New Major Features for 3.0
- Upgraded to Fedora 40
- KDE Plasma 6 - GNOME 46 - Linux Kernel 6.8 - AMD/Intel GPU driver upgrades
- Ayn Loki Max Pro support
- Ayn Loki Zero support
- Improvements for supported handhelds
- HHD Overlay is now stable
- Gyro support parity with Lenovo Legion Go
- Charge limits set for Lenovo Legion Go
- ASUS ROG Ally custom TDP that use the kernel driver
- Custom fan curve support for ASUS ROG Ally
- Added CDEmu
- Added Ollama ujust command
- Added fastfetch
- Added zoxide
All of that, and more details about the rest can be read on the announcement page here —> https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/announcing-bazzite-3-0/1218
In case, like me, you hadn’t heard of Bazzite before:
Bazzite is an OCI image that serves as an alternative operating system for the Steam Deck, and a ready-to-game SteamOS-like for desktop computers, handheld PCs, and living room home theater PCs.
It’s basically Nobara, but properly done. (If you choose the desktop version)
It gets updates automatically (max one day after upstream Fedora), has everything you want ootb in the first start wizard, is more secure, and much more.
I was very sceptical at first, but after trying it out, I really noticed some minor performance improvements in games and many QoL improvements, e.g. the preinstalled LACT, which allows me to set up fan curves and over-/ underclock my GPU.
Setting up my new PC took me about half an hour maximum.
9/10, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a smooth gaming experience.
What has nobara not properly done? I wanted to try it as a daily driver.
The only issue I can see is this is more of a team effort, and Nobara has always primarily been for GER and his Dad. The differences though are minimal, though I will always sway towards something with the image based design of Bazzite for a gaming/work setup.
But then why don’t you simply develop a toolkit that installs all those things and sets things up properly on a standard fedora install?
This seems something with too big of an attack surface.
installs all those things and sets things up properly on a standard fedora install?
That’s exactly what all universal blue images do. It’s just that setup is done every single day in github from scratch and stamped out as an image so that the end result gets to your computer as a finished deployment artifact. Leads to better update reliability, built in rollback.
The biggest benefit is that it’s easier for a community to fix the fast moving gamer stuff as a config layer on top of a distro that’s delivered this way than me having to manually figure out what component of my gaming setup changed that week.
That would be very very hard and unreliable.
Bazzite is more than just “preinstalled Steam”, it has a list of tweaks, optimizations and additions so long you can’t even finish reading it all! 😅
This includes a different kernel, pre-configured containers, and much more.
If you do that on a regular system, configuration drift would quickly destroy any good experience in no time and result in a huge mess.uBlue provides a solid base distribution (pretty much stock Fedora) and applies exactly your way, but in upstream, and then copies that new image to millions of PCs. By doing that, you can provide many many identical copies that are the same everywhere and always up to date, without the burden of maintaining a whole distro like on Nobara.
The hard and boring work of maintaining a distro is on the shoulders of the Fedora team, and you only have to maintain your own changes.This seems something with too big of an attack surface.
Not really.
- Most stuff is installed in containers
- The pros of image based distros still apply here in terms of reliability, security, etc.
- Its no more than a few hours away from upstream stock Fedora
- Most apps (Lutris, OBS, etc.) are optional and opt-in, if you just click “next, next, next” in the installer you’ll get a relatively vanilla experience compared to stock Fedora
How does it have a large attack surface? I thought being immutable reduced the surface.
I do have a request for help with Bazzite. In all my Gnomes I’ve always used dash-to-dock with intellihide. With Bazzite, I for some reason I just can’t understand, when I move the pointer to the bottom to have the dock come up, bazzite opens the workspaces view.
Is there a way to disable this?
Other than that, Bazzite has been rock solid and super customizable on my Gazelle 16.
I’ve never personally used Gnome so fotm know how to navigate it. But I am sure this is something you should be able to do disable. I’d look either in shortcuts, workspace or gesture settings maybe?
Thanks, but I toured the whole settings yesterday, together with Gnome Tweaks, Dconf and the dock-to-dash settings and didn’t find anything. Granted, I don’t have a great handle of Dconf, so there are things I didn’t touch to avoid messing everything else up.
This seems to be exclusive to Bazzite Gnome. I’ve used Gnome with absolutely every distro and this has never happened before. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature I don’t like, lol.
I guess I’ll take my chances on breaking it all and roll back if needed.
I’d jump into their Discord to ask for advice regarding this.
I’ll try that. Not a huge discord fan, but I guess I can make an exception.
Yeah it is what it is… peronsally use Vencord(has flatpak) that has stripped out the discord telemetry and added features :)
You’re on a roll with the tips. Thank you.
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Bazzite is my first true experience with an immutable distro, and wow, what a magical moment it was.
I’ve been eyeing on fedora 40’s release for some time now because it fixes all the Wayland problems for Nvidia cards. One night my grandma needed some help, so I walked away from my PC, it automatically suspended, came back 30 or so minutes later, and when I logged in I was just automatically on KDE 6 with fedora 40, didn’t even reboot.
This is truly the year of the Linux desktop.
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Immutable means that the OS will change itself without asking while you’re not looking ?
What do you do when you don’t like the change ? I would email Linus about it to complain.
https://bazzite.gg/ If anyones interested scroll to the bottom and there’s a little wizard to select the right image for your needs, don’t worry too much you can always rebase :)
What does Bazzite brings that Nobara doesnt already?
I don’t know if its still the case but originally Nobara was a “this is for me but you can use it too” type of project.
Bazzite also has the backing of a bigger group of developers and community. Whereas Nobara is developed by a solo (kudos to him). But I would say Bazzite differs quite a bit too with its immutability, automatic updates, and thanks to libostree technology, after every update the previous version of the operating system is retained on your machine. This means, should an update cause any issues, you can select the previous image at boot. Additionally, it has support for gamescope, meaning Steam can boot straight into Big Screen mode, which is very handy for gaming pcs and steam decks etc… Can read the rest of the details over at bazzite.gg, if you’re not convince :P
This and BLuefin are such good projects, I run Bazzite on 2 pc’s deskop and consolised gaming pc and Bluefin on my workstation
They really are! Love that it’s even possible to make your own image with on tweaks and such, really cool.
I’ve had a lot of experience with Linux and I use Nobara currently. My only catch with Bazzite is that I didn’t know the first thing to do. It somehow felt as if most of my experience in Linux was just useless.
Not saying it’s a bad thing, I just decided I’d stick to Nobara for now and try learning Bazzite in the future to give it a fair shake.
I’m also a tweaker. I like to play with ZRam and add other things to the OS, like a custom kernel with BCacheFS-Git to support my gaming darastores. I suspect some of my creature comforts may be harder to get.
You could give the uBlue builder a shot, which can do exactly that.
But I think NixOS is a better choice for a tinkerer like you :)
Fantastic. I’ve been planning to install it on a new PC build this weekend so the timing works out well
