Generated via https://github.com/ublue-os/countme
10k added users since last post. Here are upstream Fedora numbers only
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. 👍 🎈Bazzite is not growing because it’s immutable.
Angry upvote.
?
👑 the goat is here
Bazzite’s growth is not because it is immutable, Bazzite’s growth is because it offers gamers a straightforward onboarding process.
It offers a straightforward onboarding process because it’s image based. The model is part of the success.
The upward trend is not because Bazzite is immutable.
I disagree with you fundamentally, if it wasn’t for the simple updates and stability this would not have the success that it does. The image is part of the model.
lol you’re confusing me, bazzite isn’t immutable. Do you mean to say “Bazzite is growing for other reasons?”
Wut? You’re responding to a trend graph for Fedora’s immutable (Atomic) forks.
Built on Fedora’s rpm-ostree system, Bazzite uses an immutable design with atomic updates and rollback functionality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazzite_(operating_system)
But yes, since the trend chart is showing immutable distros and how Bazzite is growing, I am saying the fact that Bazzite is immutable has nothing to do with it’s growth.
Edit: Reading again, I realize you might not know that Fedora Atomic is the immutable base. 😉
The Bazzite team doesn’t control the wikipedia page, just the official documentation. Someone made up the term “immutable design”, that’s not a thing it’s just a container. There’s no need to confuse people just call it bazzite or a container. Atomic is a fedora brand name, it’s not a thing to classify things under.
As you can see from the comments in the thread all this does is confuse people.
Source: I work on bazzite
“Immutable”: A term to describe Linux operating systems that do not follow the traditional filesystem layout where every single file can be removed by the user with root privileges. It is more nuanced than this in the case of Bazzite, but is still considered “immutable” from the point of view of the extended Linux community. The Bazzite team would not describe Bazzite as an “immutable” operating system.
https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/terms/
I’m a big fan of Bazzite, but as stated in the docs, “immutable” is a term the community uses to describe it.
Education is the key to reducing confusion, not pretending a system architecture doesn’t exist or matter.
After reading this I’m confused about what immutable means
Bazzite contributor here, there’s no reason to care about this. This term just confuses people you can safely ignore it.
I will hypothesize why:
Bazzite is the Trendy Distro Of The Month, like Peppermint or Endeavor or Nobara or a frillion others. CachyOS is apparently next. Nearly constantly, you’ll hear about some trendy new distro which is a fork of Ubuntu or Fedora or Arch that has a feature or two targeted at newcomers or gamers, and for awhile it gets heavily recommended on Reddit or Lemmy, then you stop hearing about it forever as the rest of the ecosystem adopts that feature or fixes the thing that feature was meant to be worked around, and then the cycle repeats.
Bazzite is targeted toward gamers, it emphasizes a solid onboarding experience with a configurator to choose/build your install media based on what you want to do with it, do you want a handheld or home theater experience or a keyboard and mouse desktop? Do you want it to boot to SteamOS or to a DE? Which DE? What hardware do you have? So their gimmick is to steer users through the initital config and setup process. Which as gimmicks go, that one is pretty solid.
MEANWHILE
Fedora’s Atomic editions have no gimmicks at all. You have to independently learn that immutable distros exist, independently decide you want that, and then go hunting on their website through their godforsaken marketing wank to find it.
Fedora likes their bullshit branding. You go to their website, and there are big buttons for Fedora Workstation right next to Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop. “Workstation” does not mention that it’s just the Gnome version. You have to stroll further down, past server, IoT and “Core” versions, to a section that looks visually different labeled “More Fedora Options” including Atomic and Spins. You’re a new Linux user, you’ve just used the OS that came with your computer your whole life, explain to me what the difference between Core and Atomic is and why you should choose one over the other?
The Atomic versions, which is kind of a synonym for “immutable”, you click on that, and you’re presented with five options: Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, Fedora Sway Atomic, Fedora Budgie Atomic, and Fedora Cosmic Atomic Nowhere in its name or description does Silverblue mention that it’s the Gnome desktop one. Kinoite starts with a K and also mentions in the description it’s the KDE atomic version. Also, “kinoite” is a godawful word, they should have gone with Kyanite instead, which is a different blue crystal. Or they should have just called it KDE Atomic or Plasma Atomic. The others just put the DE’s name in the title LIKE A NORMAL PERSON, ROWAN.
CachyOS is apparently next.
I’d argue that this is already the current trend. I can’t count the number of random Indian youtubers I recently got recommended to watch as they glaze CachyOS as the second coming of christ.
That’s a really dismissive way to say “It’s an OS built to fit a demand that wasn’t being met by the other distros”.
I am wary about invoking Apple here, but say what you will about the company, there’s a lot of value in a braindead setup process. Many, many users just want something that just works - it was literally something I asked for when Linux was recommended to me (knowing some hate Ubuntu, I’ll out myself: using Ubuntu Budgie - setup was super simple. I guess there must be demand for that niche in the broader Linux community, so that’s a very smart move by Bazzite.
