In case, like me, you hadn't heard of Bazzite before:
Bazzite is an OCI image that serves as an alternative operating system for the Steam Deck, and a ready-to-game SteamOS-like for desktop computers, handheld PCs, and living room home theater PCs.
It's basically Nobara, but properly done. (If you choose the desktop version)
It gets updates automatically (max one day after upstream Fedora), has everything you want ootb in the first start wizard, is more secure, and much more.
I was very sceptical at first, but after trying it out, I really noticed some minor performance improvements in games and many QoL improvements, e.g. the preinstalled LACT, which allows me to set up fan curves and over-/ underclock my GPU.
Setting up my new PC took me about half an hour maximum.
9/10, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a smooth gaming experience.
The only issue I can see is this is more of a team effort, and Nobara has always primarily been for GER and his Dad. The differences though are minimal, though I will always sway towards something with the image based design of Bazzite for a gaming/work setup.
installs all those things and sets things up properly on a standard fedora install?
That's exactly what all universal blue images do. It's just that setup is done every single day in github from scratch and stamped out as an image so that the end result gets to your computer as a finished deployment artifact. Leads to better update reliability, built in rollback.
The biggest benefit is that it's easier for a community to fix the fast moving gamer stuff as a config layer on top of a distro that's delivered this way than me having to manually figure out what component of my gaming setup changed that week.
Bazzite is more than just "preinstalled Steam", it has a list of tweaks, optimizations and additions so long you can't even finish reading it all! đ
This includes a different kernel, pre-configured containers, and much more.
If you do that on a regular system, configuration drift would quickly destroy any good experience in no time and result in a huge mess.
uBlue provides a solid base distribution (pretty much stock Fedora) and applies exactly your way, but in upstream, and then copies that new image to millions of PCs. By doing that, you can provide many many identical copies that are the same everywhere and always up to date, without the burden of maintaining a whole distro like on Nobara.
The hard and boring work of maintaining a distro is on the shoulders of the Fedora team, and you only have to maintain your own changes.
This seems something with too big of an attack surface.
Not really.
Most stuff is installed in containers
The pros of image based distros still apply here in terms of reliability, security, etc.
Its no more than a few hours away from upstream stock Fedora
Most apps (Lutris, OBS, etc.) are optional and opt-in, if you just click "next, next, next" in the installer you'll get a relatively vanilla experience compared to stock Fedora
You could do that. With that image everything is vompletely equal on the user device which means that debugging is much easier. Ublue makes distributing custom fedoras increadibly easy.
I am intrigued. Presently using Nobara right now, and I've been running into strange issues, like the whole system suddenly becoming unwritable and Firefox crashing out of the blue and needing an entire system reboot.
/etc is completely writeable. This is why we don't use the term "immutable distros" because Bazzite and the rest of universal blue are neither immutable nor distros.
Yes, I don't know all of the details, but most of the system config files like fstab and such are modifiable. I automount my NAS by putting a command in fstab.