Bazzite 3.0 out now with Steam Deck OLED support nearly ready
Bazzite 3.0 out now with Steam Deck OLED support nearly ready
Bazzite 3.0 has been released with the internals upgraded to Fedora 40, which brings with it numerous improvements for gamers looking to get Linux on their PC or handheld gaming device like a Steam Deck or ROG Ally.
For Steam Deck OLED support they said it's ready to the point that "it should be mostly functional", however there's at least one major issue left which "has to do with audio crashing when switching to Desktop Mode" and some other issues related to HDR support.
What is it
Bazzite is an alternative to SteamOS. It had a similar setup of having a separate game mode and desktop, and supports key deck features like suspend and Decky plugins.
It lets you more easily install Linux programs that are difficult to install on SteamOS, and also lets you get a SteamOS like experience on some other handhelds like the Rog Ally.
@Fubarberry @Damage as someone who only uses basic programs for entertainment on the steam deck, what linux programs are hard to install and why?
Thank you
I suggest adding that to the title
Bazzite, a SteamOS alternative, releases version 3.0 with Steam Deck OLED support nearly ready
Bazzite is a Fedora Atomic-based operating system intended for Gaming, so you get a lot of the same benefits of that whilst still including all kinds of Gaming-Focused tweaks and patches out of the box. It is also immutable, e.g the system cannot be modified arbitrarily, whilst offering tools to still make modifications to the installed images if you want.
Note that as of this comment, I'm on
bazzite-deck-gnome:40-20240427via thestablebranch.Audio crashes don't seem to be happening on my OLED Deck anymore when switching between Desktop Mode and Game Mode (YMMV), but there's outstanding issues with Bluetooth (upstream bug from BlueZ).
Connecting a BT controller causes the BT service to crash, and you have to cycle it off/on again to restart it. Audio BT devices seem to work fine.
I haven't had any issues with playing games, though. Been running Bazzite since 2.4.0.
I take it you're on the gnome version? I wonder if that might have anything to do with it.
I'm very tempted to switch to Bazzite, but knowing it lacked full support for the OLED Deck has kept the temptation reasonably low. Hearing that it's almost fully ready for OLED now though is going to bring back those distro-hopping intrusive thoughts again.
I can't say for sure if Gnome has anything to do with it, since the DE should be separate from the drivers, but it's a point worth mentioning just in case. Obviously, there's differences between both versions, but the devs have tried to make the experience as interchangeable as possible. For example, they include GSConnect by default, so you don't lose out on KDEConnect functionality.
The controller issue, though, is upstream and affects anyone using the BlueZ package to run Bluetooth.
If anyone was thinking of switching on an OLED Deck, I would wait a bit longer. The recent changes have been great, but just before the update, I was about ready to reimage back to SteamOS due to the frustrating bugs. Still undecided if I will do that, ultimately, and wait for full support.
Fortunately, to its credit, rolling back to a previous working image is trivially easy, so you don't have to live with specific bugs that get introduced. Benefits of atomic distros.
ETA: if you're into tinkering and learning a new paradigm for how to work with an immutable OS and layered packages, it works on Desktops as well!