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 and living room home theater PCs.
I was just thinking of doing a fresh install on my gaming rig. I might give this a try. I’ve been wanting to dig into Universal Blue for a while and this seems like a good place to start!
Optimized how?
Bazzite is built from ublue-os/main and ublue-os/nvidia using Fedora technology, which means expanded hardware support and built in drivers are included. Additionally, Bazzite adds the following features:
spoiler
Proprietary Nvidia drivers pre-installed. Full hardware accelerated codec support for H264 decoding. Full support for AMD's ROCM OpenCL/HIP run-times. xpadneo driver for wireless Xbox One controllers. Full support for DisplayLink. Includes Valve's KDE themes from SteamOS. LatencyFleX, vkBasalt, MangoHud, and OBS VkCapture installed and available by default Support for Wallpaper Engine. (Only on KDE) Distrobox preinstalled with automatic updates for created containers. Automated duperemove services for reducing the disk space used by wine prefix contents. System76-Scheduler preinstalled, providing automatic process priority tweaks to your focused application and keeping CPU time for background processes to a minimum. Customized System76-Scheduler config with additional rules and CFS parameters from Linux-TKG. Uses Google's BBR TCP congestion control by default. Input Remapper preinstalled and enabled. (Available but default-disabled on the Deck variant) Helpful first-start installer provides an easy way to install numerous applications and tweaks, including installing CoreCtrl and GreenWithEnvy. Nix package manager optionally available. Waydroid preinstalled for running Android apps. Future releases will offer to set this up for you. (Not available on Nvidia builds) OpenRGB i2c-piix4 and i2c-nct6775 drivers for controlling RGB on certain motherboards. GCAdapter_OC driver for overclocking Nintendo's Gamecube Controller Adapter to 1000hz polling. Out of the box support for Wooting keyboards.
What the hell is an immutable OS?
Base system is not changeable. you install user apps etc and those are separate from the root system that remains identical.
I recently put the nvidia variant of ublue-os on my work laptop, which has Optimus graphics. Couldn’t be happier.
It’s great to see these variants popping up! I really think ostree may be the future for desktop Linux, and not even very far away.
I kinda hope not, to be honest. Unless there could be an easy way to get tiling window managers working. It’s easy on NixOS, another immutable distro, but it’s definitely not as easy on something like Silverblue.
You can totally use one of the tiling window manager images (sericea is based around sway) – it wouldn’t be a ton of work for that to be added to bazzite, it’s just another parameter in the matrix, feel free to hop into github and help out, I’m sure people will want lots of options.
The images with the nvidia drivers baked in are one of the greatest selling points for Universal Blue. Its the easiest and simplest way to run Linux with nvidia, hands down.
