Bazzite isn’t a bad distro, I’m currently running it on my gaming PC, but to be honest I’ve found it kind of frustrating. I’ve gotten used to Debian through my self hosting experiences and Bazzite is much more sandboxed than that, and not in a fun way (at least to me). It’s a good option for people coming from Windows but if you have previous Linux experience I don’t think you would enjoy it. I will probably switch to something else soon.
Despite the recent hype, I also haven’t had great experiences with gaming on Linux in general. It’s much better than it used to be but there’s still a lot of inconveniences in too many instances. Things that are not insurmountable but definitely more annoying than they should be. I don’t think casual gamers would put up with most of it.
As an example, Helldivers 2 works pretty well except for the fact that it black screens anytime you alt+tab out of the game. What good is being able to play it if you have to restart every time you check a message from a friend, open a web browser, or start playing music? I don’t want to deal with that and most people are way more likely to get frustrated with stuff like that and quit than I am.
I come from Windows, I’ve been running Bazzite for about ~2 years. I love it. I have an AMD GPU, everything just works and I don’t have to do shit. It’s even better than Windows.
Also, as I use the bazzite-deck image, when my kids turn on the PC, it’s just a console for them, they self-serve without any help from me.
I absolutely love Linux and even I went back to Windows on my gaming rig.
My problems were sleep and wake just will not work properly in Bazzite or any distro. And I found myself getting tired of having to troubleshoot 1/4 games I installed from Steam. Like sure, I did get them to run eventually, but I got tired of it.
And also pirated games. Again, you can get them to run, but depending on the game, you might spend hours tweaking things. On windows it just runs first try. Sad but its my experience.
Have you got into podman/distrobox yet? I main bazzite now, but keep a couple Debian and Ubuntu containers around for programs that run/better on those.
I felt pretty limited at first into I kind of grokked the immutable os way.
Yea the Helldivers problem killllsss me and has since day 1. I arrange all my windows on my other displays so I can see as much as possible before I launch it. 😅
My problem is I forget and try to look at something else out of habit. Then I come back to the game and it’s borked. Before I figured out that horrible vulkan shaders load time issue it would take 20 minutes for the game to launch again. Not exactly trouble free to say the least.
Agreed. We’re close to “use Linux, it just works” but the closer it gets the more glaring the remaining issues become.
I recently dumped Win 11 for gaming and decided to try Steam OS, it wouldn’t get past the install because it couldn’t get a network connection. Next I tried CachyOS. It mostly works but the WiFI/BT support isn’t there, I had to track down a project that is working on drivers for the chipset in my Strix X870E-E motherboard which mostly fixed WiFi but I can’t get an Xbox controller to stay connected. Also networking can be patchy, and the PIA VPN client is just broken. All of these things worked fine in Windows.
We’re close to “use Linux, it just works” but the closer it gets the more glaring the remaining issues become.
Yeah I totally feel that. For basic PC stuff like web browsing it’s already there and that’s part of what makes gaming so annoying. You can tell that everything else is designed with flexibility and the user experience in mind so when a game just refuses to boot it feels more disappointing. I want it to be ready for everyone to use and it just isn’t.
If you have the dongle from Xbox theres a GitHub repository called like xbone that works really well on my machine, I am on mainline Arch btw. I noticed xbone only sucks when you first connect a controller, so there is a downside that sucks pretty bad.
Bazzite isn’t a bad distro, I’m currently running it on my gaming PC, but to be honest I’ve found it kind of frustrating. I’ve gotten used to Debian through my self hosting experiences and Bazzite is much more sandboxed than that, and not in a fun way (at least to me). It’s a good option for people coming from Windows but if you have previous Linux experience I don’t think you would enjoy it. I will probably switch to something else soon.
Despite the recent hype, I also haven’t had great experiences with gaming on Linux in general. It’s much better than it used to be but there’s still a lot of inconveniences in too many instances. Things that are not insurmountable but definitely more annoying than they should be. I don’t think casual gamers would put up with most of it.
As an example, Helldivers 2 works pretty well except for the fact that it black screens anytime you alt+tab out of the game. What good is being able to play it if you have to restart every time you check a message from a friend, open a web browser, or start playing music? I don’t want to deal with that and most people are way more likely to get frustrated with stuff like that and quit than I am.
I come from Windows, I’ve been running Bazzite for about ~2 years. I love it. I have an AMD GPU, everything just works and I don’t have to do shit. It’s even better than Windows.
Also, as I use the bazzite-deck image, when my kids turn on the PC, it’s just a console for them, they self-serve without any help from me.
Pure Bliss.
I absolutely love Linux and even I went back to Windows on my gaming rig.
My problems were sleep and wake just will not work properly in Bazzite or any distro. And I found myself getting tired of having to troubleshoot 1/4 games I installed from Steam. Like sure, I did get them to run eventually, but I got tired of it.
And also pirated games. Again, you can get them to run, but depending on the game, you might spend hours tweaking things. On windows it just runs first try. Sad but its my experience.
Have you got into podman/distrobox yet? I main bazzite now, but keep a couple Debian and Ubuntu containers around for programs that run/better on those.
I felt pretty limited at first into I kind of grokked the immutable os way.
Yea the Helldivers problem killllsss me and has since day 1. I arrange all my windows on my other displays so I can see as much as possible before I launch it. 😅
My problem is I forget and try to look at something else out of habit. Then I come back to the game and it’s borked. Before I figured out that horrible vulkan shaders load time issue it would take 20 minutes for the game to launch again. Not exactly trouble free to say the least.
Agreed. We’re close to “use Linux, it just works” but the closer it gets the more glaring the remaining issues become.
I recently dumped Win 11 for gaming and decided to try Steam OS, it wouldn’t get past the install because it couldn’t get a network connection. Next I tried CachyOS. It mostly works but the WiFI/BT support isn’t there, I had to track down a project that is working on drivers for the chipset in my Strix X870E-E motherboard which mostly fixed WiFi but I can’t get an Xbox controller to stay connected. Also networking can be patchy, and the PIA VPN client is just broken. All of these things worked fine in Windows.
Yeah I totally feel that. For basic PC stuff like web browsing it’s already there and that’s part of what makes gaming so annoying. You can tell that everything else is designed with flexibility and the user experience in mind so when a game just refuses to boot it feels more disappointing. I want it to be ready for everyone to use and it just isn’t.
If you have the dongle from Xbox theres a GitHub repository called like xbone that works really well on my machine, I am on mainline Arch btw. I noticed xbone only sucks when you first connect a controller, so there is a downside that sucks pretty bad.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll just stick with a long cable for now and order a Steam Controller next week.