Look, I’m a Debian user for 15 years, I’ve worked in F/OSS for a long time, can take care of myself.
But I’m always on a lookout for distros that might be good fit for other people in my non-tech vicinity, like siblings, nieces, nephews… I’m imagining some distro which is easy for gaming but can also be used for normal school, work, etc. related stuff. And yeah, also not too painful to maintain.
(Well, less painful than Windows which honestly is not a high bar nowadays… but don’t listen to me, all tried in past years was to install Minecraft from the MS store… The wound is still healing.)
I have Steam Deck and I like how it works: gaming first, desktop easily accessible. But I only really use it for gaming.
So I learned about Bazzite, but from their description on their main site I’m not very wise:
The next generation of Linux gaming [Powered by Fedora and Universal Blue] Bazzite is a cloud native image built upon Fedora Atomic Desktops that brings the best of Linux gaming to all of your devices - including your favorite handheld.
Filtering out the buzzwords, “cloud native image” stands out to me, but that’s weird, doesn’t it mean that I’ll be running my system on someone else’s computer?
Funnily enough, I scrolled a bit and there’s a news section with a perfectly titled article: “WTF is Cloud Native and what is all this”.
But that just leads to some announcements of someone (apparently important in the community) talking about some superb community milestone and being funny about his dog. To be fair, despite the title, the announcement is not directed towards people like me, it’s more towards the community, who obviously already knows.
Amongst the cruft, the most “relevant” part seems to be this:
This is the simplest definition of cloud native: One common way to linux, based around container technology. Server on any cloud provider, bare metal, a desktop, an HTPC, a handheld, and your gaming rig. It’s all the same thing, Linux.
But wait, all I want to run is a “normal” PC with a Linux distro. I don’t necessarily need it to be a “traditional” distro but what I don’t want is to have it running, or heavily integrated in some proprietary-ish cloud.
So how does this work? Am I missing something?
(Or are my red flags real: that all of this is just to make a lot of promises and get some VC-funding?)
It used to say “container-native”. They recently changed the wording, but there was no technical change.
It’s a Linux distro that runs locally, like any other. It has no particular tie-in with any cloud services. If Flatpak, Docker/Podman, Distrobox, Homebrew, etc. are “cloud” just because they involve downloading packages hosted on the internet, then I don’t know why you wouldn’t call “traditional” package managers like apt, dnf, zypper, etc. “cloud” as well. 🤷 So yeah, I feel your confusion.
The big difference compared to something like Debian or vanilla Fedora is that Bazzite is an “immutable” distro. What this means is that the OS image is monolithic and you don’t make changes directly to the system. Instead, you install apps and utilities via containers, or as a last resort you can apply a layer on top of the OS using rpm-ostree.
The only thing cloud-related about any of this is that atomic OS images and containers are more common in the server space than the desktop space.
I think you nailed the first paragraph.
My comment is just to remind that OP is already running an immutable distro on the Steam deck. Valve OS is an arch based immutable distro.
Bazzite was assembled, by some very cool people, to bring the same features of the Steam deck using the already tested atomic editions of fedora to a multitude of “PCs”. Saves time on managing the “Linux” system and focuses on the gaming features, apps and drivers.
Funny enough I had not fully realized this about Steam Deck myself, because I kind of made a special exception for Steam Deck to prevent myself from nerding out on it too much: this is strictly for fun!
(That’s why I only changed hostname, replaced the default terminal emulator and set up Syncthing. Oh, and SSH access but that’s it, I promise! :D)
but then again, why these cool people keep saying things like “cloud native”… is a mystery to me…
Thanks, I think I’ve already heard about this architecture, although I don’t think there was any standard term for that. Maybe it’s time to try one of these out one day…
It’s still weird that hey would sprinkle “cloud native” all over the place just to confuse people like me. (But then again, maybe I’ve been living under a rock…)
If it matters, I’ve been running Bazzite on my main laptop (including gaming) for maybe 6 months now, and it’s been fantastic. The whole immutable thing took a bit to get used to but now I really like it.
Nothing about it uses a cloud.
This same Bazzite discussion came up last week. I claimed I hadn’t heard so much marketing bullshit since when everything was called Object Orientated.
There’s nothing cloud about it. It’s a bad marketing term.
…you mean, what if … what if the cool Linux/FOSS hackers are somehow also very bad at marketing?
I recall Jorge talking on one of the podcasts, and heard a line like (paraphrased) “You can just run your own, integrated into your own CI/CD system that you’re running”
Even though I’ve been running Linux for a long time, I feel like suddenly got a glimpse of what normal people might feel when we try to get them to use Linux at all.
Yeah, we’ve replaced “you can build your own kernel and install own grub” with “it’s cloud native”.
Not sure it’s better…
You know, that’s probably something every Linux dev team could use: a volunteer marketing team. Devs volunteer their time, and not everyone can or wants to code, so it seems to me that there should be space made for other skillsets.
I must have seen a dozen posts ripping into Bazzite for “cloud native”. This is a dumb decision that they need to run away from.
Founder here, the more I see this whining the more I want to keep it on the website.
It’s the accurate definition.
Does it matter if it’s accurate if it gives everyone the wrong impression?
Yes
Could you elaborate?
No