Bazzite has gained nearly 10k users in 3 months while other Fedora Atomic distros remain fairly stagnant
Generated via https://github.com/ublue-os/countme
10k added users since last post. Here are upstream Fedora numbers only
Bazzite is not growing because it's immutable.
Gaming will always take the lead—gamers are usually quick to chase the newest and shiniest things. Bluefin/Aurora adoption takes a bit longer because developers have to adjust their workflows, and there’s still this odd stigma around atomics. People assume you “can’t do things” on an atomic distro that you can on a traditional one, when in reality it’s mostly the same—just a slightly different approach in certain areas. Like with Nix, once it clicks, the pros far outweigh the cons. Personally, Bluefin has made me a more organised and efficient developer.
I can't upload the images for some reason but here's the current numbers for the ublue spins
Bluefin/Aurora adoption takes a bit longer because developers have to adjust their workflows, and there’s still this odd stigma around atomics.
Bluefin maintainer here, our target audience are container people, not people who want to adjust their workflows. The people we cater to don't have an opinion on "atomics" because no one's ever heard of that term. They've heard of docker or podman though.
I actually just switched from Bazzite to Bluefin on my devices, even my gaming PC
Mostly because I wanted a more minimal/essential experience with less pre-installed packages
I'm sure I'm sacrificing a little gaming performance, but nothing noticeable by me so far
:shrug:
Thanks Jorge the good work! I had been using silverblue for years and now I'm running machines with bazzite, bluefin, and ucore os. I really, really enjoy how easy to manage atomic distros are, and how they steer you towards better practices (in dev and sysadmin) by design. Thanks!
Joke's on you, Jorge. I use U-Blue just for the great general purpose desktop experience.
I honestly don't know what any of that means. I use Bazzite for automatic updates, Gnome extensions, Portal/ujust commands, update rollbacks, and game mode/Gamescope. It's simply the most usable distro I've found. Bazaar is a nice bonus too. Gnome Software has infuriated me for a long time and I feel like a crazy person because no one talks about it.
I used Nobara for about a month and was constantly pestered with update notifications. There were multiple updaters, I didn't really understand how to use either of them, and they required a lot of manual input. Eventually I tried to do something else while the updater was running and broke it.
Bingo. This is the explanation.
Hey, I'm one of those! Started using Bazzite in July, have absolutely fallen in love. My whole gaming library is available, which has been a real first for me with Linux.
I will hypothesize why:
Bazzite is the Trendy Distro Of The Month, like Peppermint or Endeavor or Nobara or a frillion others. CachyOS is apparently next. Nearly constantly, you'll hear about some trendy new distro which is a fork of Ubuntu or Fedora or Arch that has a feature or two targeted at newcomers or gamers, and for awhile it gets heavily recommended on Reddit or Lemmy, then you stop hearing about it forever as the rest of the ecosystem adopts that feature or fixes the thing that feature was meant to be worked around, and then the cycle repeats.
Bazzite is targeted toward gamers, it emphasizes a solid onboarding experience with a configurator to choose/build your install media based on what you want to do with it, do you want a handheld or home theater experience or a keyboard and mouse desktop? Do you want it to boot to SteamOS or to a DE? Which DE? What hardware do you have? So their gimmick is to steer users through the initital config and setup process. Which as gimmicks go, that one is pretty solid.
MEANWHILE
Fedora's Atomic editions have no gimmicks at all. You have to independently learn that immutable distros exist, independently decide you want that, and then go hunting on their website through their godforsaken marketing wank to find it.
Fedora likes their bullshit branding. You go to their website, and there are big buttons for Fedora Workstation right next to Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop. "Workstation" does not mention that it's just the Gnome version. You have to stroll further down, past server, IoT and "Core" versions, to a section that looks visually different labeled "More Fedora Options" including Atomic and Spins. You're a new Linux user, you've just used the OS that came with your computer your whole life, explain to me what the difference between Core and Atomic is and why you should choose one over the other?
The Atomic versions, which is kind of a synonym for "immutable", you click on that, and you're presented with five options: Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, Fedora Sway Atomic, Fedora Budgie Atomic, and Fedora Cosmic Atomic Nowhere in its name or description does Silverblue mention that it's the Gnome desktop one. Kinoite starts with a K and also mentions in the description it's the KDE atomic version. Also, "kinoite" is a godawful word, they should have gone with Kyanite instead, which is a different blue crystal. Or they should have just called it KDE Atomic or Plasma Atomic. The others just put the DE's name in the title LIKE A NORMAL PERSON, ROWAN.
That's a really dismissive way to say "It's an OS built to fit a demand that wasn't being met by the other distros".
CachyOS is apparently next.
