Bazzite Buzz #19: The Last Buzz

[nicknamenamenick]

Preface

Bazzite is a custom image of Fedora Atomic Desktop 40 utilizing Universal Blue’s custom image framework designed to bring users the best in Linux gaming for their hardware. Bazzite’s newsletters highlight all of the work we have been doing to bring our users the best features ready to go for their PCs, home theater setups, and handheld gaming devices.

If you are new to the project, then here’s how this technology works. Bazzite and other Universal Blue images follow the continuous delivery methodology of development, which means we’re constantly adding new features and squashing bugs to the image through updates. These updates also include anything directly from upstream (Fedora and Universal Blue) and upgrades from the packages we include.

As detailed in Bazzite Buzz #17, we are going to be announcing new changes to Bazzite as they are built going forward opposed to a monthly newsletter that is already out of date when it is published, like the one you are reading now. The next major Bazzite release will rebase to Fedora 41 from 40 sometime in October unless delays occur upstream.

Website Revamp

Bazzite’s website has added some flair with sections that are now split up at the top for easy navigation and less scrolling. Thanks to everyone from our forums, Discord, and the Bazzite subreddit for giving feedback on the website. Now if anyone would like to contribute to the documentation, so I can be relieved of my duties here then I would be incredibly thankful since the goal of Bazzite is to have a maintenance-free Linux experience where you’re not supposed to worry about computers anymore.

New Wallpaper

The new default wallpaper for Bazzite has been added. It was created using Blender and kit bashed from various different paid for models with minor tweaks to them. It showcases all of the different devices that Bazzite can be installed on and integrates the Universal Blue branding into it.

bazzite-cli

We know many of you are just getting started learning the command line. So we’d thought we’d give you a pre-configured loadout so you can learn some of the nicer tools out of gate without having to worry about setting them all up individually.

Here’s how you get some of that command line bling:

By default after an installation you get a stock Fedora terminal, but if you ujust bazzite-cli and follow the instructions we’ll supercharge your terminal with the following utilities:

• atuin for shell history
• direnv to load and unload environment variables depending on the current directory.
• eza as a replacement ls
• fd for find
• fzf for command line fuzzy finding
• ripgrep for search
• tealdeer for tldr
• ugrep for grep
• yq - for yaml, json, and xml processing
• zoxide as cd

We hope you check out each of these individual tools and find something new to explore. It’s also a good foundation if you want to add on your favorite tools, or share recommendations with your friends. Running ujust bazzite-cli again will let you toggle it off if you change your mind. If you have wizbang shell config skills we’re always looking for help, especially for zsh and fish to ensure that all shells look good. Good luck out there!

Read more about bazzite-cli in the documentation.

Bazzite Roadmap for the Near and Far Future

• Bazzite Portal improvements
• Continued support for new and popular handheld devices
• Bazzite Developer Experience Edition (-dx Images)
• New desktop environments
  • Budgie desktop environment option
  • COSMIC desktop environment option
• ARM builds
  • Requires access to Github ARM build runners first
• Flathub User remote removed from the image for new installations
  • Existing Bazzite installations will not be affected
  • New users can still add the remote manually

Videos Showcasing Fedora Atomic Desktop’s Future

• The road to a trusted and measured boot chain in Bootable Containers

• bootc: Generating an ecosystem around bootable OCI containers

ASUS ROG Ally X Dev Diary

Achieving Day 0 ROG Ally X Support in Bazzite

As in: making Windows handhelds behave in Linux. [Ally X] Bazzite’s Website GitHub Repository During this little postmortem 2-piece series, we will explore just one of the challenges of adding support to Linux: the controller, and reminisce about the 2 weeks we spent with Rich from FanTheDeck in July while adding support for the Ally X. Some would say that Ally X is an iterative upgrade over its predecessor. Therefore, adding support for it should be trivial. How difficult was it to sup…

Keep an eye out for the second part of this in-depth developer diary coming soon. Oh and the :testing branch contains numerous fixes for the ASUS ROG Ally X including improved sleep mode that should improve the battery life while the device is suspended. If you do not wish to rebase and test then it should be coming to :stable soon!

The Early Buzzes

Ending on an uneven number is so on brand for us.

Sentimental for something that only started a little over a year ago. The Bazzite Buzz was intended to inform users of new features and fixes for Bazzite, but due to the speedy nature of the project making these newsletters out of date quickly and investigating a better method of announcing new changes, the Buzz is on its way out now. It was a fun year writing the newsletters and I never imagined seeing my writings on Youtube videos showcasing the project. The archive of all the previous Bazzite Buzz articles are linked at the end of this post.

What Is A Fedora Custom OCI Image?

Who is this for?

I took a stab at a new FAQ section to clarify why we believe this is the best way to Linux, feel free to ask questions!! This is the Bluefin specific version but generally applies to all of them:

Diagram created by xyny

Universal Blue’s OCI tooling for Fedora Atomic Desktop is intended to consume Fedora directly by receiving updates directly from Fedora without any intervention required outside of building the image.

A Linux Distribution or Not?

We distribute Bazzite for the public to use which may be the definition of a “distribution” however Bazzite is built like an Android ROM or a total conversion mod for a video game as opposed to how other Linux distributions are built that expect high maintenance and arguably difficult tooling to accommodate most user’s hardware. All of the updates that apply to Fedora Atomic Desktops will also apply to Bazzite. Bazzite is built FROM Fedora Kinoite (KDE Plasma images) or Fedora Silverblue.

Anyone can rebase to and from upstream Fedora Atomic Desktop’s (Kinoite / Silverblue) variants, which are KDE Plasma and GNOME respectively. Bazzite is a layer and any changes Bazzite makes at a system-level can be removed with a rebase to another Fedora Atomic image. The only things that will remain are cache, left-over files in your Home directory, and Bazzite’s pre-installed Flatpak applications. All of these can be removed afterwards manually.

The Next Major Bazzite Update

Bazzite 41.20241022.0 or similar depending on the date it is built.
(_{Bazzite [based on Fedora version] 41, [built on] 2024-10-22, [First build of the day] (0)})

When Fedora 41 builds of Bazzite are released, which is projected to land near October 22, 2024, then no manual intervention should be required, but if you have issues upgrading then remove any layered packages you have with the rpm-ostree reset terminal command.

Upcoming Changes:

• KDE Plasma 6.2
• GNOME 47
• Proper OneXPlayer support
• Linux Kernel 6.11
• Xorg/X11 session removed permanently

The Bazzite team is now focusing on bug fixes and giving users a smoother experience. We’re aware of the current issues between the installer, Nvidia drivers, and maybe some lackluster handheld support for certain niche handhelds. We use Fedora’s default installer, Anaconda, which has some papercuts with OCI images at this time and gives generic errors without any explanation to the end user for several different issues. Nvidia’s drivers are proprietary and are controlled by Nvidia themselves on Linux, unlike AMD/Intel who both have open source drivers. Their lackluster support for Wayland, Waydroid, Steam Gaming Mode, and other weird issues are out of our control unfortunately until NVK matures down the road.

A Final Goodbye

This is the final Bazzite newsletter as we transition to announcing major features and bug fixes as they come. Thank you to our community for everything. If you miss the Buzz, then check out the Fedora Magazine which covers Fedora related news.

The Bazzite Buzz was always a goofy, amateur blog that I was asked to write since Bazzite started releasing ISOs to the public. Thank you to our community who has stuck together with Bazzite, and for those who just recently started using it. During the last year the project was still finding its footing and themes, but since a lot of the work here is inspired by Valve’s efforts for Linux gaming and it may be both appropriate and inappropriate to end with this early machinima masterpiece.

In The Virtual End (Linkin Park HL2 music video)

_{i don’t think i’ll ever beat the valve fanboy allegations.}

How to Subscribe to Future Bazzite News

[Tutorial] Subscribing to Bazzite News for Major Update Information

Why? Over the course of Bazzite’s lifespan there has been instances of manual intervention that users had to perform to continue receiving future updates. The Universal Blue maintainers wish to avoid updates where action is required since the end-goal is a maintenance-free operating system experience, however sometimes it happens. Users are also curious about what major changes that were deployed in an update, and since we’re moving to more of an announcement-based approach for updates as oppo…

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Community Resources

Join the Bazzite community!

General Information

• Website
• Documentation
• Github Repository

Social & Support

• Mastodon
• Forums
• Discord
• Reddit
• Steam Group
• Answer Overflow
• Issue Tracker

Contributing to Universal Blue & Bazzite

• Contributing to Bazzite
• Donate

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Changelog

(since the last Bazzite Buzz)

Desktop Images

bazzite, -nvidia, & -asus images

Features

• New default wallpaper
• Nvidia-open added to ISOs
  • Immature open source Nvidia drivers for legacy Nvidia GPUs
• Switched from PPD to TuneD again (Fedora 41 will include this by default anyways)
• Use bfq for MicroSD cards
• Added rar archive support
• Displaylink is disabled by default
  • Re-enable with ujust enable-displaylink
• Tailscale is disabled by default
  • Re-enable with ujust enable-tailscale
• Switched to Protontricks Flatpak by default
• MOTD changes to reflect new documentation
• Offline documentation now opens up in a browser locally

Bug Fixes

• Reduced performance of BTRFS filesystem functionality
• Improvements and cleanup to specific ujust commands

Handheld/HTPC Images

-deck and -ally images
(Note: -ally images are for users with ASUS laptops who want Steam Gaming Mode.)

Features

• All of the features from the Desktop images that apply
• Steam Gaming Mode now automatically boots after installation for new installs
• Added support for AYANEO NEXT series in the installer
• Added support for ONEXPLAYER F1
• Added support for Hori Steam controller
• Added ujust for ryzenadj --max-performance for certain devices that have poor performance when taken off AC power
• bazzite-cli now includes trash-cli
• Keyboards can use SUPER + 1 / 2 to toggle the Steam Menu and Quick Access Menu
• Steam Deck: Added an optional environment variable to prevent Steam from controlling/interfering with TDP
• Ally/X: Use powersave on Ally/Ally X to reduce battery drainage during suspend

Bug Fixes

• All of the bug fixes from the Desktop images that apply
• Fixed scaling issues in Desktop Mode
• Enabled ppfeaturemask when installing LACT or on handhelds that require it automatically
• Steam Deck: Fixed suspend issues
• Steam Deck: Display overclocking variable and values fixed
• Steam Deck: Fixed issues with DeckHD ujust command
• Lenovo Legion Go: Fixed controller issues after detaching
• Ally/X: Added Ally display patch and bicubic filter patch, use master branch for now

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Bazzite Buzz Archive