Question about Aurora vs Bazzite KDE

General
1

I’ve had to answer several questions from people asking whether they should choose Aurora or Bazzite, and vice versa. Does anyone have a clear list of what each one does differently in its KDE implementation? I know there’s the Steam Flatpak vs non-Flatpak difference, but I’m really looking for something more concrete that I can point people to, instead of just saying “Aurora is for general use and Bazzite is for gaming.”. That does not seem enough.

2

My naive decision making was like follows:

  • I like Gnome but Gnome doesn’t offer a good clipboard manager and screen shot utility without extension or installing something like flameshot and CopyQ (both are great) which often gave me problems in the past mainly due to Gnome’s permission handling
  • Then KDE offers both, a very good clipboard manager and screen shot utility out of the box
  • As I don’t do any gaming it was easy to choose Aurora
3

Ok, so I will go ahead and answer from what I understand and when I had it on Fedora 41:

So this will probably not be comprehensive:

-Aurora is intended more for developers and includes the option to install the developer experience, see here for more details on what is included in documentation:

-Tailscale is enabled by default if you require this for VPN integration (this can be turned off with terminal if not needed)

Scroll down a bit on the page for a list of included packages/flatpaks which focus on development tools vs gaming:

-No Steam layered, no lutris layered, no sunshine layered, no input remapper layered, no ROM config layered, no gamescope, and no mangohud.

-Rather than using the Firewalld GUI as in Bazzite…Aurora integrates firewalld controls into the settings menu. This may give quicker access to granular controls for configuring ports. It will come down to personal preference here. I personally like having the full GUI, but I can see why others may prefer this.

-Bazzite uses gnome Disks vs Aurora using KDE partition manager - both are great utilities

-Bazaar is now a flatpak on Aurora, so you can manage permissions. Currently on Bazzite it is still a layered package.

I will leave it at that for now, hope this helps =).

2 Likes
4

Other people have left their takes, but my take based on using both systems (depending on what I am currently doing). Gaming on Aurora can be a hack, since the steam flatpak and distrobox are kind of finicky and sometimes choose not to work. This was on a mostly fresh system too. However, the native version that comes packaged with Bazzite works perfectly fine to me. I couldn’t figure out what went wrong, but this is consistent in my system at least (I use a laptop with a relatively recent nvidia gpu).

On the other hand Aurora is personally a more pleasant experience for daily usage. It allows you to completely use the default KDE apps (like konsole and discover). There other minor things, like moving to trash takes a few seconds for even small or empty files. It is hard to quantify, but if you primarily do not game and are willing to fight steam a bit on Aurora, I’d say Aurora is better since the general non gaming experience “feels” smoother.

Though my personal recommendation is as long as you stay on the same desktop, it is fine to try either one, and then rebase to the other to try it out and see what works better for you. Also all of this is just my experience. It’s possible my hardware is just wierd.

1 Like
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I would like to qualify what some other people have said.
Bazzite’s focus is on good hardware integration, if you have nonstandard setups use bazzite (for example laptop with discrete nvidia gpu). If you want a little more stability then use Aurora. (it uses to coreOS kernel with zfs for example). The gaming / dev focus of each can be replicated on either side pretty easily. Bazzite-dx exists. And flatpak steam + flatpak gamescope etc exists. Sunshine for game streaming/remote desktop is on both, etc…

6

This is an interesting question, as I am currently also trying to figure out what I want to run. The thing is, this will be my first Linux experience on a mobile device (Rog Flow Z13), and the idea was to do a mix of work (80% of the time), and gaming (20%) of the time.

So going by your explanation, I’d be the best served using Bazzite-dx. Thanks!

7

Espeicailly for Asus devices, Bazzite is the better option as we don’t carry the Asus specific stuff anymore in Aurora (or Bluefin)

2 Likes
8

Well, that solved it quickly. Thanks for the heads-up.

9

I see that rebasing is supported between Aurora and Bazzite, but how does that work when you have Flatpaks (like Steam) installed on Aurora and then switch to Bazzite? Does the image script for Bazzite remove Flatpaks that would be duplicated because they’re already included in Bazzite, and vice versa?

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Does that also apply for Surface devices? I want to rebase from aurora-surface, and don’t know if Bazzite KDE or Aurora would be the better choice for a Surface Pro 5

11

Surface devices are also not supported on Aurora. I’m not totally sure about Bazzite, i think they have the surface patches in their kernel.