I'd argue that this is already the current trend. I can't count the number of random Indian youtubers I recently got recommended to watch as they glaze CachyOS as the second coming of christ.
I am wary about invoking Apple here, but say what you will about the company, there's a lot of value in a braindead setup process. Many, many users just want something that just works - it was literally something I asked for when Linux was recommended to me (knowing some hate Ubuntu, I'll out myself: using Ubuntu Budgie - setup was super simple. I guess there must be demand for that niche in the broader Linux community, so that's a very smart move by Bazzite.
Bazzite just works when it's a regular desktop. The HTPC (with steam game mode) one has a major issue that I don't see them even addressing, it doesn't suspend. It goes into a permanent black screen and the PC is still running. Nothing revives it beside a forced reboot. I reported it to their GitHub and got nothing really. I thought it was my hardware, but I had a friend of mine bring his whole tower to my house, we installed bazzite and it did the same thing. His tower has all new AMD hardware. On my laptop, bazzite is solid as hell. Works with zero issues.
It works very nicely on my legion go.
And on the Asus devices. I've had this WiFi issue on bazzite on my onexplayer for months until a random developer fixed it by disabling the wifi driver on the device sleeps and re-enables it when it wakes up. The device is now flawless.
Lots of shit-talking Bazzite...
I don't game much but when I do it's on Fedora.
What distro do you all recommend for my Windows buddy looking to switch to gaming on Linux?
Bazzite is the option for Windows converts that want a gaming focused Linux desktop. A lot of people are going to nitpick it to death, because they want "Literally Windows but without Microsoft". Which isn't happening while Linux has the market share it has. You either accept a few annoyances (while advocating for those annoyances to be fixed), or go back to Windows and accept Microsoft's authoritarian control of your computer.
Bazzite is a solid desktop that's going to be really hard for a regular user to break, comes with Steam, Lutris, and Heroic built in, proprietary nvidia drivers installed, and is based on Fedora (Modern, stable, well supported).
The only downside is KDE can be really easy to break if you're a new user unfamiliar with how customizing it works, but if you leave it default you're fine.
Just in the name of completeness, I wouldn't say that's the only downside. I definitely have some stability issues with Bazzite, only when gaming though. But game crashes, occasional OS crashes, that hasn't been exactly rare for me. But I will say, gaming is about the one thing in my life I'm almost unwilling to troubleshoot these days. Could be something specific to my setup that is uncommon for others, making my data point unhelpful.
And by and large, I'd absolutely recommend it for any Windows user who wants an easily transferable user experience and broadly fantastic gaming support with minimal fuss.
People just don't like it because it's different and uses new tech
PopOS/Cosmis has native Nvidia support, works perfectly out of the box
CachyOS might be the easiest one that gives you something decent. It's basically an Arch Linux with slightly better compiler optimizations and tweaked kernels. Also a tweaked version of proton in the core repos.
Started by a German dude so EU++ or something. And of course it's based on Arch Linux, which was started by a Canadian dude.
It's on top of distrowatch too, but I have no idea what that implies.
Easy installer too.
Manjaro is the closest thing to Windows you're going to get.
I recommend it with KDE.
Manjaro has also DDoS'd the AUR several times and is known for not keeping their certs up to date.
Say no to manjaro https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
Because it sucks? 🙃
Like, seriously, Manjaro had so many problems already that were completely preventable, makes stupid mistakes, bloats itself up with nonsense and provides no stability improvement over Arch whatsoever (which is a bad thing). On the contrary, it apparently even introduces additional bugs.
I'm not surprised they accidentally DDoS'ed the AUR, given they also have a docker script that spins up every single time an image is downloaded to push a change to git to increment a counter. Every. Single. Time. A full docker container. From scratch.
I'd only ever recommend Manjaro to people I really don't like.
I use Aurora DX for my work box! But yeah all my personal PCs run Bazzite now.
I started on Bazzite but transitioned to Aurora for my personal PC and wife's laptop. God I wish I could use it for work. I'm forced to use Windows or Mac.
Ubuntu used to be one of the best gaming desktops that was still very stable and usable for everything else, but Canonical has been ruining it to make it more aimed at business and making more ways to profit, so Fedora has been filling the gap IMHO. Still some better dedicated gaming build distros, but Bazzite is good at being a gaming distro that works well as a productivity desktop too.
I don’t think Ubuntu is ruined so much as that Bazzite is very focused on the gaming use case and is a better choice if that’s what you want to do. I use Ubuntu and have tried Bazzite (in a VM with an Nvidia GPU pass thru). Bazzite made the Nvidia based install incredibly easy, and is a particularly good choice for VFIO. I personally use Ubuntu specifically because it’s the same OS as my cloud servers. They solve real problems in that space.
