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Bazzite has gained nearly 10k users in 3 months while other Fedora Atomic distros remain fairly stagnant (europe.pub)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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10k added users since last post. Here are upstream Fedora numbers only

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[–] 11 points 1 year ago (11 children)

My annoyance has been RAM - Bazzite is configured to use zram for swap, meaning it compresses part of your RAM to save space. That's great since it's a lot faster than swap to disk, but I've been running out of memory with Kerbal Space Program and my many mods. I've got 16 GB of memory installed, but without a swap partition/file it just kills the game when it uses too much.

I am ordering a larger stick, but I would personally prefer a slowdown (from getting stuff from disk) to a crash.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    Yep, related root causes.

    You can set Bazzite to use a swap file instead and turn on traditional hibernate, there's a tutorial in their documentation. It did not work for me, and it sure didn't fix my dedicated GPU refusing to wake up from sleep, but you could give it a try.

    But in general Bazzite wants to do power management like it's on a handheld with an APU and limited performance, and it has been a bit of a mess to try to use it on a desktop. I really don't want to go distro hopping again, but it honestly may be required. Despite all the hype this stuff isn't Windows yet.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (9 children)

    It may not be windows, but I'm still very happy with it overall. I'm willing to turn off my laptop completely to save battery because of broken sleep, and the nice thing is it boots faster than Windows for me!

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    It's actually noticeably slower for me, but both are... not fast having to go through Grub first, since I'm dual booting.

    That makes the power management issues MUCH worse in my book. Windows hibernates very reliably, so once it goes to deep sleep, even if I boot back into Linux before coming back to Windows my session is saved. Bazzite won't do that with hibernation turned off, and if sleep is broken I end up having to do a whole bunch of manual resetting on every single session, because even with Plasma's baby steps towards session saving it's nowhere close to remembering what apps you had open.

    And there are the usual issues. Gaming performance is worse on most desktops with dedicated GPUs (don't believe the hype, you'll only get better performance in heavily memory-limited systems like handhelds, and definitely not with Nvidia cards). Software compatibility is still spotty and stuff breaks more often and is fiddlier to fix, as shown in this whole conversation.

    So am I happy with it? There are things where it's mostly on par, it feels snappier on the UX side and it's good to have an alternative. In practice there are still more downsides than upsides, I'd say, so it strongly depends on how actively you want to enforce change in this space.

    It's... viable. Is that fair? Viable is better than whatever it was a decade ago, so... progress?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (7 children)

    Performance wise, I actually did a benchmark in Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows vs. Bazzite on my laptop (Nvidia graphics card) and came out a bit ahead with Bazzite for most settings. Windows framerates were all over the place.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (6 children)

    I guess I'd ask which card and with how much VRAM.

    Linux has a significantly lower memory footprint and that is even more so if your Bazzite install was on game mode. For modern games that REALLY want more than 8 GB that can make a huge difference on stability, average fps or both unless you are fine tuning your setup. Most portable hardware tops out at 8GB of VRAM, and APUs tend to dedicate 3 or 4 to the GPU at best.

    Balls-to-the-wall on desktop hardware, though, if you're not constrained by memory you get more fps on Windows. Sometimes dramatically so. Not because of anything wrong with Linux, it tends to be some combination of having a conversion layer and less cherry-picked, optimized drivers. Stuff that really relies on GPU-specific features in particular, like the Spider-Man games, can grind to a halt with high end features enabled on Linux. At least that's my experience dual-booting Linux and Windows across a bunch of laptops, desktops and handhelds for the past bunch of years.

    On the flipside some games that have broken or inconsistent performance on Windows can get those same types of optimizations or fixes directly in Proton and get smoother performance (although rarely outright higer averages). Elden Ring is the one everybody knows about, but there are a few more out there.

