<div class="header-image"></div> <table class="table-header"> <thead> <tr> <th colspan="2"></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>2026-01-14</td> <td style="text-align: right;"><a href="About.md" class="internal-link">About</a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> # Bazzite: The Ultimate Gaming Distro  One of the systems I have laying around is a relatively recent MSI gaming laptop. It has a 6 GB Nvidia RTX 3060 discrete GPU and a 10th gen I7 CPU. It's a really nice little machine; my only complaint is that the power is unreliable when using the battery. It shuts down randomly for no apparent reason. So, because I can only effectively use it when it's plugged in, I can't really use it as a laptop. But with those specs, it's the best computer I own right now. I had intended to set it up purely as a gaming rig, which I've now finally done using Bazzite, which runs on a Fedora base, and is immutable. Immutability is something that I like, because I'm not a huge gamer; I really only play like once a month and I don't want to worry too much about ensuring I run updates in a timely manner. What I want from this is something that I can put down for weeks at a time, and turn on and start playing with minimal fuss. And from what I know, an immutable system is perfect for this scenario, though I'd never used one before. So I wasn't too sure what to expect. Now I've never used Fedora (upon which Bazzite is based), and the last time I even used an rpm packaged distro was 15 years ago when I decided to give OpenSuse a whirl. I haven't used KDE in a number of years either. So much of this environment is completely new to me. I don't know dnf commands, or what graphical package installer it uses (if any). And of course I decided to just install the thing without looking at any documentation at all. Because I'm a man. Picking the correct ISO was different than what I'm used to. On the Bazzite website there is a number of selections you have to click through before arriving at a "download ISO" link: hardware, GPU vendor, desktop environment, and whether or not you want to boot directly into Steam. After this, installing was just like most any other distro: boot into a live session and install. Reboot and start playing. The first thing I noticed was that there wasn't an immediate way to control which GPU I was using, though after checking with `nvidia-smi`, it was obviously running Steam with the nVidia GPU. As I found out later, other game launchers did *not* utilise the discrete GPU. Not ideal. Most had some immediate way to enter environment variables in the launcher interface, but if it weren't for AI, I wouldn't have known the proper syntax to properly enable this. (`__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia` is what to enter here.) >[!Note] >After digging a little bit, (and by that I mean asking Grok), I found it is possible to have normal functionality by running `ujust enable-supergfxctl`. This will provide a system tray widget to switch GPUs, and add a right-click menu entry to launch specific apps with the discrete GPU in hybrid mode. Bazzite comes with supergfx installed and configured, it just needs to be enabled. In the Bazzite documentation, this little bit of info is [buried here](https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/ujust/?h=supergfxctl#configurationenabling-scripts). > >It would be nice if this was enabled by default on hybrid laptops (or at least have this information presented in a more obvious way, such as in a welcome screen), as I don't think this would be investigated by someone who was coming to Linux for the first time from Windows. The directory structure was the next thing to trip me up: my home directory wasn't where I expected! On any distro I've ever used, home directories are always in /home/. I assume this is a quirk of immutable systems, but in Bazzite they are in /var/home/. I needed to install a couple of packages to get going. One was Synology Drive, which allows me to sync files easily with my Synology NAS. Another is KeepassXC for my passwords. My instinct here, of course, was to look for a graphical package installer for this software. Since I chose the KDE desktop, I immediately assumed Discover would be what I was looking for. Alas, it wasn't installed. What I did then was just see if flatpak was installed and configured (yes it was), and so just installed what I needed via the terminal. (As I explained earlier, I've no experience with dnf and so wasn't sure what the command would be to install software natively). I've since learned a little more about immutable systems, and flatpaks and appimages are really the *only* way to install software. There is no way to install software natively. This is perfectly fine, as I only needed those 2. I've since learned that both Bazzar and Warehouse are installed to handle flatpaks. I expected that everything else would either be preinstalled, or have an installer ready to go. I wasn't disappointed. Steam, of course, is preinstalled. Steam is a first-class citizen of this distro. Heroic was not installed, but the main menu did prompt me to do so. I remember first hearing about the Heroic game launcher. If I remember correctly it was specifically for the EA Games store. It has since gained support for other storefronts too, with GOG being my own primary interest. I have purchased a few games from there; not nearly as many as Steam, but a couple dozen at least. It connected to my game library there, installed Vampire the Masquerade and played flawlessly. It was as easy as running a game from Steam. Excellent. The system has an amazing number of tools built in just for gaming. Lutris was pre-installed. I've used Lutris in the past to run Battle.net. It's been a couple of years since I had this running, and I was hoping that there would be some improvement. What used to be the case is that you had to go to the Lutris website, look up the game (or in this case the storefront), and install it from there, which would load an install script into the Lutris app. Now, it seems, there is the ability to look up the install script right in the