Hi all,
I’ve been getting asked this a lot so I just wanted to drop a pin to help squash any speculation here.
The Bazzite team is extremely excited for the upcoming expanded launch of Steam OS. Obviously, none of us would be here if not for Valve lighting the way. That being said, we strongly believe Bazzite has a continued role to fill in a post-Steam OS future. A desktop release of Steam OS appears to still be a long way away, and handheld support is almost surely going to be focused on partnered devices first and foremost, and not on the breadth of devices we support today.
Additionally, the first builds of Bazzite were designed for the Steam Deck, which of course runs Steam OS. Bazzite was born out of supporting users with Steam OS in the Steam Deck Discord, and is designed to make up for some of the shortcomings of Steam OS, such as immutability preventing package installs when needed, lack of printing, lack of secure boot, lack of drive encryption, and so on. We also ship a number of helpers and extra packages to make non-Steam gaming easier and faster to get up and running, and are in a position to more quickly work with the community on improvements – all of which will continue to differentiate us.
It’s also important to note that Bazzite is a project and a delivery mechanism, not a product. Developers and users alike can fork, contribute to, and expand Bazzite. This is what makes us Cloud Native and what we’re trying to push for the Linux desktop.
We will continue to build Bazzite out long into the future. Thank you.
PS: If you missed it, we did an impromptu AMA in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bazzite/comments/1hvxtzs/who_does_it_and_why/
Feel free to ask more questions if you like, we’ll try to get to them all.
copied the post from the reddit link. I’m planing on switching to it in a couple of day so it better not go anywhere
Thanks for all your hard work! I have it on a laptop, and it’s been perfect.
Also, I’m wondering if SteamOS for the desktop will still be the A/B format, like on the Deck. If so, I imagine there will be people who aren’t thrilled about how they have decided to do immutability.
valve is probably aiming steamOs more for windows users and most won’t know what immutability is or how it works I don’t have a steam deck so what’s the A/B format for
A/B format (or A/B partitioning) refers to how Valve handles updates. There’s two partitions, each of which has a full copy of the base system files, and let’s assume you’re on Partition A. Each time you update, you would actually be updating Partition B, then you reboot and your boot system picks Partition B as the one you boot into. Next time you update, it’s back to Partition A, etc. This way, you always have a safe system state.
On some systems, if you run into a bug, you can rollback to the alternate partition manually. The way Valve does it, you automatically rollback when you crash, so players never know this is happening in the background.
Vanilla OS also uses A/B partitioning, and their program that handles it is called ABRoot.
Please don’t link to platforms that aren’t publicly visible.
I would certainly hope not. I have really enjoyed it as my first post-windows os. Its been 99% smooth sailing.
I’m in the same boat you are. The only thing I haven’t been able to pull off is modding and I don’t blame Bazzite for that at all. I know it’s technically possible, I just lack the necessary Linux skills to make it work.
I tried Bazzite on the Deck hoping that it would be SteamOS but without the immutability. The experience was horrible, with “gamemode” equivalent being quite broken. This was Bazzite 3.0, I really hope they are doing better now.
hoping that it would be SteamOS but without the immutability
Didn’t read about it first, eh?
with “gamemode” equivalent being quite broken
It’s not equivalent, it is gamemode. I used Bazzite at v2.4 and had a great time. Dunno why you had issues, but you’re the first person I’ve heard of that had issues like that. Weird.
I wonder if your installer was corrupted or something.
Dunno why you had issues, but you’re the first person I’ve heard of that had issues like that. Weird.
the biggest lol thing that happened was when I went to connect to my Wi-Fi and there was no way to enter the password. The password prompt showed up, but there was no connect button after entering it. Had to use wired connection via USB-C adapter to get past the initial setup.
Yeah something got fucked up. That’s a standard KDE thing and has been forever. The installer Bazzite (and their other distros) uses is the default Fedora one, so either your downloaded file was corrupted, or perhaps the USB stick you used has some kind of hardware instability.
The latter case is common enough that some distros have included a USB test option before proceeding to install. Anyway, sorry you had a bad experience. That’s truly strange.
I’m talking about the SteamOS-style OOTB experience, not KDE wifi manager.
Gotcha. It’s really bizarre that you had two core features not work correctly several versions after they made the OLED an officially supported model. Not saying you did anything wrong, but it still sounds like something got corrupted somehow.
Weird. Whatever you’re using now, hopefully you’re having fun, because that’s the important part.
Considering that was a year ago and the update pace has been neck breaking. Trust me, it is more awesome now. They dropped the single digits since august though, and now go by the fedora version plus the date for versioning.
I think their explanation makes sense
