How feasible is rebasing bazzite onto a different distro?
They fact they based it on Fedora in the first place seemed like a stupid choice, but I’ve been biased against Fedora for a long time lol.
IMO they should have based it off Arch or Ubuntu to align with the Steamdeck or SteamOS
I dunno, the concept of an immutable OS is definitely interesting, and I don’t believe Arch or Ubuntu currently offer that.
I’ve been biased against Fedora for a long time
Could you explain why?
We shouldn’t be talking about stuff like this here. It spooks the noobs.
For those that think the response is overblown, from the thread:
These images are intended to be a drop-in replacement for Steam Deck OS for handheld console-like gaming PCs like the Steam Deck (Lenovo Legion Go, ASUS ROG Ally, MSI Claw, and other hardware in the same space).
These are also to be used to create gaming theater PCs, for streamlined use on a living room television.
The issue with “just using Flatpak or a container” is that the gamescope compositor simply does not work in those situations, when paired with Steam’s Gaming Mode, as it has the same concerns as a desktop environment. There would simply be no way to serve Gaming Mode as an environment.
As such, moving to this would essentially force Bazzite, as a project, to abandon its primary reason for existing - alienating 2/3s of their userbase. The remaining 1/3s would be served a lesser experience for a variety of more paper cut reasons, and VR is already a complex topic which would get even worse.
It’s a big deal because disallowing the native steam build would make it nearly impossible to run bazzite in a SteamOS-like experience (which accounts for 2/3s of bazzite’s users)
Could Valve make Gamescope work with Flattpak ?
God fucking damnit, I finally find a Linux OS that gels with me and I find this shit…
Note that this is just a proposal that the Fedora community wants feedback on.
Even if it does go ahead, this is minimum 1 year away from happening.
Tbh I wouldn’t be surprised if this was meant as a “hurry up and move away from Steam still being a 32-bit app, Valve!” bit of brinkmanship.
I thought the Steam Linux client was already native 64-bit?
If not, maybe this is the kind of push needed to get them to actually go full 64-bit?It’s still 32bit. i’ve heard it guessed that Valve does this on purpose because so many games are still 32bit and Wine/Proton/etc aren’t fully compatible yet. What does it matter if Steam works and most of the Steam library does not.
Seems like a good reason for the Wine / Proton WoW64 subsystem to improve.
If this happens, give Fedora itself a try. The only issue I’ve had with it is that my video card drivers didnt work right out of the gate and took a little bit of playing to get perfect.
Been with fedora for years, but fedora is the problem, so that would be pretty pointless.
Fedora is literally the source of this problem. Bazzite is based on Fedora.
Hear me out… But should we be asking why there are so many things, steam included, that are still on 32b libraries?
I mean the answer is pretty easy: video games generally have a long shelf life and no maintenance at some point after they’re released.
That explains the games, but not the steam binary right? If the steam binary didn’t break, and 32b games did, that’d be a lot less of an issue.
Your compatibility layers can be 64b, however, and support those 32b games that don’t even run natively on that hardware anyway.
Because there’s no incentive for valve to spend time on that i guess
See. This is why I game only on Windows. There’s never any controversy or issues there. /s
I’ll see myself out now.
I was this 🤏 close to a reflexive downvote
As reiterated by the OP, the proposal is just a proposal and was proposed with heaps of lead time probably because they expected it to be controversial.
As also mentioned, heaps of volunteer time is spent maintaining the packages where most are barely used (even for gaming).
However, it does not seem like there is a viable alternative. Many comments say the suggested alternative, WINE’s WoW64, does not work for all games.
I can see both sides here. Fedora maintainers says “this is so much work!” and (mostly) gamers saying “But older games will stop working!”.
The response from the Bazzite guy does seem overblown to me. I would think the first step is to work out the impact, as I haven’t seen anyone quantify what proportion of games are affected and if there are alternatives like emulation.
Older games? What are you talking about? They say in that thread that Valve doesn’t release 64bit versions of Steam. That means any games through Steam using the official client would be unplayable.
The flatpak should still work. Though I agree it’s a problem.
The flatpak has its own issues. Namely, that Steam was never meant to be run like that, so you run into bugs the native version doesn’t have.
The two solutions I’ve seen presented in the thread for the Steam problem are to run Steam in a flatpak or a distrobox. I’m not sure if using distrobox has the same issues as flatpak.
I want to say no, but I’m sure if I did somebody who has tried that would pipe up with a problem they found.
I’m wondering what the problem even is. I mean, can’t you just put all the stuff relevant to 32 bit gaming into a ‘retro-gaming’ package and be like “there, now if you want updates, better find maintainers”?
