Im wondering if there are any other immutable gamine distros besides bazzite. in particular im wondering if immutables use any other base. I swear I thought suse was doing custome type things long ago.
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Other than Fedora Atomic derivatives (like Bazzite) and of course SteamOS, the only big one I can think of is NixOS? It’s certainly not tailored to gaming, but it does look like 2.4% of ProtonDB users run it
is nixos immutable?
Or is the quintessential immutability.
Yes.
It’s also a completely different way to handle … everything.
Do not think about nixos if you want to know what to try for gaming.
Do look at it id you want to learn the ins and outs of … Well, to be honest nixos. But I’ve learned a lot about standard paths that everyone expects to be there and hell’s loose if they aren’t.
Python runs amok if it can’t write into it’s beloved lib folders, nginx is utterly confused why it can’t generate certificates on startup (read only folders), deployment dependencies are absolutely visible - and if you fick up the whole system just goes “nah, take a step back and think about what you just did”.
I’m now pushing two years on my server and I’m still not sure if I’d recommend it - but I for sure enjoy it!
honestly im just not sure about red hat long term so was looking for alternatives but at the same time want to be able to play games pretty lazily.
Not sure what you aren’t sure about, but Fedora isn’t made by Red Hat. It’s the other way around. Red Hat takes Fedora as a base to make RHEL.
But Fedora is maintained by its community, not the company.
it can be if you want it to be. I will say though, while I do love NixOS and it’s my favourite distro, might be a bit of overkill if you just want something to game on. That said it can be done easily.
you can pretty much tailor it to however you want it. configure it how you want, however you want. Hell you could run the distro without installing anything if you so wished and still be able to game.
I have the immutable Gnome variant (Aeon) of Opensuse on my laptop, it’s fine but I have to say I prefer Bazzite (comes with Tailscale, brew, ujust, can choose other snapshot on boot, Appimages work etc) which I use on my desktop.
Gaming distro specifically? I run games on Kiniote on my TV PC. Not a gaming distro but I’ve Heroic and Steam on it.
Not necessarily gaming focused, but there is VanillaOS based on Debian.
Meanwhile PikaOS is based on Debian and gaming focused, but not immutable, if only you could combine them somehow. I am struggling to think of any other distros in the immutable gaming space besides Bazzite and SteamOS. Is Holo still a thing? There used to be a few other SteamOS clones out there, I remember ChimeraOS, not sure if it is/was immutable but you never really hear about it anymore.
ChimeraOS is immutable and still alive. Bazzite with gaming mode ended up taking a lot of users from them(myself included).
For VanillaOS you could modify the image used just like Bazzite to get the packages and configuration that you want. I’m just not sure if there is enough of a desire to have something Debian based compared to what is offered by Bazzite.
This is mostly a matter of maturity and whether there is tooling to make this possible. As such, it’s not surprising that only the more established atomic distros are part of the conversation. Those[1] being Fedora Atomic and NixOS.
Besides Bazzite, Playtron GameOS is also based on Fedora Atomic.
As for NixOS-based gaming distros, there’s Jovian NixOS and GLF OS.
FWIW, ChimeraOS is IIRC a notable exception to the above.
Note that none of these come close to Bazzite community-wise*.
Factually speaking, Guix System is even older than Fedora Atomic. Hence, it deserves to be mentioned alongside the other two. However, I am simply unaware of a gaming distro that’s based on Guix System. Which is exactly why it wasn’t discussed alongside the others. ↩︎
yeh currently trying out SecureBlue.
it is… interesting
my motivation though was kinda something not redhat. want to get away from redhat and ubuntu currently. Im lazy though so its a long term thing. Im writing this right now from a unbuntu based distro. Finally got to testing bazzite so I figured I would see what other options there are. Kinda miss play on linux though because I really like the right click and run thing.
Not a gaming distro but OpenSUSE has Aeon and Kalpa that are arguably more secure with more volumes also being encrypted, focus on btrfs snapshots being reliable vs rpm-ostree style images, etc…
I used it before bazzite 2 years ago or so but it was a worse user experience in most ways even if there are technical benefits for it (steam via flatpak needing hours of figuring out non- documented modifications to get working, GRUB decryption that is not only slow and prone to errors but also doesn’t show characters typed for a long passphrase and fails after the first try, volume mounting errors every other boot so booting would fail, and layering being worse than Fedora at the time, etc…)
And nobody can argue that openSUSE doesn’t have the most fun mascot/logo haha.
What about Bazzite isn’t working for you right now?
nothing in particular. I am wrestling with getting games to launch outside of my steam account for things i have seperate logins for but I have barely dealt with it. I mean I have done it a lot but things seem to fail or get taken over by steam. Im actually thinking of uninstalling steam for testing purposes. What I have setup I plan to reinstall ultimately as I am goofing around a lot and want it relatively clean if and when I get it to my daily driver. Anyway I was asking for options mainly because part of the reason I am going to it is for gaming but part is because I like the immutable way of doing things but partly to get away from ubuntu but lately I want to get away from red hat as well.