5mo ago

Immutable Gaming Distro That Just Works.

I currently use Mint, as do several family members and friends. Its been nothing short of impeccable. I was occasionally tweaking things until now sometimes the game crashes, PC freezes requiring hard reset. Everything used to work pretty flawless out the box. Should I reinstall my mint or look at PopOS, Bazzite, Nobara, Etc? I'm at the point in my life. Where we all need something to just turn on and play. I want some shit that just works. Or reinstall mint but how without losing all my files and settings? and keep it moving as usual as it used to be flawless. Tweaking is fun until you tweaked so much shit breaks lol. I'm over tweaking. Just wanna game. I keep seeing immutable is good so that's why I ask. Thanks!!

5600x 6700xt Its an all AMD build over here :)

Edit: You guys convinced me I'm booting it up now with KDE! I also plan to try PopOs. I'm excited. Thanks everyone!

28 comments

Bazzite. Its pretty swell for gaming, comes with an install script at launch for whatever you want extra, and you update manually or automatically so its pretty low maintenance.
Installed without a hitch, and I game on nvdia. Should work even better for you. Get the right iso though, the desktop non nvdia one.
- How true is this? This is kinda what turns me away. We all want shit that just works and if it breaks it'll update and be new again.
  https://lemmy.ml/comment/14475472
  
  I ran Bazzite on a mini form factor pc for about 12 months. It was just connected to the TV and used to play games.
  I turned it on, I used my controller to start a game, that was it. I’m not sure what actions would be doing to break it.
  I haven’t used it in about 6 months since I got a steam deck, but I just plugged it in and tried it again. Still starts up fine, played dead cells for a few minutes.
  But if you’re looking for immutable distro for gaming then Bazzite is the gold standard.
  Other immutable distros like Kinoite, Aurora, Aeon are targeted to desktop use, but in my experience they play games just fine too, no reason they wouldn’t (Aeon used to have a weird security policy that caused problems with Wine, but I think they changed that)
  
  I've been running bazzite for about 6 months now, daily driving for about 5 months and its never once broken on me. During boot, you're presented with 4 snapshots you can choose between so if an update did happen to break something, it's easy as just choosing an older snapshot after a reboot. No idea why that commenter thinks it's hard tbh.
  I'm running it on a 7600x and a 6700XT GPU. Everything just worked out of the box for me, steam games work perfectly 99% of the time in my experience, and when you run into an issue just go to protondb and you'll probably find the fix there.
  Games run through lutris can be annoying at times, the EA app and battle.net games glitch out on me much more than steam games, but they do work, just gotta tinker with proton and wine versions till it runs.
  Highly recommend bazzite, I love it after being a life long Windows user.
  
  I'm just here to say Bazzite all the way. No clue what that poster meant by breaking issues or problems with rollback... Bazzite is literally designed to be the antithesis of both. The ONLY time I've had a problem with it was rebasing my laptop between Silverblue and Bazzite. Technically allowed, but I wouldn't advise it as that did cause me stability problems. I'd blame Silverblue more than Bazzite in that case, however. A clean Bazzite install has been solid ever since.
  
  The only problems ive been having on bazzite, were nvdia based ones. Thats it. Nvdia drivers amiright? Honestly yeah ever since i installed in june my machine has been aging like fine wine. If you have probs for it on an amd system id be surprised tbh.

Bazzite Bazzite Bazzite!
I was at the same point a while ago.
Everything I touch breaks, and I also had enough of my system breaking because updating with an unstable power grid is like playing russian roulette.
I turned to Fedora Silverblue first, then rebased to uBlue. Aurora first, and then Bazzite. Silverblue feels exactly as the regular variant, Aurora is great for desktop use, and for my gaming PC, Bazzite is fucking great. It just works.
It comes with a lot of tweaks and super many small additions that just make your life easier, especially for gaming.
Updates just happen in the background when there's nothing better to do and get applied to the next boot image. And in case something doesn't work as expected, you can always go back in time.
You can also customise it almost/ just as much as regular distros, but it isn't quite as easy if you want to customise A LOT (e.g. using TWMs).
I didn't notice huge performance boosts tho, it just comes with more tools ootb, for example to make your GPU more silent when idle.
As said, Bazzite is based on Fedora, so you always get new great modern stuff, at the same time as the other Fedora users do.
- Hello. I’m intrigued! Is modding games possible on Bazzite in general? I like playing Sekiro with Resurrection mod.
  