If you have an old game, chances are you won’t need many new features. Only problem could be other packages or the kernel becoming incompatible. I don’t know how relevant that is in this instance.
only problem could be other packages or the kernel becoming incompatible
Yea dependency management without updates is like 80% of the work that goes into package maintenance
WINE’s WoW64, does not work for all games.
Ok but is that because of fundamental limitations, or just because of bugs?
One’s easier to fix than the other.
If it works like real WoW64, then 16 bit applications won’t work ever but 32 bit applications that don’t work will be because of fixable bugs.
It seems to me that 16-bit applications are already basically broken with 32-bit wine if you’re running a 64-bit kernel, by default it places extra restrictions over what the hardware already does to prevent apps from loading 16-bit code entirely.
https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/FAQ#16-bit-applications-fail-to-start
Guessing that’s why they don’t feel it’s that important to continue supporting, seems a VM is the future for these apps.
AFAIK, you couldn’t run 16-bit software on native Windows x64, so Wine is exhibiting the same behavior.
Anyway, these 16-bit softwares are old enough that running them in DOSBox or something like that won’t show any significant performance penalty through emulation vs translation.
I always thought it was purely a hardware limitation, but reading up on it I found it’s actually just “virtual 8086 mode” that was dropped, 16-bit protected mode is still available even when running the CPU in “long mode”.
So it rules out DOS apps, but 16bit Win 3.x apps should still run. But it’s probably a compatibility minefield, and even MS decided it wasn’t important (iirc the only thing they kept around was support for 16-bit app installers, but by internally swapping them out with 32-bit versions when run, since it was apparently common for 32-bit 9x apps to still use 16-bit installers so they could show a proper error message when run under Win 3.x)
Yeah most 16 bit stuff is old enough that there’s already a mature reimplementation of the game engine or old enough that it’ll run nicely in a translation layer or VM
From what I’ve seen if an online store provides a 16 bit classic without a reimplementation, it’s bundled with dosbox.
Of course, I’m pretty much blanking on any classic Win16 titles of note. As far as I recall the significant games just kept being DOS games with at most launch from icon. I suppose original Myst because QuickTime, but they released a Win32 build. But this 16 bit stuff was a speculation, this is about the 32 bit stuff that isn’t reasonably accommodated without a 32 bit runtime and certain bits being at odds with Flatpak isolation architecture.
dang. That was supposed to be my go to OS once I got my data backed up.
any chance someone could recommend another distro for me?it would be on my Laptop. Fairly new, Intel IRIS cpu, no dedicated GPU (can get specs if needed).
I’m going into UNI for comp sci next year
I want KDE as a requirement.
I would prefer it to be arch based so my knowledge can be transferred to messing with my steam deck, but not a requirement.I also tinkered my previous distros to death by messing with terminal commands I didn’t know (it’s how you learn!). I would prefer something to back it up if I accidentally delete a million packages like last time but I don’t know if that would be something dependent on the OS or just a program.
I don’t really understand what immutable is, but I think my SteamDeck is immutable so I think I want it 🤷♀️
any recommendations/tips would be appreciated 🩷
I’ve appreciated endeavourOS’s installer and defaults. It’s Arch-based and has an option to install KDE/Plasma as the default desktop environment. I only back up my home directory, but I’m sure there’s systemwide options, like btrfs snapshots (although that’s a whole thing you’d need to test/verify). It’s not an immutable distro. And, being Arch-based, it gets frequent updates. I’ve had a handful of issues from a package being too cutting-edge, but often it gets resolved within a few days at most with an update. Never had something totally break my system that I didn’t cause myself (mostly symlink traversal). Just read up on
pacman’s flags (particularly-Rflags, like-dd,-s,-n).Bazzite is still currently a great distro.
If Fedora drops support for 32bit packages, Steam, Proton, and more will no longer work, and all Fedora derivatives become useless for gaming.
Other than Bazzite, openSUSE Tumbleweed and Kubuntu Minimal are both great choices.
If Fedora drops support for 32bit packages, Steam, Proton, and more will no longer work, and all Fedora derivatives become useless for gaming.
That is until Valve make the Linux Steam client proper 64-bit (which hopefully will happen sooner than later), and Wine/Proton don’t have to depend on 32-bit/multilib at the Linux host level, that’s what the WoW64 subsystem is for.
That will definitely break Linux-native 32-bit games though.
That will definitely break Linux-native 32-bit games though.
Which is why Valve hasn’t adopted 64-bit. What good is Steam if an enormous number of Steam games stop working? Until WoW64 improves significantly, dropping 32bit support on Linux is a non-starter.
Garuda is built on the zen kernel and ships with KDE, I have been using it for a year now and it meets all my needs.
just try cachyos off a usb, it has a graphical installer, it boots into plasma off the usb, was easier than windows install
You can grab flatpak and snap support on i easilyt, half my apps are from flathub, and debtap for debs (I wanted to maximize flexibility) I use faugus launcher for non steam games, works well with pirated stuff (opens stuff that wouldnt open otherwise, and is instant)
I think I can hear Bringus sobbing somewhere
the return of HoloISO never booting up
I should’ve figured people on Lemmy would love his content lol
Dammit - found Bazzite one week ago and love it - now its embroiled in a controversy.
Dw, this will pass - there is too much passion in the project, and too many with stakes in it too. If it is installed on so many people’s systems, we will have many people eager to see this continue also.
Same here. Nobara was too glitchy so I switched to Bazzite and love it so far. Sigh.
If it helps at all some of the comments in the linked discussion mentions it’s at minimum a year out
When Redhat went Fedora, I learned Debian and Ubuntu. When they decided to flush CentOS, I GTFO even professionally and stayed out of their ancestral distros.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m down with change and updating, but they are very focused on making things better/easier for themselves without worries about who they’re supposed to be supporting.
After Bazzite I went to Garuda, is also gaming focused and has a handy helper app that helps you install common software, run updates, and more.
If you need a new distro it’s worth a look.
I went to Garuda
THERE’S DOZENS OF US, DOZENS!!
Hell yeah brother, make it 11 of us!
💪💪💪💪
I go with CachyOs Ik ik the compiler optimizations only give a minor difference and maybe major in latency but am just comfy with it.
I just like how minimal is the distroCachyos has some great default setup choices too. Limine with btrfs + snapper, all preconfigured… spot on!
Ohh yeah true I forgot they offer alterntive bootloaders that arent grub
Grub was really the only option if you wanted a snapper rollback though.
But now Limine is the new choice for me.
Systemd-boot doesn’t play with snapper.
True but systemd-boot also worked for me on opensuse?
Interesting. I wonder if opensuse wrote up their own solution to this. I did find a post from Cachyos Petr last year responding that he’d like to see more how opensuse boatloader is managed.
I only ever used grub with tumbleweed.
Why not just install the CachyOS kernel onto Fedora (like me)? I then deleted the stock kernle and now make sure to use --exclude=kernel* when updating. Works like a charm.
Ik
My go-to too.
Isn’t Garuda also based on Fedora?
Edit: I was thinking of Nobara.
Honestly go for EnOS. Garuda is neat and has a good default setup, but they’ve gone a little far with their modifications imo
Honestly go for EnOS.
Is that the whole name? Because searching shows YenOS, EndeavorOS, EventOS, EndlessOS and one ENOS based off Xubuntu (a single 2020 mention for a 0.4 version)
EnOS is generally EndeavorOS
Oh? I’m still a Linux noob, educate me.
I just don’t like their candy design that much and it’s effort to undo post-installation
I assume you are taking about desktop environment stuff? I installed the xfce version and it’s been pretty streamlined.
Well, I’m talking about their pre-installed software and custom theming
That’s fair, but as a Linux beginner, I was happy to have more software than I needed at the start rather than not enough. If you know what you are doing, I could see how you could have a different opinion.
There is a lite version, but sure whatever you prefer.
Yeah, but it’s still more work to remove KDE and things… EnOS has an installer that allows you to cherry-pick your preferred packages
Instead of shutting down why not choose another distro base
The only notable thing about Bazzite is that it’s built on top of Fedora Atomic, making it immutable like SteamOS.
Without that, it’s just a regular old distro with some opinions about which software should be preinstalled.
That would require redoing everything. It would be a massive project, and honestly since there’s already other gaming oriented distros out there, what would be the point? It’s not like Garuda or PopOS is shit.
popos is
Probably a lot of time and work to do so, they’ve spent a lot of time learning what tweaks Fedora needs.
Makes sense
Why not ride streams coat-tails and switch to arch?
I’d not really paid attnetion until this thread and assumed it was an Arch derivative becase of Steam OS. TIL
The tiny bit of gaming I do is in my main install is LMDE using Steam, it works fine.
I went from Windows to arch after waiting for a while for steam to release the desktop os. No real problems gaming aside from anti-cheat.
Or Debian. It still supports MIPS64 officially and 68K unofficially. x86 isn’t going anywhere for a long time.
I really feel for the Bazzite developer over the possible Fedora decision. That just plain sucks. Fedora was never a big gaming distro though. Hindisght is 20/20 and all that, but why pick that one as base in the first place?
