Generated via ublue’s countme script https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg
Upstream, the Fedora KDE Plasma edition is also doing well. Nice to see that within the first release after promotion to a full edition.
I’ve been on Linux for a bit. I was fedora for a long time and it’s totally fine but I tried out Bazzite for gaming and it’s been really good experience. I like tinkering but I never played as much game time because I was tinker with it. Now it mostly just work and that’s awesome.
There are a few things I don’t like about Bazzite, like ujust for example, but it’s still worth it to me.
If anyone likes Bazzite but doesn’t want the immutability, Garuda is also gamer focused and easy.
I hadn’t heard of Garuda before! I’ll check it out!
Garuda is great. I tried Bazzite on my nvidia based laptop and had problems getting it to work well (to be fair to Bazzite, this was well over a year ago when Bazzite was very new on the scene - I have no idea if i’d have the same problems today). Replaced it with Garuda (which I had been running on my desktop) and it literally “just worked”. And, frankly, I’m a linux idiot. I basically just read the messages that pop up occasionally and do my best to do things like they say (for example, I try to remember to run updates before the system has to tell me “hey, it’s been a bit. Would be best if you would update me soon”).
Speaking of being an idiot… I don’t even know if I HAVE to download the “dragonized” version to get all the gaming bells and whistles just as easily, or if I can use their KDE plasma version that doesn’t have all the theming and still get the “gaming” tweaks? Since my system works, I don’t want to install a new version just to find out, but I feel like I could convince other people to try it more if they got the same functional experience without all the purple glowing stuff out of the box.
I use the xfce version and it’s pretty bare bones. Other than a background image I replaced, it didn’t have any annoying UI stuff in it. It still runs all the gaming stuff just fine out of the box.
I’m a long-time Mint guy, my current desktop is Fedora KDE because Wayland, and I’m looking at Bazzite for my old computer/HTPC but it doesn’t support my old GTX-1080 GPU, I might get a low-tier Radeon for it (I don’t want to buy an Intel card and fuck Nvidia’s butt, that GTX-1080 was literally the only GPU available to me in 2020).
this is the distro I am hoping to switch to.
Is bazzite better than Steam OS?
For all intents and purposes it is Steam OS.
They are different. If I could run steamos I’d probably run that. But on my hardware Bazzite is the best of the compatible options.
I thought it was just my YouTube algorithm showing me install bazzite. Hehe guess there was a trend
I think its hitting a critical mass, that much upward growth is very encouraging to see. I was able to convince a handful of friends to switch to linux due to windows getting so bad, they liked the extremely simple approach Bazzite has. I think its better than Mint in this regard, Fedora has come such a long way.
What is bazzite doing differently compared to mint?
It’s image based, so it’s very hard for a beginner to fuck it up, and if they do its one or two lines of commands to fix 99% of the time.
eg rpm-ostree rebase or rpm-ostree reset
The immutability is the main difference. If something gets messed up, on boot you simply change to the previous image and you’re back up and running again.
I keep seeing people saying this but realistically how many new users had to do that? IMO, it’s just the fact that Bazzite has pretty much everything you need out of the box.
so it maintains several editions at once? that sounds like a space hog even though it’s useful.
Two editions, the current one and previous one, I believe
And the space hog is like a few gigabytes. I think that’s well worth it for a beginner when it means that in the worst case you can always roll back when we have like terabytes of space
Question for all Bazzite/Aurora users: what do you use to make backups of your machine?
I’m using Pikabackup to make backups of
/home, but I’m not sure if there’s a better way?I use Duplicacy, personally. All you need to backup is your home directory since it’s immutable.
Syncthing to my server
I don’t currently backup /home.
You def don’t need to backup anything on the OS drive since rollbacks are built into the system and it initializes every time you boot.
I’m using Fedora KDE and haven’t set up backups on my desktop PC yet, but on Linux servers (both at home and “in the cloud”) I usually use Borgbackup with Borgmatic. Every system has two backup destinations: My home server and a storage VPS, both via SSH.
Looks like Pika Backup is a GUI for Borgbackup, so it should be a good choice. Vorta is also popular. GNOME apps tend to focus simple, easy to use GUIs with minimal customization, so it’s possible Vorta is more configurable. I haven’t tried either.
Don’t forget the 3-2-1 policy: you should have at least three copies of your data, in at least two locations, one of which is off-site (cloud, a NAS at a friend’s or family member’s house, etc). If you’re looking for cloud storage, Hetzner storage boxes are great value. Some VPS providers have good sales (less than $3/TB/month) during Black Friday.
Pika broke for me so many times I gave up on it. Vorta has been solid.
on my CachyOS/Arch and NixOS machines I just use borg to backup to my dedicated server. Very easy to do. I have a couple alias’ set up so I can view my backups easily through my file manager on whatever local machine. Essentially all you have to do is make a script to tell it what files/folders to backup, what to potentially ignore, how often you want to backup, the time of day you want it to happen, can also tell it to delete old backups. In NixOS it’s painfully easy to set up and can be done within the configuration.nix. On other distros the only difference is you have to set up a service and timer for it.
but I like it, it’s straight forward, never had issues with it.
Pika should be fine, look into borg or just a simple Rsync setup if you want something a bit more detailed. But personally with backups I want it as simple and reliable as possible.
Pika is a GUI for Borg.