Gaming really benefits from up to date kernels. So Ubuntu just isn't a good choice for that.
As I said, it was a good distro for gaming that was also stable enough to use as a daily driver workstation.
Ubuntu literally has never in it's history been a good gaming distro. It use to just be a popular one. But all of the Deb/apt distros have never been "good choices"
Arch and Gentoo were always the better options. And it's really only recently that the rest become reasonable options.
Gaming has historically been best on absolutely bleeding edge distros with a bunch of hacky community patches and fixes.
As I said, it was a good distro that could do gaming and still be used as a stable daily driver workstation without needing to dual boot.
I am a container evangelist, I find excuses to convert my jobs into Kubernetes workloads, and I frequently use the likes of podman for one off apps/processes and development. I use Flatpak frequently to isolate dependencies for the likes of Steam and Heroic.
I really wanted to like Bazzite or Bluefin, but I can't deal with the overhead from the rpm os-tree updates. I would frequently notice hitches for my use case (sunshine streaming), and the hoops I had to do to configure Nvidia drivers (for it to then not work as good as other distros) was tiresome.
I went back to Arch (EndeavourOS), and I improved sunshine performance and had a driver that worked with less fiddling.
I'm saying all this because, while I'm glad to see any Linux distro grow, I hope it starts delivering what it says on the tin eventually without compromises that I experienced. Markering on it being immutable and container focused is true, but I dont see the benefit (aside from more stability which as others pointed out, is already stable is most cases)?. Right now, its a simple to configure (assuming most defaults work for your setup) distro that is finding a growing niche amongst some users (obviously by the data shown). And thats good enough for now at least.
Just installed it at the start of the month on an older PC for a console-like experience in my living room. Only 2 issues really have me disappointed (and I’m not sure there’s much Bazzite can do about them)
If they can figure those things out, I’d be much more impressed with the experience…. For now it just feels like another FOSS compromise to the product you actually want (PS5 Pro)
Unfortunately, the former is not possible due to asinine requirements by the HDMI Forum: https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected The only option is to use DisplayPort instead (or perhaps an adapter).
Neat!
I've been running Garuda on my main rig for a minute. I thought all would be good but some of my music production stuff has been a bit slow to catch up as far as updates in the AUR vs the official .deb releases (and I haven't tinkered enough to just make that work myself).
Being able to install .deb otb seems nice; I was planning on running a new framework 12 laptop on it (which I dream of getting for a new performance rig for my music) but I may install it on my current performance rig to see how it runs.
How well does it play with nvidia? If it's all good and I eventually switch on my main rig I'd love to be able to run a local GPU supported AI. I know that for nvidia I have to have drivers that support cuda stuff.
Nvidia open source drivers are working pretty good, I have no complaints. Local AI stuff can be a little annoying to setup as a beginner I bet, but if you run it through llama.cpp its smooth sailing. I recommend something like StabilityMatrix (app image) if you have no clue whats going on
I've done a fair bit of tinkering so I'm sure I can get it to work.
You might want to check out distrobox. Nice way to access apps for other distros or package managers like they're native.
I'm also on Garuda for my main box (Bazzite on the framework 13), and I have an Ubuntu distrobox for dev work with one dev project, another for general tools that are only released as .debs, one running fedora for things that "only support RHEL", etc.
I'll give it distrobox a shot. On the main box using Garuda I've been trying the dragonized version and had a lot of "odd" graphical issues with the DE.
these weren't present when I was using plasma with Debian ( which only was smooth once I switched it to be used by the GPU as well). This is another reason why I've been considering the switch.
I'm using it with a 5070 ti and everything is smooth. I have been using ComfyUI to restore old photos so the AI aspect works well too
awesome, that's good to know.
Is there an overview of what differentiates all those Fedora Atomic derivates?
Fedora Atomic variants just differ in the desktop environments.
You can see Universal Blue stuff here: https://universal-blue.org/. But in short, Bazzite is for gaming and the others are for regular desktop uses. All have a “batteries-included” attitude. There’s also some images meant for servers.
Yeah, there's the KDE version, the Gnome version, the Sway version, the Budgie version and the Cosmic version.
There's also uCore as a server OS, but I haven't looked into that very much.
It's mostly about what software is preconfigured. I've run Bazzite for a while and it's been great. Bluefin has been nice too but admittedly it's a pretty run-of-the-mill OS.
