Bazzite comes ready to rock with Steam and Lutris pre-installed, HDR support, BORE CPU scheduler for smooth and responsive gameplay, and numerous community-developed tools for your gaming needs.
That seems to be a great distro to follow
Just to clear some misunderstandings, TLE did a performance test on this distro and it was pretty much the same in terms of FPS as other distros. Gaming distros like Bazzite are made for a faster and easier setup process because gaming tools and stores and preinstalled.
But that’s a legitimate reason for it to exist. A lot of people have reservations towards Linux because they’re concerned about the gaming experience. Making it smooth and easy is a good thing. Having said that, I just installed Steam on Mint and everything ran just fine. I only play Steam games on that machine, though.
I can’t fully agree with you about the smooth user experience on this particular distro because it’s immutable but yea we should promote Linux for gaming. It’s pretty good now.
I can’t fully agree with you about the smooth user experience on this particular distro because it’s immutable
Could you elaborate on why you think this is the case? FYI, I’ve been using Fedora Atomic for over two years. So, please don’t feel the need to explain me how it works*.
TLE did a performance test on this distro and it was pretty much the same in terms of FPS as other distros.
Without measuring any 1% lows or 0.1% lows.
I enjoy TLE’s content, but that video is far from exhaustive on this.
Unless a better comparison comes out, we should reserve ourselves from making any judgements on this particular subject.
I still don’t think there will be a difference. I tried distros with various schedulers and didn’t notice a major positive difference except for the DE smoothness that was unbeatable on CachyOS.
So…, you don’t think it will make a difference. However, you do affirm that whatever CachyOS does is noticably better than the rest.
Perhaps more importantly, have you actually measured 1% lows or 0.1% lows on games. And did you compare how different distros fared in this regard?
I extensively tested apex legends with different kernels and found a difference.
On one hand, I think some data is better than no data, so I think its fair to say that there is a lack of evidence for it being better in terms of in-game performance after setup based on it and that should just be the null assumption anyways.
On the other hand, its been over a decade since its been pretty well known that average FPS is not necessarily reflective of overall performance and throwing the frametime data into a spreadsheet and doing =percentile([range],.99) and =percentile([range],.999) and then dragging it to neighboring cells seems like a pretty minimal extra work for a commercialized channel. For niche testing like this, I’m less bothered by it because having some results seems better than nothing, but its still nice to see it pointed out.
I installed Bazzite on a sibling’s thinkpad and it was amazing. Chose KDE, out of the box, it was amazing. Fingerprint fprint was pre installed, just had to scan them in settings. Battery management and power level settings (power save or performance) were also already installed. Everything has been flawless. Even full disk encryption works amazingly well without hiccups. I remember trying it on Ubuntu and it bricked itself or something and gave up on it.
Dual booting it and installation was a walk in the park.
I’ve been rocking it for a couple weeks now. So far it’s been great
How good is the “HDR Support”? It’s one thing I’ve really wanted for Linux for a while.
From my experience using Plasma 6+ and a NVIDIA card, I keep HDR on on my main display (Odyssey Neo G7).
No issues with washed out colours on the desktop, everything looks fine
I can watch HDR videos using the included Haruna player or MPV.
Firefox has no HDR support outside Mac OS, so no HDR on YouTube.
For games, it depends. Some games can detect HDR and work fine, but for most I have to use gamescope, which in itself brings some issues like not having the Steam overlay, games freezing randomly or just having terrible performance due to niceness (everything has a workaround though, but that requires some tinkering). Check my comments about the issues and workarounds
For game scope running HDR, there’s a lot of people and guides telling you to use countless flags that don’t really do anything at all. The best thing to do is to read its documentation. I use the following flags as startup parameters on my Steam games:
gamemoderun gamescope -W 3840 -H 2160 -r 165 --hdr-enabled --hdr-itm-enable --hdr-itm-sdr-nits 300 -f -e --mangoapp -- %command%
gamemoderun just enables game-mode, which can bring some small performance improvements.
-W -H -r flags are to determine resolution and desired refresh rate. You might be able to omit those flags but I have had some issues with that.
--hdr-enabled is the only flag needed to get HDR working. Nothing else. (except from enabling it on your DE)
--hdr-itm-enable --hdr-itm-sdr-nits are for inverse tone mapping for non HDR games, it’s the same as Windows Auto HDR.
-f is full-screen, but to be fair I don’t think this one is doing anything, but I need to test better.
-e is to enable Steam integration, which should be the overlay and input, but its broken (there’s a workaround, check the last comment made by me there)
--mangoapp is to run mangohud, this flag is preferred over running mangohud before %command%. It’s partially broken this way because it does not dispaly the GPU or gamemode info. Running it as mangohud works 100% fine but apparently there are some issues with it that are beyond my knowledge.
