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Bazzite: a gem for Linux gamers
One of the things that has historically stood between Linux and the fabled "year of the Linux desktop" is its lack of support for video games. Many users who would have happily abandoned Windows have, reluctantly, stayed for the video games or had to deal with dual booting. In the past few years, though, Linux support for games—including those that only have Windows versions—has improved dramatically, if one is willing to put the pieces together. Bazzite, an image-based Fedora derivative, is a project that aims to let users play games and use the Linux desktop with almost no assembly required.
Bazzite is part of the Universal Blue project, which aims to provide ""the reliability of a Chromebook, but with the flexibility and power of a traditional Linux desktop"" via immutable Linux images based on Fedora. LWN covered another Universal Blue project, Bluefin, in December 2023. Each Universal Blue project is based on bootc images from the Universal Blue project's base images, which in turn are based on Fedora Atomic Desktops, or CentOS Stream images in the case of the long-term-support (LTS) release of Bluefin.
Bazzite is relatively new to the scene: its first release was in November 2023, based on Fedora 38. The project takes its name from bazzite: a mineral that forms small blue crystals. It is designed to be similar to Valve's SteamOS, but more suitable for general desktop use. It is largely based on stock software from Fedora, but adds a number of packages to provide hardware drivers for gaming, including support for various game controllers, keyboards, and proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
Bazzite also provides a custom kernel: the project uses the Fedora Always Ready (kernel-ark) repository that is used to develop Fedora Linux's kernels, and then applies a set of patches added for device support and performance optimizations for games. The project recently announced its Fall 2025 update based on Fedora 43, with support for new handheld gaming PCs and steering-wheel hardware.