Generated via https://github.com/ublue-os/countme
10k added users since last post. Here are upstream Fedora numbers only
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.
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.
Bazzite is not growing because it’s immutable.
Angry upvote.
?
👑 the goat is here
The upward trend is not because Bazzite is immutable.
They all are
But “being immutable” is not why Bazzite is growing.
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.
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. 👍 🎈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
- Bazzite: 26k users -> bazzite.json
- Bluefin: 1.9k users -> bluefin.json
- Bluefin LTS: 40 users -> bluefin-lts.json
- Aurora: 1.3k users -> aurora.json
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:
once it clicks, the pros far outweigh the cons
I would love to hear a pro about atomic distros that isn’t some vague platitude about security or stability. I have zero security/stability problems on my ‘normal’ Fedora.
As someone who has steadfastly avoided atomic distros because it sounds like an arseache and the last thing I want is more busywork. Convince me to switch!
I switched to fedora for stability and pretty consistently each major update would break my computer. I switched to fedora silverblue and everything is so much simpler and upgrading is a breeze. A few times I have missed the simplicity of just installing random obscure software or toolkits for school but typically I can use containers and that also works nicely.
I also prefer using containers anyways because that aligns with how I mentally organize things. Flatpak has basically everything I need so that’s not a concern either.
Edit: I see you don’t benefit from stability, so don’t worry about that bit. It benefits me greatly though.
I switched from Fedora KDE to Kinoite a few months ago. Both were 100% stable for me as well.
The main reason I switched to Kinoite is because I’m a digital hoarder and after 5 years or so all my systems are completely trashed with various libraries, 12 different PHP/.NET versions, custom builds and a bazillion Python packages.
In the end it always causes issues like my builds stop working because I have some ancient version of a library stashed away somewhere.
Immutable distros are really easy to return to “factory defaults”. It keeps a list of all the packages that are installed on the system and everything else now goes in Toolboxes, Distroboxes or Docker containers. If I mess up my C++ environment (again) I can just delete that toolbox and start from scratch.
I still manage to bloat my home directory but that is much easier to clean up than looking through all system files.
Security isn’t really one, but saying don’t mention stability is proving the point—Fedora goes to ten, but Silverblue goes to eleven. That’s like saying, “tell me why Arch is good without mentioning the up-to-date packages.”
For Bluefin, it had everything I was doing with Fedora and then Silverblue OTB, and then some things I didn’t realize I needed. Yes, you can run a container-focused workflow in Fedora, but atomics keep you focused on good practices. With Fedora, my system became a bit of a dependency hell with Python and npm packages; now I have a container per project that can either have its own home dir or just seamlessly integrate with my main system.
I’m the whole IT and dev department for my company, so I would often have dedicated VMs etc. for each focus. Now everything is just seamlessly in my system.
It’s a bit of a reset for sure what isn’t, but once it’s done you know you can just hit the power button and everything is there ready to go.
I’m getting into rolling my own spin at the moment for our thin clients as they only have 16GB of space, and that’s been really easy to set up. Now I have a trimmed-down Bluefin that comes packaged with Remmina, and I can deploy updates just by updating some files on GitHub. It’s really not more busywork, pretty much the opposite for me, my root is basically /var and anything lower level I don’t really need to be messing about with on a workstaiton. I have all my tools most out of the box. I have every language package esp elixir thanks to brew have you tried setting up iex on Ubuntu it’s dog egg. On bluefin, I just brew install elixir.
Thank you for the informative response! :)
saying don’t mention stability is proving the point
My point is that stability is already 100% fine for me now. So saying you’ll make my already rock-solid experience somehow more stable is meaningless. As a power user for over a decade, I’ve personally experienced zero issues where I wished Fedora was somehow more stable. It’s like telling me that Silverblue connects to the internet - Like yes, I already have that.
From what I’m reading, it sounds like the singular ‘pro’ is being forced to do cleaner, more self-contained practices. I can totally see how that would be helpful for some people. But personally, I would genuinely despise that kind of restriction.
I’m admittedly the kind of person who hates being forced to do the ‘best practice’ thing. I’m genuinely happy that my Linux distro will me
rm -rfthe root partition (with an ‘are you sure’ prompt these days :) ). I’m happy that if I really want to purge the kernel package with dnf, then I can. I want (and kind of need) my freedom to make a mess, if I tell Linux to jump, it will goddamn jump, even if it’s a bad practice technically terrible decision. I have zero interest in going all around the houses just to do it the technically correct (and sometimes less-effort-in-the-long-run) way. If I ever want a clean plate, I can still spin up a container just like you’re saying.So I get the feeling that atomic is very much not for me, which is what I suspected :) Very glad that people like yourself find it an improvement, that’s what flavours are for!
Exactly that. It’s not the be all and end all for Linux, nothing ever will be and that’s OK. Some people have had a few issues, especially when Fedora was in the 30s. Just did a quick search, even this year some users reporting it borking itself. But like you, I have never had an issue, but when I deploy machines that are 100 miles from me, I don’t want to deal with that, same for my work machines.
Bazzite works really well for my living room PC, wife approved PS5 replacement. Again, for my personal gaming rig I don’t want to get home go to game and have to deal with some dependency issue. I put Bluefin on my field laptop because again I use it sporadically, and it’ll update on boot if it was cachyOS or workstation there’s a chance it could drift out of spec enough to bork.
So yeah I love the Atomics, but I was prob 90% the way there before Silverblue came about and 95% there when the Ublue stuff stated rolling out.
Like a lot of things Linux it’s not the future of Linux but its a future I think.