The removal of KDE Discover has me considering going back to plain Kinoite on my HTPC. I figure I can build a sysext with the handful of bazzite bits I actually use and keep the unbutchered plasma experience
Would you be willing to say more about what you know / experienced about the removal of Discover? Preferences included? I only noticed it recently, been away from things for a bit, and you sound like your brief info would probably be at least as fruitful as the reading I was gonna look for :)
the ublue project / bazzite decided to make their own flatpak first app store called Bazaar. Fair enough its their distro. However they created it with GTK4/Adwaita libraries, so its a Gnome native app and looks completely ugly on a KDE Plasma desktop. Also as a flatpak first app store it doesn't update anything else on your machine like what discover is capable of (cant update ostree, knew stuff etc). This means you have to use the ujust terminal app to access updates, which I dont agree with.
I think technically you could layer it back in with rpm-ostree install kdediscover - however this pulls back a couple of hundred meg of plasma dependencies, which if you're not aware, when you update your system would be redownloaded and reinstalled with each new ostree snapshot, slowing down the update process even further. I I tried doing it as a sysext (myrepo) but it keeps segfaulting and I havent worked out the issue edit: I have fixed the segfault issue and readded the ostree backend. Sysexts are new experienmental alternative to package layering which hold a lot of potential (check out tim ravier's development of them here https://travier.github.io/fedora-sysexts/)
There's a toggle for the store in ujust command iirc
Only on Aurora, we don't ship that.
I couldnt see one - I also dont want to layer it, because it will pull in a couple of hundred megs of kde dependencies every time you update. I tried doing it as a sysext (myrepo) but it keeps segfaulting and I havent worked out the issue
Bazzite community really deserves tbe credit. Lots of work and great vibes all around!
Surprised to see it at the bottom of the graph, but for anyone with a homelab uCore is a present from the heavens cloud!
Feel like saying more about what ya like?
I am interested in Bazzite, but am unsure about its compatibility with NVIDIA GPUs. Had anyone here had experience with this?
It handled it like a pro for me
I use a Fedora variant called Nobara with my 4080. Driver management has been great.
20XX onwards in desktop version is fine. I've only heard issues when using gaming mode on the HTPC version, and even then i think it's just inside the gamescope steam menu it's shit, in games it's just fine, no difference.
Works fine, but there are a few issues with game mode specifically.
They make dedicated Nvidia images and I've heard good things. It's supposed to be one of the distros to pick if you want a good out of the box experience with Nvidia. Only used the Amd/Intel image myself though.
I have it on my HTPC and Steam Deck. It's good! Simple to use, simple to set up, no complaints.
On the HTPC you're running Bazzite? Do you play games on that machine?
I'm planning on setting up a HTPC, but I won't use it for gaming. I was thinking of setting it up to run Sway because I think I'll mostly be using Kodi which has good keyboard support, so why not try to do everything in a keyboard-friendly way.
Been using it on my desktop since a bit before F40 came out I think. Big fan!
Me too. The Bazzite desktops are amazing.
I had been using Aurora-dx, but I also like to play games, so I re-based to Bazzite-dx when it became available.
Call me a Luddite, but I want to retain control over my updates and upgrades. I fear the day that Fedora becomes all atomic, all the time, which I can't help but think is in the cards
What's stopping you from turning updates off?
Then what would be the point of using an atomic version?
My son also picked Bazzite, which I hadn't heard of before. Unfortunately he didn't like it and it back to Windows again.
Never really understood the appeal of "immutable" distros.
There's not a single distro out there that does everything right and won't require manually editing some fuckup on the developers' part. Why would we want to make it harder for us when the time inevitably arises?
Go on and keep using your distro another few years, and you'll recognize the patterns of what keeps breaking. And then try some others for some years, and you'll find that you can at most pick between smaller issues on a regular base on rolling ones, or larger batches of issues on release based ones. And some point you'll find that every user creating a custom mix of packages that are all interdependent on another is quite the mess, and the number of package combinations times the number of configuration option combinations is so large that you can guarantee some of them will have issues. On top you have package managers rumaging around in the system while it is in use, and with a mix of old code that is still loaded in ram and new code on disk behaviour for these transients is basically undefinded. Ultimately you'll grow tired of this scheme at some point, and then running a byte-to-byte copy of something that has been tested and doing atomic updates is quite attractive. And putting a stronger focus on containerized applications not only enables immutable distros for broad adoption in the first place, but also cuts down the combinatorial complexity of the OS. And lastly, to be honest, after so many years of the same kinds of issues over and over again, the advent of immutable+atomic distros + containerized desktop apps brought a couple of new challenges that are more interesting for the time being..
Dude Fedora? Really
Just use Windows if you want a voyeur.
Go Bazzite, there has been a lot of talk about Bazzite lately, also on YouTube many have been reviewing it, like JayzTwoCents had a feature about it, which probably helped.
I haven't tried it myself, but it's great to see that it's still possible to shake up the Linux community with a new approach.
Congratulations and best of wishes. 👍 🎈