Custom Linux Distribution just for Gaming

Just to clear some misunderstandings, TLE did a performance test on this distro and it was pretty much the same in terms of FPS as other distros. Gaming distros like Bazzite are made for a faster and easier setup process because gaming tools and stores and preinstalled.
- But that's a legitimate reason for it to exist. A lot of people have reservations towards Linux because they're concerned about the gaming experience. Making it smooth and easy is a good thing. Having said that, I just installed Steam on Mint and everything ran just fine. I only play Steam games on that machine, though.
  
  I can't fully agree with you about the smooth user experience on this particular distro because it's immutable but yea we should promote Linux for gaming. It's pretty good now.
- TLE did a performance test on this distro and it was pretty much the same in terms of FPS as other distros.
  Without measuring any 1% lows or 0.1% lows.
  I enjoy TLE's content, but that video is far from exhaustive on this.
  Unless a better comparison comes out, we should reserve ourselves from making any judgements on this particular subject.
  
  I still don't think there will be a difference. I tried distros with various schedulers and didn't notice a major positive difference except for the DE smoothness that was unbeatable on CachyOS.
  
  On one hand, I think some data is better than no data, so I think its fair to say that there is a lack of evidence for it being better in terms of in-game performance after setup based on it and that should just be the null assumption anyways.
  On the other hand, its been over a decade since its been pretty well known that average FPS is not necessarily reflective of overall performance and throwing the frametime data into a spreadsheet and doing =percentile([range],.99) and =percentile([range],.999) and then dragging it to neighboring cells seems like a pretty minimal extra work for a commercialized channel. For niche testing like this, I'm less bothered by it because having some results seems better than nothing, but its still nice to see it pointed out.
- I installed Bazzite on a sibling's thinkpad and it was amazing. Chose KDE, out of the box, it was amazing. Fingerprint fprint was pre installed, just had to scan them in settings. Battery management and power level settings (power save or performance) were also already installed. Everything has been flawless. Even full disk encryption works amazingly well without hiccups. I remember trying it on Ubuntu and it bricked itself or something and gave up on it.
  Dual booting it and installation was a walk in the park.
  
  Welcome to modern Linux where almost everything works, mister/miss
- And way more reliability, even though it is pretty modified.

I've been using bazzite for over 6 months now, I have it on three of my devices at the current moment in time, and I would never look back to Windows at this point, shit just works.
- I have three questions if you have the time. Can you make it go to desktop mode by default, not big picture mode? What DE does it come with, Plasma? Does it come with Lutris or whatever? If I have an .exe installer for an old game, does it come pre-installed with tools to help create the proton wine-prefixes and everything? I imagine the last one would allow Flatpak to be used.
  
  Not OP but:
  on a desktop it's defaulted to desktop mode. I'm unsure about the steam deck.
  you choose. KDE or GNOME. Budgie is being worked on.
  lutris can install your windows executables. Bottles is available too.
  The only games I'm unable to play so far have been AAA games with unfriendly anticheat. ProtonDB helps here.
  
  I apologize for the late reply, the other commenter is correct as well, Bazzite comes out of the box in desktop mode, if you've ever used plasma before, it's a lot like that. For .exe programs I use wine, and haven't had that let me down yet for the most part. Im fairly certain Bazzite does use flatpaks, but it does also have also Discover baked in.
  Honestly, I compare it strongly to using the steam deck desktop mode.
  
  I want to add to what the others said. Usually I just add windows programs/games to steam as none steam game. that has been the easiest way to do it for me. I have very few games that isn't on steam so it is nice to be able to add them together with the rest with the correct categories and such.

As someone who has done a lot of distro hopping in the past, I've found that going for a stable release that is widely used as a daily driver is superior for gaming than "gaming specific" linux distros, largely on the basis that the gaming distros have routinely had buggy UIs, driver issues, and a variety of unexpected and undesired behavioral problems tied to the array of "gaming adjacent" software installed, most of which you can install yourself with little to no effort and most of which you probably don't want or need in the first place.
- Thankfully, bazzite is both, the community has gotten rather large lately so support has been good.
  
  Too bad they use discord :(
- The thing is, Bazzite isn't really a distro in it's own right, which they admit themselves. It is essentially Fedora with a bit extra on top, and it gets all the updates Fedora does at the same time. It seems like they're trying to "solve" some of the issues with other gaming distros. As far as pre-installed software, it comes with Steam and Lutris pre-installed. Sure, there are some linux gamers out there that don't need those, but the vast majority will use them. Apart from those, it has the graphics drivers pre-installed for your system, based off your iso choice. Everything else is installed by choice through a first-boot wizard.
  
  So is it pretty much an unofficial Spin then?
- It's atomic! If the latest version you try has issues you can roll back to the last one that was working. It's really cool. You cannot write to anything other than /etc and /var unless you make a reversible commit on top of the system base image.

This is the first and only distro I’ve tried that has display link drivers already installed. Was able to plug my laptop into my work dock and immediately have it all work. I used to have to install a community version of the displaying driver for my Ubuntu and Debian based distros. Shit just works the first time.