I don’t think I’ve even tinkered with Bazzite since installing it. It just works. You do have to get used to container workflows and using flathub but its a marginal amount of overhead for improved security. Bonus points: you can lazy install lots of apps with distrobox, for example you can install .deb files, .rpm files, pull from the AUR, its no biggy, and its all preconfigured and easy to setup.
It’s also nice to be able to rebase your distro whenever you want to try out different spins and features, makes inter-fedora atomic distro hopping easy without destroying your configs.
Thanks for the response, though up to this sentence I’m hearing extra busywork and slow/annoying containerising, in exchange for vague security platitude and a tool which I can already use.
It’s also nice to be able to rebase your distro whenever you want to try out different spins and features, makes inter-fedora atomic distro hopping easy without destroying your configs.
I’m interested by this. Is there a uniqueness to Atomic setups such that you can (more easily) keep your user partition, GNOME configs, etc. and swap out the Fedora distro underneath?
Yep, I can for example rebase from Bazzite to Secureblue and keep all of my configs intact for say, KDE. So if a project goes fubar you aren’t out of luck and need to reinstall and reconfig linux, its trivial to rebase/“swap distro”, its a single command that looks like this
rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bazzite-dx-nvidia:stableAll programs, files, configs, etc are intact in your home directory. I’ve swapped between user created spins for different DEs like Cosmic and so on, whats cool is its all preconfigured to run well under bazzites kernel. Image based upgrades are also very nice, theres inevitably config drift that messes with performance or updates can break your setup on other distros, image based means the devs tweak every interaction and push it all to you with the least effort possible on your part.
This is very cool, and I can suddenly see atomic being useful for certain circumstances. Won’t be using it for my personal computer main driver, but hopping/resetting this is easily attracts me so. Thank you!
rpm-ostree is pretty nifty in general, it functions like git so it reapplies each of your configs over what the devs do each time you upgrade, leading to as little config drift and broken upgrades as possible. each upgrade feels like a fresh install imo
I am interested in Bazzite, but am unsure about its compatibility with NVIDIA GPUs. Had anyone here had experience with this?
Worked great in VM with Nvidia A4000. Zero problems, just a learning curve to use
rpm-ostreeandbrewinstead ofdnf.I use a Fedora variant called Nobara with my 4080. Driver management has been great.
Works fine, but there are a few issues with game mode specifically.
It handled it like a pro for me
Works fine with the nvidia open drivers, what gpu you got
The open drivers ? You mean the ones without 3d acceleration support ?
That’s not the case for the newer open source drivers from nvidia. They’re only compatible with the last few generations of cards but they’re performant and the only feature they lack is CUDA to my knowledge. Not talking nouveau here
Oh ok, that’s pretty good then.
But I do hope we’ll get an open cuda replacement soon and some sort of gpu partitionning/ vgpu capabilityIntel Arc Pro is the only GPU attainable to normal people that supports SR-IOV. in general using a couple cheap cards is more reasonable than one expensive card that handles all those functions.
cuda works fine on 4070 right now, though iirc certain specific things dont run well and are a little funky in comparison. i think it was ollama? but llama.cpp seems to work fine, same with things like comfyui
🤷♀️ I don’t know much about that, cyberpunk runs perfect on my 4070 idk what else you could want
Then you are surely running the proprietary nvidia drivers, not the open source “nouveau” nvidia drivers ?
“nouveau” != “Nvidia open source drivers”. Nouveau was community made by reverse engineering. Nvidia has released their own open source drivers now.
thanks, this explains my confusion, I recently lost half a weekend to this distinction !
No it’s definitely the open drivers
Geforce GTX 1080
I run bazzite on an old laptop with a 1050, runs flawless.
I’m rolling a 1080 on Bazzite and it’s worked great for me, as well as NVIDIA does on Linux generally. Which is to say, much better than it was 2+ years ago but still could do with some improvements.
That’s promising to hear! For the drivers are you using Open GPU?
I still have to look into the 1080s compatibility with this. Thanks OP for mentioning it.
Turing or newer. 20XX or 16XX and newer.
Like the other poster said, the open drivers aren’t for the 10-series and earlier. It’s because the microcode that NVIDIA wants to keep proprietary is within the GPU on later series, rather than the driver.
Bazzite has a build for the older proprietary nvidia drivers, I’m pretty sure 1080s dont get the open source variant of the driver unfortunately 😔
https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
https://download.bazzite.gg/bazzite-nvidia-stable-amd64.iso this is the download for the proprietary nvidia kde iso
https://download.bazzite.gg/bazzite-gnome-nvidia-stable-amd64.iso this one is for gnome
I don’t know how well the proprietary driver runs, I assume if you got it running on another linux distro this will work fine
Thanks! I am still very new to Linux and have been learning the OS through OpenSUSE on an old laptop. Still debating which Linux distro to switch to for the windows desktop (the one with the 1080)
Could try dual booting to see how your hardware works
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 use Aurora DX for my work box! But yeah all my personal PCs run Bazzite now.
Very fun, I’ve been rocking Fedora workstation for years. If Fedora could take off as the gaming distro that’d be great, I’ll get even more up-to-date top-notch graphics drivers without having to change distros
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
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’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
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.
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.
I actually game very little, the performance optimizations are pretty noticeable on bazzite just for general use so its my daily driver
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’ve been running it on a beelink n150 for 6 months and it’s been great. This winter I plan to build a beefier gaming PC to run it on.
I have it on my HTPC and Steam Deck. It’s good! Simple to use, simple to set up, no complaints.
