It’s no secret that Bazzite 44 was a massive undertaking. More than 700 commits went into this release, alongside months of testing from our contributors and testers, with countless bugs caught and squashed before the stable release.
Still, for many of you, it’s been a tough release. When things worked before you updated and don’t today, no amount of testing makes that less frustrating. Bazzite explicitly supports a broad range of hardware, and unfortunately some bugs simply weren’t caught during testing, and Kernel 7.2 added some additional complexity on top of what was already a complex release.
Our previous handheld stack was quite mature and served Bazzite well for many years, but the changes we made were still needed to keep Bazzite healthy and maintainable years into the future while also cleaning up years of technical debt. Our goal is more collaboration and shared tooling across the broader Linux gaming ecosystem. That’s why the Open Gaming Collective exists: to allow all of us to work together instead of solving the same problems alone.
But structural changes this massive often come with a cost, and we’re sorry that some of you have felt that cost in the day-to-day experience you’ve come to expect from Bazzite. That’s on us to make that decision pay off. We’ve been hard at work since release addressing many of your concerns:
- Steam Deck is now the default emulated controller device for handhelds in game mode to resolve issues with Gyro (Legion Go 1 still incoming)
- Users experiencing Gyro issues should make sure their controller target in OGUI is set to “Steam Deck”
- Users experiencing issues with desktop controls can fix it by opening Steam and going to Settings → Controls → Desktop Layout. We recommend binding X to open keyboard.
- Refer to our helpful guide on how to open OGUI here.
- Latest version of InputPlumber with fixes for numerous GPD devices, MSI Claw 7/8/AI/A1M/BZ2E, and other devices
- Touch screen gestures in Game Mode have been restored.
- Fix for high CPU usage on some handhelds
- Fix for memory leak on Intel ARC GPUs
- Fixes for sleep-state issues on Nvidia-LTS
- Fixes for graphical issues on Nvidia-Deck (Gamemode will no longer artifact, we’ll ship this patch for as long as we’re able to).
- For the first time you can now set your Desktop as the default session on Deck images
- This option is available in Bazzite Portal, or can be used via
steamosctl
- This option is available in Bazzite Portal, or can be used via
- We’re also testing fixes to help with the display blanking some HTPC users are seeing with some displays
- These issues are related to the new HDMI 2.1 VRR implementation and fixes will be sent upstream
We’re committed to continuing that work through Bazzite 44, into Bazzite 45, and beyond.
We’ll keep working through the issues you’re reporting, just as we’ve always done. If you’re willing to assist us, consider rebasing to our testing branch via Bazzite Portal. You’ll get updates faster and be in a better position to provide feedback to us during this process.
And lastly to reiterate from our last update, should your use case require rebasing back to Bazzite 43, you may do so by following our guide on rolling back to that release here.