app. So that's an improvement. But, unfortunately, I wasn't able to run Battle.net after the install completed. It crashed immediately after logging in. In fairness, Battle.net was always finnicky as I recall. Updates would frequently break it. It's really unfortunate, because Blizzard used to make the best games available on PC. The games I want to play, Starcraft 1 & 2, and Warcraft 3, set the bar for realtime strategy games. Those games were also among the first I ever got running smoothly under Wine, so it's a very strange irony that now they are among the most difficult to get going. But I digress. I haven't yet investigated to see what I might be able to do. I assume that I will get it running eventually, but it's worth noting that not everything will be as easy as 90% of Steam games. >[!update] >I did end up getting Battle.net running properly by changing the Wine runner to Proton Experimental. It also *needs* to be using the discrete graphics. The integrated GPU will not work. In the end, it was only Blizzard games that gave me any difficulty at all. Everything else has been no effort: just install and play. In fact I am somewhat amazed at how painless the whole process was. From start to finish, from visiting the Bazzite website and downloading the ISO to playing a game was maybe around 20 minutes. If Steam is the only place from where you get games, then there's really nothing else to do. Linux is in a unique situation right now. It's had opportunities in the past, where Windows was dropping the ball. Vista and Windows 8 were the 2 big ones, but back then, gaming was still a massive headache for just about any game you cared to play. Steam didn't even have a native version yet, and Proton was years away. Now, Linux is a very reasonable alternative. And Windows 11 seems to be as big of a mess as Vista was 20 years ago. Back then, it was Apple that benefit most from that particular Microsoft bungle (and they were hilariously ruthless about it):  *Every "I'm a Mac; I'm a Pc" commercial ever made* Recently, though, Apple has been extremely lackluster in it's offerings, with the only improvement being a [UI change that a good number of users don't even like](https://www.wired.com/story/liquid-glass-could-be-one-of-apples-most-divisive-system-designs-yet/). And, with Windows system-requirements through the roof, along with the [price of RAM](https://www.techradar.com/pro/experts-warn-pc-prices-could-rise-even-more-in-2026-as-ram-costs-set-to-soar-higher) and [GPUs skyrocketing](https://blog.acer.com/en/discussion/3846/why-gpu-prices-are-expected-to-rise-in-2026) to even higher than the peak of 2017 cryptocoin madness (not to mention the insistence of tacking AI onto everything with duct-tape and bubble-gum), Microsoft seems *determined* to drop as many customers as possible.  >[!quote] >- boot my old windows laptop >- its been force-upgraded to windows11 >- sign in with microslop account >- immediately get blindingly bright pop up: “finish setting up your machine with Copilot” >- no ty, click “setup later” >- turn down Xbox gamepass offer >- turn down Copilot 365 offer >- unpin LinkedIn shortcut >- open edge to redownload Brave >- have to find it in Bing >- disable OneDrive (it’s erroring out anyway asking for money, ransoming my files) >- unpin copilot shortcut >- disable Copilot Recall spyware >- run windows update >- click shutdown, but it restarts instead >- blindingly bright pop-up “finish setting up your machine with Copilot” >- copilot shortcut enabled again >- try to use the start menu search bar >- hangs then returns “search with Copilot” >- click, it opens LinkedIn instead >- want to close it but it’s frozen >- open legendary programmer Dave W Plumber’s award winning software, Task Manager >- 238 processes called copilot.exe >mutter expletive >- Cortana Copilot pops up, “I can help with that!” and freezes >- Defender flagged it as malware >- immediately get another pop-up >- ”OneDrive has run out of space! Your files are no longer accessible!” >- about to lose it >- I’ll just play a game, boot up CoD >- pop-up asking to enable Copilot gaming assistant The comments to that post are all amazing too. "Click shutdown and Windows restarts? I thought it was just me!" "It happened to me too.." with a gif of a laptop blowing up.. It's all Windows users commiserating with each other. I haven't seen this many people upset with a Windows release since Vista! Even Windows 8, with its jarringly awful UI, actually worked properly. It was still usable, but 11 just seems completely borked. Back in the days of Vista, though (and even Windows 8 to a lesser extent), there wasn't any real alternative, if you enjoyed gaming at all. Any gaming library you owned simply wouldn't play on Linux. Maybe you could get a couple games working with Wine, but it was never an easy task to do. I would sometimes be tinkering for *weeks* trying to get a game running in Linux. And even then there would often be weird quirks with it. Many games simply wouldn't work at all. Now, however, the entire gaming landscape is just completely different. RAM and GPUs are prohibitively expensive to get into PC gaming now, at least for modern games. But more and more I'm seeing dissatisfaction with new AAA titles being released anyway. I see more posts like this all the time now, expressing how 10 year old games look just as good as anything being released today:    This means that buying a used desktop PC or laptop will serve many people just fine, as libraries of games numbering in the 1000s will run smoothly on even a 10 year old machine. And since Windows will no longer run on these PCs (and judging by the post above, why would you want to anyway??), distros like Mint, Cachy, or Bazzite and others will fill the gap quite nicely. With the 2 main competitors, Apple and Microsoft, faltering as they are, we could very well see mid to lower end PCs and laptops with Linux become much more popular in the coming years. Honestly I could see a small business emerging where people just buy up these old systems, install one of the above distros on it, and resell it for a profit. Hmm.. that's not a bad idea.