Bazzite April 2026 Update

Bazzite
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1

Hello folks! It’s that time of year again.

I’m excited to share that the new kernel has officially landed in the :testing branch for our Desktop users! This brings a number of improvements to Bazzite 43 as we gear up for the major Bazzite 44 release. Here’s what’s new:

  1. 6.19.10 OGC Kernel
  2. Mesa 26.0.4
  3. SBOMs (Which now power our changelogs), Build Attestation, OpenSSF security scanning, and signed ISOs.
  4. Images reduced by 1GB thanks to moving in-image QEMU and ROCM to Bazzite-DX for users who need them
  5. A brand‑new rechunker that further shrinks image size, with Red Hat’s Chunkah and ZSTD compression coming soon for even leaner images and updates
  6. Expanded steering wheel support via additional drivers.
  7. Built in support for Elgato 4K capture cards
  8. Access to the latest and greatest ASUS Linux patches for use with ASUSCtl
  9. New brew installer for Sunshine via ujust. Sunshine is no longer preinstalled in-image.

Builds with these improvements based on Fedora 44 will hit unstable in the very near future, and should land in stable the same-day as Fedora 44’s launch assuming no major regressions are found.

As a quick reminder, Fedora 44 means the latest versions of both KDE & GNOME, and the new Plasma Login Manager.

If you want to give these desktop builds a try you can run brh rebase testing in your Terminal. Use brh rebase stable or brh rollback if you need to return to :stable for any reason.

Our main focus is now on the Gamemode/Handheld/HTPC images of Bazzite which are undergoing major changes and improvements to bring them in sync with what Valve and others are shipping today.

Some of the improvements (beyond what’s listed above) we’re working on include:

  1. An OpenGamepadUI‑based overlay for options not exposed in the Steam UI
  2. Accurate changelogs displayed directly in the Steam Update UI
  3. A smoother update experience from game mode
  4. The latest gamescope with additional fixes from the OGC branch and working streaming on Nvidia hardware.
  5. TDP control entirely through the Steam UI and powered by SteamOS-Manager and PowerStation
  6. Numerous bug fixes for the Legion GO 2 and other recent handhelds thanks to Input Plumber.

Our plan is for the -deck images to receive all of these enhancements, plus the Fedora 44 base and new kernel, slightly later. This gives us time to test across our large ecosystem of supported handhelds with community feedback. We appreciate your patience and support during this transition, and we’ll announce when these images are ready for broader testing.

We’d love to hear your feedback. Every issue reported against these testing builds helps us deliver a smoother, more polished stable release.

Lastly I just want to give a shout-out to our contributors, you’ve all been rockstars through this process and I can’t thank you all enough!

2

How Sunshine will work after this update? Is it will be deleted from entire system and I’ll have to install it from ujust and setup it from zero again?

3

No need to set it back up, it’ll use the existing config. You will need to go through our ujust one more time to get the brew version of it, after which you’ll be on the stable build of sunshine with updates delivered directly from their team independent of Bazzite.

4

Thats great to hear! I’ve been following the unstable commits over the past several weeks and am excited to see the revamped deck images. I just wanted to ask if adding RGB control in game mode to the deck images still on the roadmap? I know it was briefly mention in January with the announcement of the OGC along with fan control.

5

Awesome news! Will we need a reinstall on our handhelds or will normal updates pick things up as usual?

6

Normal update as soon as it hits stable

7

I tried the latest SteamOS beta on my Legion Go 2, because it added so many fixes. However, unlike in Bazzite, the Gyro is essentially broken. I cannot make it behave correctly no matter which settings I choose.

If I upgrade to this latest Bazzite, given that it now uses InputPlumber, will the Gyro be broken the same way? Or is that unrelated?

8

I liked having Sunshine in the base image. Was it hard to maintain? I saw in the github that there were updates that broke functionality.

I honestly don’t use brew a whole lot.

9

Given ‘moving in-image QEMU and ROCM’ being moved, does this mean if you’re using VMs you should rebase? e.g. bazzite-dx-nvidia:stable

10

yes, you can rebase before the change happen

11

Thanks :slight_smile: .
I know I can :sweat_smile: . My question was, should I? Or, to be clearer, do I have to? (Sorry, I’m kinda a noob.

There is a lot of other stuff in the DX image that I wouldn’t really use (except VM-related stuff). So layering virt-viewer, swtmp, etc. to a gaming image e.g. bazzite-nvidia-open:stable
seems leaner than rebasing to an image with a lot of stuff I wouldn’t use.

On the other hand, the DX image turns my “layered” maintenance burden into the maintainers’.

So I guess, for my use case, the DX image aligns better with Bazzite’s overall philosophy.

Definitely makes sense to remove QEMU and ROCM if you’re on a handheld or HTPC - but on Desktop?

12

I think you answered your own question. If you want to run QEMU, then you should flip the switch to dx mode. I use my desktop for gaming (last priority in my case), virtualiztion, local LLMs, docker containers, and other sysadmin type things. So, DX base made sense out the gate for me. You’ll not notice the difference other than the extra features and functions.

13

Yes, you’re right, I did answer my own question and arrive at the ‘rebase to DX conclusion’ in the end - thanks all for listening to my shower thoughts :sweat_smile:

14

I’m a chronic over-thinker, so I understand Ben. :rofl: