It has been 84 years...

Okay, maybe I am a bit exaggerating in the title. It has been two years since I put Bazzite on my main gaming system. Two years feel like a pretty good time to take stock and see how the journey has been. There have been updates, major releases and new games, which covers most of the relevant things.

Back when I put Bazzite on my system I did not expect it to last very long. I was mostly curious to see how well it will work out of the box and if I could recommend it to my non Linux-savvy friends and people less inclined to mess with an operating system, like my wife.

Community

Small parts of the Linux community are still as annoying as they were 30 years ago. Congratulations, you managed to either dodge any form of character development or successfully raised equally annoying replacements.

"X just did Y. That’s either a bug (hopefully), or a really bad user experience" seems like a fairly simple statement. Sometimes you just throw out a toot with a bit more context than that, because you are annoyed by something. (Especially interesting when you try to figure out if "X" is good enough to recommend.) The amount of arrogant responses down to immediate insults such as "you could ask for help and not be an asshole" is staggering. Yep, I am surely an asshole for calling it a bug or a bad user experience when Nautilus does not show hidden files even when "show hidden" is checked. How dare I insult the free labour of infallible, eternal beings slapping together a desktop environment that is known for being opinionated and telling people they are wrong when they want any given feature.

Large parts of the community are as amazing as always, but the loud minority is what gives the rest a reputation.

Updates

„Are you on Windows? Do you fear a Tuesday auto-installing update that might break a game, your system or re-enable copilot or Recall? There is a solution for that.“ Marketing jokes aside - I was not very careful with my distro. I installed updates the moment they dropped.

Bazzite kind of gives you a little bit of a safety net by allowing you to boot into the old image (that is if you notice fast enough that there is a problem before the next update comes along).

The last two years I needed this feature exactly zero times. Everything just worked. Major Fedora releases, KDE updates, the whole thing just happily updated and did not change settings or break anything. Except Discord. For some reason push to talk stopped working. I did not spend any time looking into this yet, but based on previous behavior I might have to start giving Wayland a side eye. (I am not saying it is the culprit, but I might do a blind shot and start there. Not sure if the X Legacy Support was dropped during a major release for example.)

Games

Games just work. Very well, actually. I have not run into a single game I wanted to play that just did not work.

Some games seem to do a bit worse than on Windows. But otherwise any major release I wanted to play I could play from day one. There are still some anti cheat issues, but the two "competitive" games I play (Overwatch and Rivals) that have an anti cheat always worked well.

Overwatch has the habit of compiling shaders every time the game starts up. It is only a few seconds. After a large update when it has to do a full rebuild I am usually stuck in the practice range for four to five minutes until it is done, with round about 10fps and 400ms latency. Feels like playing on NA servers, and it is a minor inconvenience I am willing to live with.

Modding is a bit of an odd-ball. Surely not the most mainstream activity, but as a Skyrim player (and my wife being a Sims enjoyer) modding is on the requirements list. You might have a better time manually adjusting Wine prefixes than using Bottles, even if Bottles is more intuitive and is an easier time handling dependencies. Not too bad, but a bit more work.

Two years in

I have not booted Windows once the past two years. I guess it is time to wipe the 4TB NVMe it is installed on, sell it and buy an apartment or something. That should roughly check out with current storage prices.

I assumed I will ditch Bazzite once I have used it for a bit and know if I can recommend it. But that did not happen. I am still on Bazzite, I am decently happy with it and do not foresee this to change in the near future. Some friends, even some long time Windows fans and Linux haters, switched to it and seem pretty happy. My wife is backing up her Sims mods and getting ready for the move.

I am not too fond of Fedora Kinoite on a laptop. Using toolbox or distrobox is pretty inconvenient, especially when you need root and bind to privileged ports. I also have rarely seen a Linux self-destruct the last two decades, making the rollback a bit of a "nice to have, but do I really need it?" feature. This is not Arch 0.7 anymore (ironically enough I used Arch before "I use Arch btw." became a meme).

It has been two really pleasant, uneventful years, OS-wise. I am thankful to the people putting all the work in from optimizing the kernel, to distros, Proton and more. They made it possible to have a pleasant, workable alternative to Windows when all you want to do is kick back and play a few games.