Bazzite is based on Universal Blue, which is based on Fedora Silverblue, which is the first immutable, atomic Linux distro. The immutable nature of Bazzite is the point of it’s existence.
What’s the immutable part of Fedora, compared to other distros? Asking because, well, dropping 32bit support is a significant change and something that would make dummies like me not understand what’s immutable.
The underlying system is managed by OSTree, which handles the entire system instead of individual packages. You cannot simply change any part of the system, it’s all or nothing. This means stability, security, and effortless rollbacks if anything goes wrong. If you really want to tinker, you can create layers that sit on top of the base system, but it still doesn’t modify the system. It’s a very different way of thinking about how the system works. It’s like working with containers.
Man that sounds so nice for my laptop.
It is. I did that and will keep it even if fedora drops 32 bit functionality since I don’t need anything 32 bit on my laptop. If bazzite ends I can just rebase to a different variant. The gaming computer I may not have the choice
Did he elaborate on why? Is it really that integral to have 32bit tools?
Yes, and from what I understood:
- Steam is still 32bit. Two-thirds of Bazzite’s user base use the OS on handhelds requiring Steam’s gaming mode front-end. Installing Steam as a flatpak removes the ability to boot into gaming mode, and so alienating two-thirds of Bazzite’s user base.
- It will kill support for older games that are still 32bit. Wine’s WoW64 isn’t ready yet, and even so, building custom Proton for 32bit support (e.g. Including all the 32bit libraries inside of Proton itself) on top of the Proton provided by Valve is going to be very messy.
- OBS requires 32bit packages to capture video data from 32bit games. If 32bit is no longer supported, this’ll kill streamers playing older games (OBS is probably the most widely used software by streamers and game recorders).
- It would kill VR on Bazzite, as VR still makes use of 32bit features (I’m not sure why or which ones, but that’s what’s said).
Oh wow, if steam is still 32 bit, forget the offshoots, fedora itself won’t be worth using. I’m on fedora but if I can’t run steam, then I’m finding a new distro.
On the flip side, what’s the reason they want to drop 32-bit support, given steam depends on it, which they should understand means it’s integral to the size of their current userbase?
Lol if you think gamers, especially on fedora, are anything more than a rounding error in the total user pool
People just ditching Fedora for another distro is exactly what is being warned about on the linked forum thread, should the Fedora team decide to go through with it.
As for the why; the Fedora team says that 32bit libraries are annoying to maintain and that they can cut it out to save on time and resources. They consider 32bit old and no longer relevant.
However, others have said that if 32bit is still being used (also for none-game-related projects) then it’s still relevant and should still be maintained. Also that Fedora should develop according to what the user base wants, and not pull a Microsoft/Apple and force want they want on the user base.
…not pull a Microsoft/Apple and force want _they_ want on the user base.
This is why I personally stopped using anything from Canonical.
Afaik Steam still heavily relies on 32-Bit. And bazzite’s only purpose is Steam.
The comments in the thread don’t mention Steam itself, but it’s that running all the 32 bit games will become a problem. Steam’s flatpak packages the 32 bit packages so that can get around this change, but the flatpak is not official and does not support all features. Steam themselves only provide the RPM for Fedora.
steam package from rpmfusion is not official
Ah you’re right. It seems Steam only provides a *.deb as far as I can tell.
What features are missing on flatpak version? I am playing games that way without any issues…
I’m no expert, and I’m running Bazzite (and previously Nobara), both of which have the RPM installed by default so I don’t think I’ve ever used the Steam Flatpak. But things mentioned in the thread are VR and Gamescope.
I do wonder if any issues are related to permission restrictions that could be resolved editing permissions with Flatseal, but I don’t know enough about the issues.
Ah yeah. Would be unfortunate. Bazzite was the least amount of setup i’ve ever had to do with linux and is the only repo I could recommend to someone non-technical
There are others like it and some better for those who are both non-technical and non-gamers. What you’re looking for is “immutable distro” https://itsfoss.com/immutable-linux-distros/ which is a distro of Linux that is very user friendly, much like Windows, in not allowing major changes to the OS. SteamOS is this as well.
It makes setup and updates much easier to manage and easier for users to use because it just works most of the time.
I tried fedora kinoite and the experience is much worse than bazzite. The nvidia drivers ware a pain to install on kinote but bazzite just provides an image with them already configured.
That makes me sad. Bazzite just refused to install on my new laptop (as did several others, amusingly) so it was back to manjaro for me.
If bazzites only purpose is steam then it would’ve probably “died” anyway when Holo Desktop releases
