Bazzite surpasses 30k active users, gaining 5k users since two months ago 🎉
Generated via ublue's countme script https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg
Here is Fedora's upstream graph to compare:
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Comments125View original on lemmy.ml
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 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.
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
It's weird that I can play Portal 2 via Proton but Portal 2 mods crash. Also, Doom Eternal works but not via Steamlink.
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'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 also installed it on two machines now and really like it. But I have exactly the same freezing issues. I already increased my zram swap to 8GB (having 32GB RAM), but long running idle games still freeze the whole system after a while. Could be a memory leak. I also tried to tweak the config so that applications are automatically closed when on low RAM, but that still didn't help yet.
I don't have any slowdowns or freezes. Do you experience this with other distros as well?
Just years ago with Xubuntu. It may just be my use case. Seems to happen with WINE related stuff mostly, and I usually after days running. Once a week restart isn't too painful.
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.
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.
Distrobox seems to be a container... I wonder how well that works with applications following system themes and being able to be seen in app launchers.
Its interesting but my experience is that usually you do get some issues with solutions where apps are not native.
What's normal linux?
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.
Eh, on something as customizable as Linux where the solution to problems can often be "run this line in the terminal", I do believe that a new user can mess up their configuration. I remember Linus from LTT having to deal with a few problems while doing the challenge.
It's certainly also the fact that everything you need is already there out of the box, no need for tinkering to get the GPU drivers installed.
The two things are probably both true
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
fuck i gotta put all my good hard drives into my box. i cheaped out on the m3 memory and it's biting me in the ass
Let’s see, Microsoft kills 10, which nobody really loved but they were willing to tolerate. Microsoft insists they move to 11, which is universally reviled.
Gamers predictably say “fuck this” and install the first gaming-oriented alternative to windows 11 they can find on Bing, and then this happens.
Has Microsoft realized the Intel-level deep shit they are in yet?
Microsoft doesn't actually care because most of their revenue is from corporate environments tied to the OS and their cloud offerings. Everyday users are nothing to them, which is why they don't try harder to keep you from using unactivated copies of windows. You are nothing
you’re overestimating the “IT folk”.
I wish! There's no way companies will move away from teams one drive and SharePoint , they love it
The IT folk doesn't have any power in big companies. They get told what to install by higher management. And higher management usually knows fuckall about computers but does listen to consultants and fancy buzzwords which is something Microsoft is insanely good at.
As an American, Americans are strangled by Microsoft.
5k users down 999,995k left to go!
Mind you that's only Bazzite, Zorin has been making large gains as well.
5k in 2 months isn’t a lot.
Not if we look at it as linear growth. But in the environment we are in, this has the potential to be exponential growth.
Remember when Intel intentionally ignored the mobile market?
But the mobile market is filled in now and android is the windows of mobile
This isnt a magical new market.
But a major player is basically leaving it.
? Which player?
Microsoft
I think it may be dawning on them. I'm on an international holiday & didn't get time to faff about installing Linux before I left. But I discovered the day before my flight that Microsoft has extended its offer of security updates for another year to individuals as well as businesses free of charge, and signed up. Last time I'd looked I'm sure ESU was for businesses only.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/extended-security-updates
The bit that made me laugh was: "ESU enrollment does not provide other types of fixes, feature improvements, or product enhancements." Phew!
I'll crack on with upgrading to Linux when I get home, nice little winter project.
This is a Linux distro focused on gaming.
In the future, please say what the project is for when you post about it.
I was also wondering what the fuck this is. From the Wikipedia introductory paragraph:
Reminds me of when a school instructor walked by and looked at my laptop and he's like "whoa what is that" (I had Firefox running) and I said it was Linux and he was like "whoa I didn't know Linux could do that"
???
In this case they are clarifying that it isn't just a handheld device OS, it is a full desktop OS.
Thank you
The amount of stuff i read about it ,i'd thought 30 Million! Lot of noise about it out there.
i'd think 30k is a lot for a 2-year-old OS, but i know very little
I too was surprise to read the actual number being so low considering how much it's talked about. I never really saw the appeal as steam is pretty easy to get set up and running on any mainstream Linux distro with little fuss, but I recognize it was set up for newbies who want an gaming ready experience. It's an interesting project regardless.
Gonna install CachyOS tomorrow.
I know I'm late but ... ::: spoiler 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.
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 had 3 files installed and one was proton when I downloaded my first game.
I started with EndeavourOS as well (but have since switched to Bazzite). Enjoy, it was a fun time :)
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
Upstream, the Fedora KDE Plasma edition is also doing well. Nice to see that within the first release after promotion to a full edition.
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
Yu could just... stop playing League.
Would be great for mental health
Yeah vanguard fucked up linux compatibility...
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.
Just switch to dota from league ez fix. You get your toxic moba addiction fed and you can ditch league!