Rsync is doable, but it’s not great since you essentially only have one backup set. If a file gets corrupted and you don’t notice before the next backup is done, you won’t be able to restore it. Borg’s deduping is good enough to keep lots of history - I do daily backups and keep every day for the past two weeks, every week for the past three months, and every month indefinitely (until I run out of space and need to prune it). Borgmatic handles pruning the backups that are out of retention.
That’s amazing. Been using it for 6 months, loving it.
Started my EndeavoursOS gaming PC. Oh no, my new-Steam lists the game as windows only?
Proceeds to install proton and related software and bam, I can game.
I know it’s not Bazzite but there is sure as hell little reason not to use Linux any more except for enterprise computers and laptops.
Steam installs proton on its own when you just click the button insettings so you don’t even need to install proton. Just works
I started with EndeavourOS as well (but have since switched to Bazzite). Enjoy, it was a fun time :)
Gonna install CachyOS tomorrow.
I know I’m late but …
spoiler
It took me a while to backup all my game saves and memes from Windows 10 because Proton Drive limits you to 2GB unless you pay and if you don’t pay your subscription they delete your email address. Could’ve gone with another provider but I was due for a spring cleaning anyway.
I was also trying to get through my Itch library to save me the hassle of figuring out how to work Lutris but then the Steam Next Fest came and I gave up on clearing my backlog since I have a hard deadline of the next Steam Hardware Survey.
Perhaps a bit unconventional, but CloudFlare R2 gives 10GB of free storage accessible as S3 with
rclone.I know I have other options, Google Drive for example, I just didn’t want to use anything new so I did things the hard way.
I did my first fedora atomic install yesterday. I’m doing my part!
What happened the 3rd week of April? Fedora got a massive spike there. The other one has a small bump at that time as well
Fedora 42 got released: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-linux-42/
Booted up Bazzite and everything just worked except League of Legends anticheat and Linux SteamVR. Supposedly SteamVR got patched. So League is the last thing keeping me on Windows 11. Could probably boot to Win11 as needed anytime I want to though
Same, I’m not gaming, but this distro for me that I find just working. I used Aurora for a bit before making the switch.
Yeah vanguard fucked up linux compatibility…
Yu could just… stop playing League.
Would be great for mental health
Man. Props to the team. At least from my perspective (I’m not into distro hoping anymore) they came out of nowhere and people absolutely loved them. I should give them a test on a VM, specially since I’ve been recommending against them because I didn’t think they are a good fit for llinux newcomers
Bazzite cured my desire to distro hunt ever again
Real
Bazzite is absolutely great, if you just want a very reliable system that just works and goes out of your way. I lean nowadays way more into recommending Bazzite to new Linux users, since there is literally not much to initially set up, no matter the hardware. Gaming works perfectly fine and any regular users software needs get easily satisfied by the Bazaar.
I’ve been using it for 3mo now. Mostly no issues, except for installing packages without flatpak, and also the weird random slowdown to freeze (I’m assuming memory management?) I mostly use my machine for learning freecad, watxhing jellyfin, using a browser, and playing Genshin (relaxing to play while people bitch at me on my phone job)
I don’t have any slowdowns or freezes. Do you experience this with other distros as well?
Absolutely. I switched to Bazzite and it is everything I wanted from the switch. So painless. I have yet to find a game I want to play that wont play. Ive been using it for all my normal computer tasks. Its been the best transition to linux I’ve experienced as ive tried in the past but always hit some sort of snag
I am too much of a tinkerer for Bazzite, but it’s still the distro I recommend the most for new users. If they decide they need more freedom, then Fedora KDE is the next step I recommend.
Most Windows expats should be completely happy with Bazzite.
I really wanted to like Bazzite but after a couple of months I couldn’t handle it. I really need the tinkering 😆.
I’m considering it for the kids though once we get a family PC, but I also really want things like being able to switch between Gnome and KDE and other stuff like that which makes the experience nicer.
I see what you mean. Sometimes I wish I could tinker with it the same way as I was used to with Arch. But in the end, it just works and goes out of my way.
It might be beginner friendly, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do pretty much anything else you’d want to do on any other distro. It’s just a different process.
Agreed. I’m a software dev and I also have a ton of weird and niche hobbies I use my PC for and I’ve never run into anything I felt like Bazzite prevented me from doing. Even if they didn’t offer the super convenient developer edition.
For example, the immutable root partition doesn’t stop me from adding udev rules in
/etc.In fact, DistroBox gives me the freedom to use any package from any distro I want, including the Arch AUR.
Anyone who says Bazzite is “too limiting” doesn’t understand how it actually works.
I love distrobox.
I havent tried it but I cant see how it can be better than arch Linux with its AUR. Almost all software that exists is right there in its latest version.
Fedora feels a lot more limited. I think just because bazzite is novel, a lot of people are trying it now. I dont think the popularity will last. People will understand that they get many issues with it and go back to a normal Linux.
back to a normal Linux.
What’s normal linux?
You have complete access to the AUR via Distrobox. Also, how do you conclude that it has “many issues”? I do get that Bazzite might not be for everyone, but please, elaborate.
Since its immutable, I imagine that a lot of apps may not “just work” and need special packaging or configuration. But I havent used it. What would you say? Apps just work or they need anything special? Will Flatpaks work?
Flatpak works just fine, as it installs to the user directory and not any immutable part of the filesystem. Any non-flatpak apps can be ran in distrobox.
Shilling works.
