Been daily driving Bazzite for almost half a year now. I currently have two seperate 2TB SSD's, one with Windows 11 and the other has Bazzite. Bought a 1TB SSD so I can migrate my Windows install to a smaller SSD since I much prefer Linux now.
Just need to stop being lazy and finish migrating everything I care about off my old Windows install onto my new 1TB Windows install, then I plan to install CachyOS onto the soon to be free'd up 2TB SSD, since I'm curious about Arch Linux. I'll always have Bazzite to fall back on if need be, or god forbid, Windows.
Hmm, I've never tried Bazzite. Have you tried Ubuntu/can you offer a comparison to it? I play only on Ubuntu and games compatibility is like 80% hit and 20% miss.
Compatibility is unlikely to be very different. The key is immutability (easy to update, hard to brick your system) and some baked in nice to haves for gaming like some specific drivers/patches and controller support out of the box.
In theory, compatibility on Fedora-based distros may be slightly better since they have newer Linux kernels, meaning all the drivers are newer and you get bug fixes sooner. On the other hand, you also get all the new bugs sooner :)
Not sure about Ubuntu, but the AMD GPU firmware that ships with Debian can become very outdated, and you need to manually download newer firmware to get the bug fixes. Until July 2024, the version of AMD firmware in Debian (even in testing and unstable) was over a year old, from June 2023.
I haven't used Ubuntu since around 2014, so I couldn't give you a proper comparison tbh. Sorry!
What I can say is that my entire Steam library basically just works, and has since the day I installed Bazzite. I have more trouble with non-steam games though, EA app and battle.net games can be finicky at times, you just gotta mess with different proton/wine versions until they work, but they do all eventually work, at least for me. I don't play much MP games outside of Starcraft 2, Overwatch 2, Helldivers 2, and Space marine 2, so if you play any MP games I don't play, then your mileage may vary.
I'm extremely happy with Bazzite, it's made me a true Linux convert, which is why I want to dip my toes into Arch in the form of CachyOS while keeping Bazzite as a backup in case I fuck something up!
That's awesome! I'm glad it mostly all works for you. I was looking for an OS for a TV-gaming setup sort of thing and it might be Bazzite now. I use Lutris/Wine for most of my games instead of Steam, I find it easier to troubleshoot. Also lol @ so many games with "2" in them haha.
Tbh I'm kinda glad Blizzard/battlenet games don't appeal to me anymore. I got severely burnt out on Diablo 3, and it feels like all blizzard produced was either grindfests or competitive games.