about accidentally breaking something. Unless you are playing around with the terminal and running sudo commands without any thought, it is unlikely for you to break something. Also, you are most likely to break something during initial setup and configuration (as you will be installing most of your software in the first few hours), so it is easy to re-install if you get mess something up during the initial setup of installing the apps you need.
If you are wanting the easiest distro to get up and running, I would recommend debian based distros, followed shortly behind by Fedora. I have found software to most likely have a .deb package allowing for easy install, although flatpaks are relatively common and easy to install on Fedora.
It is also worth considering if you are running an nvidia or amd gpu. I ran Fedora on both (had a gtx 970 that I used for two months on Fedora, then it broke and I replaced it with an amd 6650xt). It is possible to get both working, although amd is an easier setup, and I found less graphical bugs on amd (nvidia bugs tended to happen after waking computer up from sleep). There are potentially some distros that play nicer with nvidia cards, so that might be something to consider.
For immutable distros there aren't many Debian options actually... but maybe just using Debian and pretending it is immutable (eg. using Flatpak to install most things) is ideal
It seems like most of the immutable development work is being done on the Fedora/Red Hat side. A big motivating factor for them is making Podman work on bare metal so it turns into a universal tool. The bits and pieces are all there with
bootcanddnf5but there's a lot of redundant moving parts and I think it will take a year or two before everything is working and the current ostree immutable standard is made obsolete.There's some interesting discussion here:
I use immutable distros on a couple machines. For the most part there isn't a big difference.
I haven't had it save my butt yet--and it makes troubleshooting some OS problems a bit more painful. The most frequent annoyance early on is when you need to install a system tool--you can use
rpm-ostree install --apply-live X(orrpm-ostree apply-liveafter installing) so you don't need to reboot immediately to gain access to the new program--but it still adds A LOT of overhead to what might be a very minimal install... like taking 200 seconds instead of 5.But I think they can be good if you want to force yourself to use more isolation like docker, toolbx, distrobox, Flatpak, etc. It can help you to change the way you think about installing software... but not all in a good way.
Aside about isolation:
Personally, as a user, I don't really like Flatpak that much. It makes things more complicated with dubious security and packaging benefits. It's nice to be able to run untrusted code. The browser JavaScript engines are the only ones that do this well but they are pretty much locked out of filesystem and hardware use. The Android permissions APIs are kind of a mess but I feel like the Android 11+ storage API strategy of app-specific and restricted shared storage is a nice UX pattern... but it's still imperfect...For users who mostly browse the web and use office software I think immutable distros can work well. It makes it harder to make permanent changes as the system is mounted as read-only (though there is
ostree admin unlock --hotfix...). It's definitely possible to end up with a broken system even with immutable distros but with something like greenboot it should automatically rollback to the previous working state.Tumbleweed also had an immutable install option, and functionally it is the same as regular Tumbleweed except there is a wrapping process around the installer, which can include chmodding a shell into the update.
I abandoned it because the benefit was minimal compared to the effort, and Tumbleweed already had fantastic rollback.
I feel like my initial comment did not bring up my original point as much as I intended. To me, it seemed like OP wanted an immutable distro not for technical reasons but to make sure they did not mess up their system. For that, I felt that a mutable distro would be fine, as messing up your OS is not as high of a risk as OP is perceiving.
I've been running Aurora (the distro that uses KDE Plasma) as my daily driver for the past 6 months. General computing and some light python/golang development.
It's nice. If you unlock the *-dx dev mode, the additional tools are really useful.
I'm still a bit ambivalent about the entire rpm-ostree system. Installing software like normal is really frowned upon and can cause some issues when rebasing/updating but not everything can work in a flatpak as the project demands. I find myself dropping things I'm curious about due to not wanting to bother with layering.
Just use distrobox if you have non-system packages you don't want to layer. ublue bakes it into all of their images (Aurora included). I run a bunch of stuff that isn't available in Fedora in various distroboxes, from MegaUpload's tray app in a Fedora container to a full music production workload under an Arch distrobox.
I run Bazzite on my TV gaming rig, using the Deck UI as default. It's about as functional as the Deck, with some handy scripts to help smooth out some rough edges. I don't think I'd daily drive it on my laptop though. There are some rough edges that can be a real pain...one I'm going through is that it always picks the wrong audio output every reboot regardless of defaults.
I did the read-only root with Tumbleweed awhile back, but the rebooting to take affect was annoying enough to ditch it for daily driving. I just fell back to Tumbleweed, as OpenSUSE's rollback scheme is the easiest I've ever used which solves an awful lot of problems.
I use Bazzite as a daily driver on my gaming PC after ditching Windows last year. As far as what you're hearing about software installation, both are true: it's annoying and probably also good. The few times I have had to try Distrobox to install an app, it generally hasn't worked for me. I don't recall what all of those are or why they didn't work. I do know that the text expansion app I use Espanso can't be installed under Bazzite as far as I can tell. There's an issue on the UniversalBlue repo asking them to make it work (Bazzite is based on UniversalBlue, by the way, or that's my understanding of the relationship at least), but it's been open for a while now with no activity. My resources failed me. Oh My ZSH was also difficult to install, and the support is pretty bad in my experience. The support is provided by the developers, who obviously don't want to be doing support.
That said, it's the only distro I've tried where most everything I wanted to do gaming-related has worked out-of-the-box. I still can't get HDR to work reliably, but I understand that's just the state of HDR under Linux.
If I had it to do over, I would probably go with a standard mutable distro and just deal with having to reload if I ever got it into a bad state. If you just want to do gaming though and don't have a tendency to color outside the lines, Bazzite could be a good choice.