For Steam Deck OLED support they said it’s ready to the point that “it should be mostly functional”, however there’s at least one major issue left which “has to do with audio crashing when switching to Desktop Mode” and some other issues related to HDR support.
What is it
Bazzite is an alternative to SteamOS. It had a similar setup of having a separate game mode and desktop, and supports key deck features like suspend and Decky plugins.
It lets you more easily install Linux programs that are difficult to install on SteamOS, and also lets you get a SteamOS like experience on some other handhelds like the Rog Ally.
Thank you
@Fubarberry @Damage as someone who only uses basic programs for entertainment on the steam deck, what linux programs are hard to install and why?
So SteamOS is what’s known as an immutable file system, which is where the system files can’t be modified by the user. This makes the system very hard to break for end users, provides easy system repair options, and is generally nice for a consumer device.
However immutable systems are relatively new, and historically most programs are installed to parts of the drive that are now “immutable”. This is a problem for installing software.
A recently popular software distribution system is called flatpak, and one of the nice things about it is that it installs software to the user section of the drive, allowing it to work for providing software in immutable systems. This is what the Steam Deck uses, available through the discover store. However flatpaks aren’t perfect, they lack some programs available from the traditional sources, and they often have trouble letting programs interact with each other. An easy example of this is a program like a password manager may need to integrate with your web browser to fill in passwords, but the flatpak versions of the browser and password manager can’t actually talk to each other and won’t work together.
Bazzite also uses an immutable OS, but it allows you to install select programs to the normally locked down system partition. This isn’t meant to be the main way to install software, but is a good fallback option for something that isn’t available or doesn’t work when installed through flatpak.
Bazzite also offers alternative desktop environments like Gnome, which has a more touch friendly user interface. Alternative desktops are not currently available for SteamOS in any reasonable way.
To be specific, SteamOS isn’t actually immutable. Its “immutability” is more artificial, since the updates come as complete images, which effectively wipes out any changes to the core system files, resulting in the same goal of an unchanged core OS. But you could, if you wanted to, set up a sudoer user and modify things like any other Arch install (until the next update wipes it all out, obviously).
Bazzite, on the other hand, is truly immutable. But there’s some drawbacks with Bazzite that will likely never change, like the fact that laying certain VPN clients isn’t possible, due to how they need to write to certain system directories. You may be able to circumvent this in specific cases by layering via
rpm-ostreeor utilizing adistrobox, but I can’t get mine to install no matter what I do. YMMV.
I suggest adding that to the title
Bazzite, a SteamOS alternative, releases version 3.0 with Steam Deck OLED support nearly ready
Bazzite is a Fedora Atomic-based operating system intended for Gaming, so you get a lot of the same benefits of that whilst still including all kinds of Gaming-Focused tweaks and patches out of the box. It is also immutable, e.g the system cannot be modified arbitrarily, whilst offering tools to still make modifications to the installed images if you want.
Note that as of this comment, I’m on
bazzite-deck-gnome:40-20240427via thestablebranch.Audio crashes don’t seem to be happening on my OLED Deck anymore when switching between Desktop Mode and Game Mode (YMMV), but there’s outstanding issues with Bluetooth (upstream bug from BlueZ).
Connecting a BT controller causes the BT service to crash, and you have to cycle it off/on again to restart it. Audio BT devices seem to work fine.
I haven’t had any issues with playing games, though. Been running Bazzite since 2.4.0.
I take it you’re on the gnome version? I wonder if that might have anything to do with it.
I’m very tempted to switch to Bazzite, but knowing it lacked full support for the OLED Deck has kept the temptation reasonably low. Hearing that it’s almost fully ready for OLED now though is going to bring back those distro-hopping intrusive thoughts again.
I can’t say for sure if Gnome has anything to do with it, since the DE should be separate from the drivers, but it’s a point worth mentioning just in case. Obviously, there’s differences between both versions, but the devs have tried to make the experience as interchangeable as possible. For example, they include GSConnect by default, so you don’t lose out on KDEConnect functionality.
The controller issue, though, is upstream and affects anyone using the BlueZ package to run Bluetooth.
If anyone was thinking of switching on an OLED Deck, I would wait a bit longer. The recent changes have been great, but just before the update, I was about ready to reimage back to SteamOS due to the frustrating bugs. Still undecided if I will do that, ultimately, and wait for full support.
Fortunately, to its credit, rolling back to a previous working image is trivially easy, so you don’t have to live with specific bugs that get introduced. Benefits of atomic distros.
ETA: if you’re into tinkering and learning a new paradigm for how to work with an immutable OS and layered packages, it works on Desktops as well!