Jorge, Kyle and the others over at ublue is doing a great job with their Fedora spins.
I run Bazzite on all my computers and if you got a full AMD system you can even get full gamemode running by installing the deck image. This in turn give you the best controller experience for games, as Desktop Steam got several issues with Steam Input valve have not fixed yet.
But not all credit should go to them for this but also ChimeraOS team, Nobara and others that are constantly working on an improved gaming experience on Linux.
When developing RetroDECK Steam Input profiles I mainly use the Steam Deck with SteamOS and Bazzite on my desktop to test them.

https://universal-blue.discourse.group/c/bazzite/5
Discussion forum for the readers.

That seems to be a great distro to follow

How good is the "HDR Support"? It's one thing I've really wanted for Linux for a while.
- From my experience using Plasma 6+ and a NVIDIA card, I keep HDR on on my main display (Odyssey Neo G7).
  No issues with washed out colours on the desktop, everything looks fine
  I can watch HDR videos using the included Haruna player or MPV.
  Firefox has no HDR support outside Mac OS, so no HDR on YouTube.
  For games, it depends. Some games can detect HDR and work fine, but for most I have to use gamescope, which in itself brings some issues like not having the Steam overlay, games freezing randomly or just having terrible performance due to niceness (everything has a workaround though, but that requires some tinkering). Check my comments about the issues and workarounds
  For game scope running HDR, there's a lot of people and guides telling you to use countless flags that don't really do anything at all. The best thing to do is to read its documentation. I use the following flags as startup parameters on my Steam games:
  sh
  
  gamemoderun gamescope -W 3840 -H 2160 -r 165 --hdr-enabled --hdr-itm-enable --hdr-itm-sdr-nits 300 -f -e --mangoapp -- %command%
  gamemoderun just enables game-mode, which can bring some small performance improvements.
  -W -H -r flags are to determine resolution and desired refresh rate. You might be able to omit those flags but I have had some issues with that.
  --hdr-enabled is the only flag needed to get HDR working. Nothing else. (except from enabling it on your DE)
  --hdr-itm-enable --hdr-itm-sdr-nits are for inverse tone mapping for non HDR games, it's the same as Windows Auto HDR.
  -f is full-screen, but to be fair I don't think this one is doing anything, but I need to test better.
  -e is to enable Steam integration, which should be the overlay and input, but its broken (there's a workaround, check the last comment made by me there)
  --mangoapp is to run mangohud, this flag is preferred over running mangohud before %command%. It's partially broken this way because it does not dispaly the GPU or gamemode info. Running it as mangohud works 100% fine but apparently there are some issues with it that are beyond my knowledge.
  
  Awesome, thanks so much. I actually just purchased the same monitor so this will be very helpful when I set it up.
  
  Thank you so much! I’ve looked at countless guides and everyone said something different. This helped a lot.

Linux veteran here. I use Bazzite on my gaming PC and ROG Ally. Once I figured out the quirks of an immutable distro and started using distroboxes it became an amazing experience. No complaints here.
- As someone who never used an immutable distro: what are the quirks when using it?
  
  Basically installing packages. You're fine if you default to using
  flatpaks for gui apps
  brew for cli programs
  distrobox when building from source or when you need good control over the package environment (e.g. when installing a latex editor and only the latex packages you want)
  layer packages on host with "rpm-ostree install" when the program needs tight integration with the host (e.g. VPN software)
  Also, you shouldn't edit files in /usr, but I've never run into that limitation. You can still edit other top-level directorys like /etc .
  That's about it.
- I'm seriously considering Bazzite now. Can you explain whether something like LaTeX with custom packages would work? I also don't want to redownload the LaTeX packages to vanish after a system update.
  Also, I'm a tiling window user (i3). Will it be possible to use it in desktop mode?
  
  As per my other comment:
  Do your latex work inside a distrobox and you're fine.
  I'm not sure if you can layer another window manager on top. You may have to create a custom image for that
  
  Bazzite is exclusively KDE, and I honestly don't think it's possible to run a different desktop manager on it.
  Edit: Sorry, my mistake, there's the option for GNOME as well. But I don't think they recommend even switching between them on an install.

I tried it. Gave up and moved to regular fedora at the end. I didn't see any real benefits personally
I did like many of the ideas, like gamescope is built in. But I think I had minor issues
- Biggest benefit for me is automatic updates in the background which are also safe. On a normal distro, if your pc shuts down for whatever reason during kernel updates you have an unbootable system. That can't happen on bazzite
  
  Just ran into this exact problem this morning which was incredibly frustrating. Performed a routine system update, and I'm pretty sure I had a kernel panic (all input was non responsive, couldn't even switch to a tty) in the middle of pacman's upgrade phase.
  While I was able to chroot into my install and reinstall the kernel, half of my system's packages were left in an inconsistent state so I still couldn't properly boot - and so I just nuked my root subvolume and reinstalled Arch (I suspect I could've somehow got the packages reinstalled if I wrangled for a while with pacman but it was just easier to reinstall at this point).
  Atomic distros like Bazzite are designed to prevent that exact situation I ran into, unfortunately I just haven't had enough time or energy to try to make my own custom image that has what I need in it (got kind of close with NixOS but that had its own issues), otherwise I'd probably be running that.
- Same here. Ir's very bloated. You can decide on what to install,but if you do install all that bloat,you need to be prepared. I tried their AMD GPU overclock tool and after a got a black screen, I ended up with missing packages. Immediately went back to Arch.
  Edit:words
  
