The existence of both is justified for their unique merits. However, I’d argue that the ‘immutable’/atomic model makes more sense for a system that’s dedicated towards gaming.
For a general daily driver, it all comes down to your specific needs. If Bazzite satisfies those, I’d argue it’s the safer pick. However, if (for some reason) Bazzite falls short[1], then go for Nobara instead.
There’s a lot more to it than this, but I kept it short for the sake of brevity.
Honestly, there’s only very little that Bazzite actually can’t do. Though its unique workflow might require some adjusting. Regardless, if you go for Bazzite, ensure to take a proper look at its documentation.
I am very interested in what you are saying. I’ve been trying Bazzite for a while now and I ran into some quirks I couldn’t resolve - tiny stuff, that’s mainly a small inconvenience like not being able to put icons on the desktop with Steam due to it being Flatpak and Valve not having enabled that specific option) -
BUT -
I’ve also tried Nobara then was kinda put off by people saying something along the lines, that GE disabled some security features for better performance (and since it was a distro for personal use at first) and I tried to search for the details, but came up empty. Could you say a bit more about this or where I could find more info, please? Cause I’m using my distro as daily driver and not only for gaming, so it got me worried a little.
Oh yes, that’s entirely my own fault. I first installed Aurora, then Steam as Flapak and later rebased to Bazzite. It was all just for trying stuff out, on my main machine, the install will be clean.
Think of it like you have a base OS that is stock, like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite. Then the different ublue offerings, Bluefin/Aurora/Bazzite/Ucore take those and add new things on top. If you rebase, anything you installed as a user isn’t touched. But all of the addons change to whatever the default is for that ublue variant.
So someone rebasing from Bluefin/Aurora to Bazzite will have Lutris and Steam (and other gaming specific software and system tweaks) automatically ‘layered’ as part of the default experience, since Bazzite is targeted primarily at gaming, and the other two for general desktop use.
You’re swapping out the default system image, just like when you update and the update is actually just replacing your entire OS with the new version (until the feature that let’s them only replace things that have changed gets finished).
The existence of both is justified for their unique merits. However, I’d argue that the ‘immutable’/atomic model makes more sense for a system that’s dedicated towards gaming.
For a general daily driver, it all comes down to your specific needs. If Bazzite satisfies those, I’d argue it’s the safer pick. However, if (for some reason) Bazzite falls short[1], then go for Nobara instead.
There’s a lot more to it than this, but I kept it short for the sake of brevity.
I am very interested in what you are saying. I’ve been trying Bazzite for a while now and I ran into some quirks I couldn’t resolve - tiny stuff, that’s mainly a small inconvenience like not being able to put icons on the desktop with Steam due to it being Flatpak and Valve not having enabled that specific option) -
BUT -
I’ve also tried Nobara then was kinda put off by people saying something along the lines, that GE disabled some security features for better performance (and since it was a distro for personal use at first) and I tried to search for the details, but came up empty. Could you say a bit more about this or where I could find more info, please? Cause I’m using my distro as daily driver and not only for gaming, so it got me worried a little.
Interesting. Bazzite has (for some time now) been shipping the native Steam package; so not the Flatpak one.
Oh yes, that’s entirely my own fault. I first installed Aurora, then Steam as Flapak and later rebased to Bazzite. It was all just for trying stuff out, on my main machine, the install will be clean.
I’m totally new to Atomic Desktops. How rebasing differs from installing fresh OS?
And what exactly is rebasing though?
Think of it like you have a base OS that is stock, like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite. Then the different ublue offerings, Bluefin/Aurora/Bazzite/Ucore take those and add new things on top. If you rebase, anything you installed as a user isn’t touched. But all of the addons change to whatever the default is for that ublue variant.
So someone rebasing from Bluefin/Aurora to Bazzite will have Lutris and Steam (and other gaming specific software and system tweaks) automatically ‘layered’ as part of the default experience, since Bazzite is targeted primarily at gaming, and the other two for general desktop use.
You’re swapping out the default system image, just like when you update and the update is actually just replacing your entire OS with the new version (until the feature that let’s them only replace things that have changed gets finished).