1 Like
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I don’t think there is anything that would remove the flatpaks.

Haven’t personally tested what happens if there is a steam on the image and also flatpak installed. Maybe the on image package overrides the flatpak one. Or then you will just have two Steam icons on your app launcher/app menu

13

Thanks for the quick answer!

I really like Aurora and don’t really need any gaming features on this old Surface, but I’m pretty certain Bazzite has the surface patches. So I guess, I’ll give it a try

14

Agree, me either. I was wondering if one would use the other’s game storage folder, but thinking about it, I think flatpaks use a different folder storage path for that.

15

Because I’m lazy :wink: I decided just to ask google Gemni about KDE specific changes in Aurora by specifically scanning the repo source. I’m sure inffy can confirm this is right or not. It IS an LLM, so you know how accurate it can be…

Tried to add the Bazzite repo and ask a comparison, but its too big for Gemini’s github connector and I’m too cheap to pay for an LLM that can do that.

Based on the repository files, Aurora implements the following specific changes and modifications to the KDE Plasma environment:

1. Branding and Visual Identity

Aurora replaces Fedora branding with its own visual identity across various KDE components:

  • Look and Feel: It creates a custom Look and Feel package located at /usr/share/plasma/look-and-feel/dev.getaurora.aurora.desktop.
  • Splash Screen: It generates a custom splash screen logo (aurora_logo.svgz) and places it in the custom Look and Feel directory.
  • SDDM (Login Screen): It updates the SDDM theme (01-breeze-aurora) to use default-logo.svg which is linked to the Aurora distributor logo.
  • Wallpapers: It sets the default wallpaper to aurora-wallpaper-8 (using .jxl format) and updates default.xml in /usr/share/backgrounds/.
  • System Logos: It replaces standard pixmaps (like system-logo.png and fedora-logo-sprite.png) with Aurora logos.

2. Task Manager and Shell Layout

The default panel layout is modified directly via XML substitution:

  • Pinned Applications: The build script modifies /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.taskmanager/contents/config/main.xml to set the default pinned applications to the Browser, Ptyxis, Bazaar, and File Manager.
  • ISO Layout: A similar modification is applied to the Live ISO environment, adding the Installer, Documentation, and Discourse links to the task manager and Kickoff menu favorites.

3. Application Overrides and Software Store

Aurora favors its own tools over default KDE applications:

  • Software Center: The default KDE software center, Discover, is hidden. Its desktop files (org.kde.discover.desktop, etc.) are renamed to .disabled, and its autostart notifier is removed.
  • Bazaar Integration: The system is configured to use Bazaar for managing Flatpaks. The MIME type application/vnd.flatpak.ref is associated with Bazaar.
  • KRunner Configuration: The just scripts include logic to toggle KRunner plugins, disabling krunner_appstreamEnabled (Discover) and enabling bazaarrunnerEnabled (Bazaar).
  • Terminal (Ptyxis): The Ptyxis terminal is modified to integrate better with KDE. Its desktop file is patched to use Ctrl+Alt+T shortcuts, include konsole as a keyword, and use the ibus input module.

4. Package Management and Settings

  • Excluded Packages: Aurora explicitly removes Fedora-specific KDE packages, including plasma-lookandfeel-fedora, plasma-welcome-fedora, plasma-discover-kns (KDE New Stuff), and khelpcenter.
  • Added Packages: It installs specific KDE extensions such as krunner-bazaar, plasma-wallpapers-dynamic, kcm-fcitx5 (for input methods), and ublue-bling.
  • GSettings Overrides: The build process compiles a specific schema override file zz0-aurora-modifications.gschema.override to apply system-wide GNOME/GTK settings that likely affect how GTK apps look in KDE.
  • Developer Experience: For the “DX” variant, it appends Variant=Developer Experience to the KDE “About Distro” configuration file (kcm-about-distrorc).

5. Services and Updates

  • Update Mechanisms: The plasma-discover-rpm-ostree backend is removed (implied by removal of Discover packages and reliance on uupd), and systemd timers (uupd.timer) are enabled to handle updates instead of the default KDE update applet.
16

That is actually pretty good summary :slight_smile:

Didn’t quickly see anything totally wrong in it.

17

Yea…SOMETIMES the LLM can be useful :wink: