Bazzite is an alternative OS to SteamOS for the deck and other handheld PCs. Unfortunately due to a mistake, anyone who installed Bazzite before July 3rd 2024 won’t get automatic updates.
If this affects you, I’d suggest checking out the article to get instructions on fixing it.
If you use Bazzite anywhere, you need to apply this fix.
I had to fix this on my desktop and laptop.
As someone who’s never heard of Bazzite until this thread, what is the appeal of using it on desktop?
It’s an atomic variant of Fedora that satisfies all necessities for gaming with Linux, like coming with built in drivers and the option to install stuff like Steam and Discord during initial startup.
Atomic varieties of Linux are really cool, they are much less prone to breakage because all updates happen at once or not at all. They are just generally more stable and you can rollback easily if necessary.
Personally I just like Fedora, so my preconfigured options are either Bazzite or Nobara. I also prefer the stability of atomic variants. It’s just a solid base to work with, regardless of if you’re using a desktop or a handheld.
Is there a benefit in using it over the default OS?
It has all the advantages of steamOS, can boot straight into game mode, supports Decky plugins, etc.
However it also supports installing traditional Linux programs permanently (which steam OS generally won’t let you do), and has other benefits too.
Because it’s based on fedora atomic it uses rpm-ostree, which lets you layer packages to persist between updates. Good for stuff that isn’t available as a flatpak or doesn’t work as well when installed as a flatpak. Beyond that not much, maybe if someone doesn’t trust Valve with their OS?
On SteamOS you can still kind of have non-flatpak packages persist by using distrobox. It’s still a sandbox, just one that has a bit more latitude in what you can install than a flatpak.
edit: distrobox seems more integrated with the host OS than I thought
Yep, distrobox is a wrapper for Podman, which is also installed by default.
But I agree, there’s actually not a ton of functional difference between SteamOS and Bazzite, unless you want/need to use your Deck like a laptop. If you are only doing gaming, SteamOS is actually the better choice, because Valve has patches and modifications that aren’t yet included in upstream that maximize the hardware’s capabilities and stability.
Unless you’re planning on building from latest source, that info isn’t for you.
This goes for any Ublue project Aurora and Bluefin too
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Bazzite, the popular version of Linux powered by Fedora and Universal Blue that’s great for handhelds including the Steam Deck, ASUS ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go and others needs a little manual user effort after a bit of human error.
Developer Jorge O. Castro noted in a forum post how they “were rotating our cosign keypairs this morning, which is the method that we use to sign our images” and unfortunately they “made a critical error which has resulted in forcing you to take manual steps to migrate to our newly signed images”.
They have a script set up that you can run that will fix the problem, so all you have to do is run this in a terminal app (code source):
curl -sL https://fix.universal-blue.org/ | sudo bash
To ensure it doesn’t ever happen again, they’ve noted some process changes to be implemented.
See all the details in the forum post announcement.
The original article contains 189 words, the summary contains 153 words. Saved 19%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I was puzzled for a while why it wanted to update again right after it seemigly finished but doing again it in the terminal put out an error which for ‘atomic’ distros usually means a fix like this is needed.
