We shouldn't be talking about stuff like this here. It spooks the noobs.
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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?
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)
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.
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.
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 -R
flags, 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.