From: Evan Leibovitch via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
On Wed, Aug 20, 2025 at 3:23 AM Ron via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
Did you end up going with Bazzite?
Sorry, you've asked this a few times and I've been meaning to answer.
TL;DR: No, I ended up at Fedora and am very happy with a few caveats
Bazzite's concept of an 'immutable' system based on Fedora Atomic Desktop may be good to keep Linux newcomers from accidentally damaging their system, but for someone using Linux since the turn of the century that just gets in the way.
Immutable has been cool for a while. (My PhD work, finished four decades ago, was on functional programming where everything is immutable.)
Bazzite is known for improved and streamlined Nvidia support, which does nothing for me on this all-AMD rig. It's also primarily aimed at being primarily a games system and secondarily anything else; I can and have installed Steam under Fedora, but to me that's Just Another Repository rather than the OS's main reason for existing. Games that work on the Steamdeck Just Work on Fedora too.
Steamdecks use AMD APU's. So AMD support ought to be good. But they have iGPUs that are a few generations behind that in your box.
The final straw was the slow boot time. Really slow. Between two and four minutes.
Annoying. I tend to only boot every couple of weeks -- when I feel the urge to do updates -- so slow boots would not be a veto.
*"Run systemd-analyze blame".*
(The very existence of a software flag "blame" amuses me for some reason.)
This command is great. The old init systems didn't have such useful instrumentation. The other thing with blame: "git blame". Very useful. It shows you each line of a file prefixed with the revision and author of this line. So blame is good.
I admit to lacking patience, especially with a distro that touts itself as being super newbie friendly. I decided to go with Fedora as a safer, better understood path. No snaps and no software designed to lay blame. Haven't looked back for a moment.
Fedora does have flatpaks. I think that they are slightly better, but pretty similar. I don't actually know when flatpak's are installed and when regular RPMs are installed. One of my machines has flatpaks for reasons unknown. You can check if you have flatpaks: "flatpak list". One annoyance: "sudo dnf update" won't update them. You can use "gnome software" gui updater or you can use "flatpak update"
My remaining challenges on Fedora are mainly power management. Sometimes USB devices won't work when waking from sleep and sometimes the whole system refuses to wake after sleeps and needs to be power-cycled. "Screen off but don't sleep" doesn't seem to work either. Any help on this issue is appreciated.
KDE or GNOME? You used to use KDE, I think. I only use GNOME. Where is "Screen off but don't sleep" setting? Fedora desktop (not server) goes to sleep after some minutes of inactivity. Unfortunately, only desktop input events are considered activity. This is somehow mandated by EU regulations. Changing the setting for you desktop screen is easy.but changing the settings for GDM (the login screen) is more arcane. Here's the command I use. It affects all users and GDM. for i in gdm $( ls /home | grep -v 'lost+found' ) do echo $i: sudo -u "$i" dbus-run-session gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-ac-type nothing done I have a little "mouse jiggler" USB device that I can use when I want to suppress blanking (rare).