Hello guys. I recently watched some news about gaming on Linux, and Bazzite was the one that convinced me to try it out. After following some tutorials, I got my Dual Boot of Bazzite with Windows 11 (Disabling Fast boot and hibernation there).
The problem is the WiFi, which drops all the time, with near-zero performance, and fails to connect to my 5GHz network at all. Sometimes it works fine with 2.4Ghz but suddenly the connection is lost (Mediatek MT9721e).
I read some documents where people blamed a specific driver version that was introduced to the kernel, and there are tutorials available on how to uninstall the WiFi driver and add the old one. ( RPM resource mt7xxx-firmware ) Some managed to make it work with the FC42 driver. However, it appears, or at least I am unsure, that you cannot modify the Bazzite Fedora kernel.
As Bazzite users, do we need to wait for a new Kernel version to be released before we can properly use our devices? I’m trying to abandon Windows, but with these problems, is impossible. (I tried Zorin and Manjaro, and no problems with my WiFi) I really liked Bazzite.
There are ways to modify the base Bazzite image, but that takes a bit of Linux/Atomic‑desktop knowledge that someone just coming from Windows is unlikely to have.
Bazzite is designed so you normally do not touch the underlying system, and it tries to include good hardware support out of the box so these problems are rare.
If Wi‑Fi only works on regular Fedora after installing a separate driver RPM from a download page, that usually means the Bazzite image is missing something the developers probably want to ship by default. In that case it is worth treating this as a Bazzite issue rather than only a local configuration problem, so they can look into adding support directly to the image.
The developers are generally more active on their Discord and GitHub than in other places. If you do not get an answer here, it is a good idea to go to their Discord first, since they have a dedicated help section, and/or open an issue on GitHub describing the problem in detail.
When you ask for help, try to be as detailed as possible: mention your exact device model, the Wi‑Fi chipset if you can get it, and the link to the Fedora driver page you found. That information makes it much easier for the Bazzite maintainers to fix the issue for everyone in a future image.
As a workaround, you can try manually installing the RPM you found. Download the driver RPM, then run: sudo rpm-ostree install /full/path/to/the-driver.rpm
After the install finishes, reboot and see if Wi‑Fi works. This should be treated as a temporary workaround, because layering random third‑party RPMs on an immutable system can sometimes cause problems with future updates. If something breaks later, you may need to remove the package again or reset your layered changes. You can roll back to your previous working image or you can use rpm-ostree uninstall (name of rpm).
Not that it’s ideal, but a work around is a cheap USB wifi adapter. I had to do that with a laptop where due to lack of open source drivers, it just didn’t work very well.