  I think I tried emudeck and it wouldn't install. But that wasn't their issue (turned out to be a regression upstream).
  I think I had stuttering sound in audio too. But that's via HDMI.
  Spdif no issue
  I also used another gaming distro though so might be confusing them
  They should absolutely keep developing it. It will only get better, and I'm a unique case because I've been using Linux probably since 1998 or so.
  But I feel they make things a bit more custom, and it will only get better. It has a lot of potential, and is probably the best option already for many people

I've been rocking it for a couple weeks now. So far it's been great

How much different is setting up immutable distros like Bazzite? I like the concept but I've been too intimidated to try it out.
- Setting up is stupid easy. What makes immutable distros potentially difficult is installing software. Anything packaged as a flatpak is stupid easy. Beyond that it can get complicated. But it's not bad in general.
  Having just switched to Linux with Bazzite two weeks ago, my biggest issues have come from Wayland support. And that's really just because I have a specific piece of software I need that doesn't support Wayland. And that's a bit of an edge case and the result is more annoyance than show stopper.
  
  Just use brew for non-gui programs. Really easy. It's the recommended way by the ublue devs and should be pre-installed
  
  Can't you use Xwayland?
- Having to install things mostly through flatpaks works seamlessly until it doesn't. Then you're stuck in dependency hell where you have to open holes in your containers to allow access to files or binaries.
  I'm at a point where I layer enough software that I don't know If there is still value added.
  
  This has always been my concern with relying on Flatpak. It is only as simple as your requirements are it seems.
- The setup process isn’t really much different from other distros, quite easy. It’s documented here. If it’s still too intimidating for you, you could always do a test run in a virtual machine first, there is even an image that you can select at the bottom of the download menu on the website for virtual machines.
  The nice thing is that, if you have some kind of special hardware (e.g. certain laptops, nvidia gpu…) you only need to select it the downloading menu and then you are all set with the special tweaks that the hardware requires provided by the community.
  After the initial installation it’s an even better experience than other distros I have used. It gives you a first time portal, where you can choose additional applications that you would like installed. If you get your application via flatpak then you are all setup. If you need other applications not available in flathub, you will have to do some further reading in the documentation, it’s all explained there.
- Flatpaks ,boxbuddy for gui RPMS, it's super versatile once you get it

I have been using the hell out of bazzite for the last few weeks and I've really enjoyed it. There have been a couple of minor bugs but otherwise everything just generally works.
I've enjoyed it so much that I've also installed bluefin on my work laptop.

the idea of a console like layout ( Ui ) Out of the box ( if you so choose ) is awesome..
but that installer 😮‍💨
- What about the installer? Anaconda isn't great, but you only need about 1 minute to set the options to install and then let it do it's job before rebooting.
  
  I can endure it, but it's kinda confusing and looks outdated.. I hope they make a new one like Ubuntu did

Anyone able to give an ELI5 to a linux noob? I'm struggling to find what the benefit is of Fedora's atomic builds (is it just containerised apps? Is this an immutable distro?)....and then also what the benefit of Bazzite is on top of Fedora's atomic spins?
Are immutable distros good for daily driving?
- The ELI5 for Fedora's atomic desktops is that if Windows had an Atomic Desktop version, Program Files and most of the Windows folder would be read only, and each program you installed yourself would go into its own folder in your user directory. That's the basic idea. It's harder to screw up an Atomic system as long as you stick to containerized app formats like flatpak/appimage whenever possible. It makes it easier for everyone to diagnose problems, and easier for users to roll back if an update has problems. Even if you were to install it right now, you could use one simple command to "roll back" to any image from the last three months.
  The benefit of Bazzite is you have all of the above, plus a lot of gaming-related stuff preinstalled which, if you were to install them yourself in a normal Fedora environment, you'd likely have to spend a lot of time just learning how they're supposed to be configured, how they interact, which versions have problems, and how to troubleshoot problems when an update to one app breaks a prerequisite for something else; eventually you end up in config hell instead of actually using your computer. With Bazzite, the image maintainers are the ones in config hell - they work out the kinks, app versioning, communicate with upstream to fix issues, all that, so your system should be in the most functional state that a Linux system can be, so you only have to think about using your apps.
  tl;dr
  Atomic Desktops are more resilient to randomly breaking from updates or user error, and are easier to revert to a prior state if problems do arise
  Bazzite is a custom Atomic image with lots of gaming stuff preinstalled and preconfigured to work properly out of the box
  If you're a gamer and wanting to try out Linux, Bazzite is going to be the least painful way to get your feet wet.
  Immutable distros are excellent for daily driving. I daily drive one myself!

Has someone tried Steam VR with an Index on Bazzite? How well does it run?
I tried some setups with Steam VR, as Steam inside Flatpak is not supported and not working, but even when installed via deb it can require some restarts and be janky.