  In general, yes. Most of the difficulty is due to being on Linux and running games through the Proton/WINE compatibility layer, so there can be an extra layer of jank involved, but it's very possible.
  If modding consists of dropping files into the game directory, it will work almost exactly the same as in Windows. However, if some of those files replace the game's DLLs, then whatever WINE runner you use might need to be told to use the DLLs in the game directory instead of its own.
  If you need to use a mod manager, that situation is still not ideal - native Linux mod managers I know of are only the Nexus Mods app (very new, there's some talk of it being integrated directly into the Heroic launcher) and Limo. Everything else, you'll be running whatever bespoke Windows mod manager your game uses through Proton/WINE, probably with Steam Tinker Launch, possibly Lutris.
  tl;dr There can be an extra layer of complexity over modding on Windows, but it's otherwise comparable.

Bro, I distro hopped between 10 different distros. Bazzite is the best, hands down. If you game and do non-dev work on it, it's the best thing ever. It just gets out of the way. It's very hard to brick your install. It freaking rocks.
I've been on Bazzite for half a year, and I'm moving my secondary PC to Bazzite tomorrow.

Bazzite if you want no bullshit easy mode and bulletproof.
Cachyos if you wanna tinker and squeeze out that last 10% in performance.

I tried out Bazzite on my Legion Go and was so impressed I immediately stopped distro hopping and installed it on my daily as well. Hardware wise everything works out of the box. It's based on Fedora Kinoite so it's quite well documented if you run into trouble or want to start doing weird shit. The few times I've had issues (mostly with flatpak sandboxing) they've been solvable with a quick web search.

Not immutable, but I slapped Garuda on a 2016 gaming laptop to give it a second life and it’s been great for the most part. I got a bit fiddly with it and had to fight my way through some partial upgrade issues, but know I arch based distros better and it’s stable as can be. I honestly don’t update it that often since it just serves are my TV box, and I’m seriously considering swapping to a Nix install now that I’ve mostly stabilized my package list for the purposes of gaming and video encoding. Proton is one of the only things I think get regular updates on that device, but those are entirely handled by Steam, so immutable is very attractive to me for a gaming only system.
I’ll also add that my primary device has arch on it and I do most of my gaming (but also work) there. It’s great, and I can’t help but feel a lot of the distros that are “made for gaming” suffer from a lot of the issues that windows does. They are trying to be preconfigured to work with any and all hardware. This leads to bloated package lists, and just extra guffins to work around as you trouble shoot. I’d say my arch install took a bit longer to get gaming super stable, but I’ve also had to fix much fewer issues compared to the Garuda install.
All the people mentioning Bazzite are making me eye it to replace Garuda tho.
- I can't recommend Garuda because they have somehow configured their sddm to not want to work with other desktop environments. Admin on the forums said it themselves. I'd recommend arcolinux because it doesn't shove you into such restraints. Installation is a simple menu to install everything right away.
  
  Ah good to know. I’m using Hyprland on my main device, but never even considered installing anything other than the default on the Garuda box.
- I adopted a lot of customisations from Garuda to my EndeavourOS setup. I got fed up with Garuda because it constantly broke.
  Bootloader broke twice, desktop broke all the time, and when I needed to load a snapshot and it simply didn't work, they finally lost me. Never had any of these issues with my current setup, really a surprising contrast, given that Endeavour is also Arch based.

linux typically won't hard freeze on errors like that no matter the distro. it can, but rarely. being an all amd build i suspect there's some cpu bios feature auto scaling core clock or voltage and in my experience ryzen cpus need to have a manually set stable clock and voltage to perform properly no matter the os. try checking your bios and disabling any powersaving or auto-scaling features for your cpu and manually set it for stock clock and voltage. you may need to look up what these values are as the bios might not have a default value for you. this might not be your issue but it's worth trying. good luck!
- I'll check thanks! I'm unsure of why. Maybe even a bad MoBo but I'm willing to at least try all routes before ordering a new one.

I installed Bazzite about a week ago. Other then the Nvidia performance not being quite as fast and me not having figured out what I am going to use for design for 3D printing yet, my biggest problem has been that I can't seem to get the setting for a custom login screen image to stick.
So all in all it's been pretty painless.
- My wallpaper and lock screens reset every time I restart. It borked my dual boot and now when I boot in the boot menu I have Fedora and Bazzite. No more windows. I still see it in the partition so I guess I just got to recover my windows. The install was a pain in the ass getting an error every time. So far on install I had to remove my old Linux mint EFI and rewrite a new one for bazzite. Gaming has worked no issues but its not been the smoothest transition. I kept getting an error code fatal error message. Had to terminal in to fix it before it would install. Had I known it was gonna be this much of an issue id have reinstalled mint which is a breeze just plug and click.
  
  I unplugged the old drive and installed on a fresh one. I'd heard that dual boot installs could be finicky, so I just avoided it. Sorry it didn't go smoothly for you.

in my experience seeing a few new people come through our support channels the immutables unfortunately had a bigger learning curve

28 comments