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.
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.
Thanks Jorge the good work! I had been using silverblue for years and now I’m running machines with bazzite, bluefin, and ucore os. I really, really enjoy how easy to manage atomic distros are, and how they steer you towards better practices (in dev and sysadmin) by design. Thanks!
I honestly don’t know what any of that means. I use Bazzite for automatic updates, Gnome extensions, Portal/ujust commands, update rollbacks, and game mode/Gamescope. It’s simply the most usable distro I’ve found. Bazaar is a nice bonus too. Gnome Software has infuriated me for a long time and I feel like a crazy person because no one talks about it.
I used Nobara for about a month and was constantly pestered with update notifications. There were multiple updaters, I didn’t really understand how to use either of them, and they required a lot of manual input. Eventually I tried to do something else while the updater was running and broke it.
He’s not talking about Bazzite, though. Bluefin and Aurora are built from the same cloud tech as Bazzite, but are more focused towards devs, specifically devs who use containers.
Joke’s on you, Jorge. I use U-Blue just for the great general purpose desktop experience.
I mean yeah sure, if you’re not a developer you can just use it like a chromebook. :D
Bingo. This is the explanation.
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!
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.
IME the nicest part of Bazzite is not having to manage it. To that end, it works on my Steam Deck. But that’s nothing to do with stability, as you say. In its own ways it’s more annoying to use than a regular distro.
Clearly people are finding use for it, but I personally find those annoying aspects needless speedbumps in my own usage. Except for, again, on my Steam Deck.
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.
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
Convince me to switch!
Why? If your computer is working fine there’s no reason to mess with it. bootc images are for people who do not want to use whatever you mean by ‘normal’ Fedora.
Because I was being told the pros outweight the cons, and if I can get a better OS, then I want it? I feel like it was a reasonable question and we had a good conversation out of it.
I also put ‘normal’ in quotes myself, I obviously meant a non-atomic Fedora.
I feel like you’re coming across unnecessarily dismissively here, when I was just out for a nice conversation on the benefit of atomic setups.
j0rge is one of the main devs of bazzite and theres a lot of very strange people in this thread on lemmy.ml chumming the waters here, atomic distros doing well apparently bring out the worst in the strangest linux nerds who think their way of life is under attack. On hexbear a lot of these people causing a ruckus probably aren’t even viewable
edit: yeah the thread here on lemmy.ml has 153 comments currently and on hexbear its 63 and much more tame, lol
Oof, fair enough, I certainly don’t see a lot of said ruckus. Cheers for the context.
They should be scared, we’re here to replace their 30-year failed experiment with tech that’s already successful everywhere Linux makes money.
I’m told my cute’n’calm Hexbear instance means there’s a lot of drama here I can’t see. So apologies if my tone comes off badly in the ol’ .ml context.
Rest assured I was just out for fun conversation to learn about atomic stuff :) Hope the rest of this thread ain’t too stressful.
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.
Bazzite community really deserves tbe credit. Lots of work and great vibes all around!
Surprised to see it at the bottom of the graph, but for anyone with a homelab uCore is a present from the
heavenscloud!Feel like saying more about what ya like?
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.
I am a container evangelist, I find excuses to convert my jobs into Kubernetes workloads, and I frequently use the likes of podman for one off apps/processes and development. I use Flatpak frequently to isolate dependencies for the likes of Steam and Heroic.
I really wanted to like Bazzite or Bluefin, but I can’t deal with the overhead from the rpm os-tree updates. I would frequently notice hitches for my use case (sunshine streaming), and the hoops I had to do to configure Nvidia drivers (for it to then not work as good as other distros) was tiresome.
I went back to Arch (EndeavourOS), and I improved sunshine performance and had a driver that worked with less fiddling.
I’m saying all this because, while I’m glad to see any Linux distro grow, I hope it starts delivering what it says on the tin eventually without compromises that I experienced. Markering on it being immutable and container focused is true, but I dont see the benefit (aside from more stability which as others pointed out, is already stable is most cases)?. Right now, its a simple to configure (assuming most defaults work for your setup) distro that is finding a growing niche amongst some users (obviously by the data shown). And thats good enough for now at least.
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.
Gaming really benefits from up to date kernels. So Ubuntu just isn’t a good choice for that.
Ubuntu literally has never in it’s history been a good gaming distro. It use to just be a popular one. But all of the Deb/apt distros have never been “good choices”
Arch and Gentoo were always the better options. And it’s really only recently that the rest become reasonable options.
Gaming has historically been best on absolutely bleeding edge distros with a bunch of hacky community patches and fixes.
I actually game very little, the performance optimizations are pretty noticeable on bazzite just for general use so its my daily driver
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
I use Aurora DX for my work box! But yeah all my personal PCs run Bazzite now.
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
Is there an overview of what differentiates all those Fedora Atomic derivates?
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