I am one of them! Converted my main machine this weekend. The worst problem I have had is getting the settings right for a Jellyfin container. Got all my games running, even City of Heroes (using Wine / Lutris). Takes a little getting used to when I have mostly used Debian-based distros in the past.
You run Jellyfin on your main computer? It's a lot easier to deal with it elsewhere, unless you are running docker locally.
Bazzite is an awesome gaming machine but I def find it annoying for other stuff sometimes. I should probably install a separate distribution for everything else but I don’t want to flip between two.
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/
I so badly want to do the "old man yells at cloud" meme and be angry that Bazzite is so popular.
I want to do it, I'm resisting hnnnngg
Atomic bad because different and I don't like things that are different. 🧓
It's too bad that we're holding a gun to your head to make you switch. 😔🔫
😱 😢
That's amazing. Been using it for 6 months, loving it.
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.
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).
If anyone likes Bazzite but doesn't want the immutability, Garuda is also gamer focused and easy.
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 hadn’t heard of Garuda before! I’ll check it out!
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.
Yes
I started trying out Bazzite yesterday and it’s been great so far! HDR is not as simple to get working as their marketing would make you think, but once you know what to do it’s not so bad.
Al’s I’m having trouble getting OpenRGB working correctly.
But other than that it’s been pretty good. It’s harder to tweak than Ubuntu (what I was previously using) but works much much better out of the box.
If you're on a Gigabyte mobo openRGB may not work at all.
It’s working for just setting static colors, but when I try to install plugins it doesn’t show up at all. I wanted to use HardwareSync and maybe Effects.
You have to find the right plugin version. The ones on the website use different versions than the one installed by ujust. I can't remember where I found them but it was a github repo
I found an older version that sounded like it should be compatible on the OpenRGB webpage but it didn’t work. I suppose I should look further. Thanks for the tip!
NP, I figured it out by looking through the logs, I think you can turn them on in the settings
Open RGB is a absolutely fucking shit show.
Then again RGB in windows is barely better then a fucking shit show.
RGB controls in general is just bad on everything.
Honestly.
On payday I'm running to the local electronics shop for a breadboard. I'll make my own RGB controller. Fuck drivers.
I'm surprised Aurora is so low on the list. I've been loving it on my Dev laptop. Huuuuge improvement over Ubuntu. It feels so much snappier, ironically.
Do you know whats the difference between aurora and bazzite? Its from the same team and looks a bit similiar so I am a bit confused about it
Supposedly its focused on the Dev experience rather than the gamer experience but I also do development on Bazzite without issue. So I guess the real answer is "not much"
There's a flavor of bazzite made for developing now, Bazzite-dx
Thanks, I am using bazzite right now maybe I'll try aurora next time I need a linux install
Lemmy has a similar number of active users and makes about 3K . That money would be good for the ecosystem and could help fund upstream projects (I am sure wine could use the money for example). But they will have to use fundraising methods similar to lemmy to reach that number (popup, good message etc)
The donate page is kinda a mess IMO to be honest. There should be one organisation to donate to otherwise this creates overchoice.
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'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. All my systems have 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 on 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 different mediums (hard drives, "cloud", Blu-rays, tape, etc), 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 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.
Okay, thanks!
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.
On my NixOS and Arch machines I used ZFS snapshots for backups. That’s why I specifically asked for Aurora / Bazzite users.
Syncthing to my server
I’ll check it out, thanks!
I use Duplicacy, personally. All you need to backup is your home directory since it's immutable.
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.
Yeah, I don’t really need to backup the system, except for a list of installed software, but I guess that’s all included somewhere in
~/.localor whatever, since it’s flatpak homebrew and steam.Pika broke for me so many times I gave up on it. Vorta has been solid.
Did anything specific break?
I’ll look into vorta, thanks!
this is the distro I am hoping to switch to.
I read Brazzite as Brazzers 😅
Mate I think you misread it again.
Time to clean your keyboard.
anyone have experience with bazzite and mint, with a focus toward gaming? The box i want to try on, i have been procrastinating hooking up and dealing with the contents (it was my dad's work computer and i'm the only family member with professional ethical requirements relating to confidentiality so it went to me)
Bazzite didn't work for me out of the box (I wanted to see if it being 'gaming focused' had any positives), and what tinkering I could do didn't fix the steam gaming. I went back to an arch-based distro and haven't had any problems.
Suggesting anything that isn't arch based for a gaming focused solution seems stupid as hell to me. No matter how you cut it, there's a god damn good reason valve picked arch as a base for steam os.
Other solutions are just not going to be as good. Will they work? Sure you could game in Debian for heaven sake and be perfectly fine.
But it's just more possible problems. Gaming is basically the exact inverse of non cutting edge. It's the exact worse case where even bleeding edge may not be new enough to properly support things even months after release.
If your playing 10 year old games anything does fine, but other wise your updating packages to what might be newer then your distro supports regardless as which point why arnt you just on arch where that's less prone to explode.
Wait, so 0.2% of all Aurora Users are me?
Shilling works.