Bazzite: The way forward?

After the last post, I began looking at options for a long-term replacement for Windows.

Considering I mainly use my PC for gaming, web browsing and only the occasional tinkering with other stuff like graphics or music, my options are pretty much wide open when it comes to Linux Distros.

The one thing I do need however is stability. I'll likely keep my Win11 install around for a few months, just as a backup, but I want a system I can rely on and that performs well, given my pretty expensive hardware setup.

Arch

Arch is great. I love it, and it's been my distro of choice for a fair few years now. My flavour of choice is usually EndeavourOS, as it's not only very close to vanilla Arch, but the community around it is genuinely one of the nicest online communities I've ever been a part of.

However, Arch with Wayland, for now at least, isn't the most stable of environments. Gaming especially seems to be a bit janky at the moment, and as mentioned above, I need a system that's solid and can be depended on.

Debian/Ubuntu/Pop_OS!

I've played around with these in the past, but this family of distros have never tickled my technology pickle to be blunt. Certainly stability at the very least is poor, as any time I've run a Debian-based distro, it has ALWAYS broken itself when it comes to doing a major upgrade between versions, usually necessitating a complete re-installation. Not acceptable, so not a choice.

Fedora/Bazzite

Fedora is a distro I've never actually gotten to use in earnest. I've had trouble installing it in the past, with the installation process bricking itself part the way through with various errors.

But the idea of an immutable gaming-distro appealed to me, so I started looking into Bazzite, and really liked what I found.

An immutable distro is one where you cannot touch or alter the system files at all. There is little to zero chance that anything you do will brick the system to the point where it needs a re-installation. You can still write and do stuff in your /home directory as normal, change and customise your desktop environment etc, but anything related to the core system files are locked down.

Updates are a bit weird, coming from an Arch environment where updates are to individual packages and programs. My understanding is that the OS is installed as a containerised image. Once or twice a week, this image gets updated and automatically downloaded onto your machine, and on the next reboot this new image is used as the OS. The old image is retained for rollback purposes and can be booted into at any time.

So I decided to give it a go...

The experience so far?

A few days in and it's been great. The update process has been completely seamless. So much so that I hadn't realised that I'd been upgraded between the major version I'd installed (based on Fedora 42) to the new version (Bazzite 43). That's how invisible the process is, and I was honestly astonished by it.

Everything is done in the background whenever your machine is idle or not using much bandwidth (so no massive downloads in the middle of a gaming session for example), and it updates the entire containerised portion of the OS in one go.

So I was upgraded from Bazzite 42 using kernel 6.16 and Plasma 6.50 to Bazzite 43 using kernel 6.17.7 and Plasma 6.52 (and 6.53 this morning!) without even knowing it had updated!

Absolutely invisible and seamless, and it means I never have to worry about keeping my system files updated.

Another advantage of a containerised OS like this is no dependency hell issues.

By that I mean that there will be no issues around application dependencies being missing, or blocking an application installation/removal, or orphaned files lying around clogging up the file system.

Arch was notoriously bad for this, and it's the one thing I won't miss about it in all honesty.

Installing Applications

Applications are all FlatPak or AppImage installations. This means that the applications, similar to the OS, are all containerised and standalone, and have minimal opportunities to break your operating system.

Being a gaming-focused distro there are of course a fair few necessary applications pre-installed when you install Bazzite:

• Steam
• Lutris
• ProtonPlus (for managing Proton versions)
• Nvidia Drivers

Obviously using a 5090 it was nice to have the Nvidia drivers pre-installed by the OS, and having Steam and Lutris already installed is a nice touch.

I've also installed the Heroic Launcher for handling my non-Steam catalogue of games on the likes of GoG.com, Prime Gaming, Epic Games etc.

I've also installed Faugus, despite the fact that the installation of WoW I had under it in Arch was crashing in instances for me. Speaking of WoW...

About World of Warcraft

I still have had some issues with WoW, both in Arch and in Bazzite using Faugus and installing via Steam. The game would run mostly fine, but in an instance, such as a 5-man dungeon, it would freeze up, sometimes catastrophically, necessitating a complete system shutdown and reboot.

Not great.

So I went back to Lutris, and this time the installation was pretty smooth. No faffing around with old, outdated scripts on the website, which is something I always hated doing. This time the install was straightforward and quick. Maybe because there were no dependency issues? Who knows, but it worked!

However there were some initial major issues where the game would either crash when trying to launch it, or the actual Battle.net launcher would freeze up.

So, using ProtonPlus, I downloaded several versions of Proton and settled on version 10.0, and so far that has been solid. No crashes as yet 🤞

The plan for the next few months is to maintain my Win11 installation, but day to day I'll be using Bazzite. I'll only be keeping Win11 around essentially for the remainder of the current raid tier, until we've finished farming Mythic Dimensius for the mounts and CE achievements, at which time we'll likely take a break from raiding for a couple of months.

With Midnight now announced to be launching on March 3rd, that will give us a nice wee raid break, allowing us to get plenty of rest in ahead of the new landscape that Midnight will bring, what with the Addonpocalypse coming down the line.

So I'll be giving Bazzite a good rattle between now and then, and if everything is looking solid in terms of daily usage and WoW remains stable, then it'll be finally "Adios, Agentic OS", and get wrecked, Redmond data-harvesters!