    Being very OS-agnostic, I'm actually excited for Windows' upcoming game mode equivalent. It could be the best of both worlds. This is a big part of why you'd want Linux to do well, it pushes MS to refocus on actually useful stuff, whcih in turn has a good chance of moving Linux in the right direction.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)

    RTX 3070 (laptop) with 8GB vram

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    Gotcha. That should be right at the edge of where you may see some benefits from memory, but it certainly shouldn't show better performance across the board.

    I don't have that exact spec available, but I do have a 3080 mobile I'm dual booting, so I checked a few games I had installed or were small enough to conveniently download and boot up on both.

    Couple caveats: Linux audio is outright broken on this laptop, which is a bit of a dealbreaker and a real bummer. Also, it's running Win 10 on the Windows side, not Win 11, which is one of the reasons I'm dual booting it despite the speaker audio being busted. I don't think that impacts performance either way, though. Also also, man, am I sweating now. This thing is a fantastic space heater when cranked up. Also, also, also, all of these are maxed out at 1440p, for reference. RTX on, DLSS on at max settings where available, since we're testing for Nvidia feature performance as well.

    So, spoiler alert, this went how I expected it to go:

    Quake II RTX: 44-46fps on Windows, 40-43 on Linux. Basically the same. Linux was more stable and frankly, if I didn't have a FPS readout I wouldn't have thought to lower settings for more FPS, it felt so smooth.

    Bloodstained RotN: waste of time, it has a 60fps cap and it runs identically on both, down to brief stutters when changing rooms. I had it installed, so now you know.

    Lost in Random The Eternal Die: Super optimized game on Windows, shockingly much worse on Linux. 125-135 fps on Windows, just 110-119 on Linux, and more stuttery. Was not expecting that.

    Abyssus: Unreal 5 game. Another surprising Linux loss I wasn't expecting. 70-120 on Windows, but a bit stuttery, but only 53-77 fps on Linux. Windows was more stuttery this time and showed some glitches I didn't get on Linux.

    Lego Builders: Raytracing showcase, pretty even. 45-60 on Windows, 53-55 on Linux. Again smoother on Linux despite lower max FPS.

    Orcs Must Die Deathtrap: More Unreal. 36-43 on Windows, 33-38 on Linux. Another case where max fps is lower but it feels a bit smoother on Linux. You'd definitely crank settings down on this one for both OSs.

    So yeah, like I said, no surprises. Linux is generally a bit slower in terms of max fps, which is expected, but a couple of games really don't like it. Proton tends to fix some stuttering and often that offsets the lower max fps loss. So, big things we learned: Proton is really good, I wish ASUS had better Linux support for audio and Linux gaming is very, very doable but not perfect. I haven't changed my mind much since the last time I tested this sort of thing.

    Hey, if nothing else, that's a great list of games and they all run fine on Bazzite, so if anybody is looking for game recommendations I stand by all of them.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Interesting that your Asus device has audio issues. my laptop is the Zephyrus G15 I think? (I know it's GA503QR) and audio is fine out of the box. definitely a great space heater too though, the power supply is 200 W, and I usually run Cyberpunk at reduced graphics settings to cut down on heat and fan noise. It will legit heat up a small room

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's a bit of a shame it works for you, because yeah, they're similar devices but whatever software nonsense ASUS did on Windows to try to fix their crappy downward-firing speakers on mine is not on Linux and they just sound like a 1950s radio. I don't know that there is or can ever be a fix, honestly, since it's clearly a quirk of this particular model. I could try to manually EQ them back to life or something, but... yeah, neither ASUS nor Linux maintainers are going to fix it for me.

    I agree that it's definitely worth losing performance most of the time, too. If not for the heat for the fan noise. It's actually not whiney or high pitched, but it's definitely not quiet.

    I got this thing as a desktop replacement because I was working on the go for a while, and it did that job pretty well while I needed it. I'm not complaining. It's still a beast of a laptop, honestly. As you can see from the benchmarks it absolutely holds up. Still, there are better, cheaper ways to get that kind of performance if you don't need to carry them inside a backpack.

    FWIW, Bazzite's build for ASUS laptops does pick up the iGPU/dGPU system correctly and it does handle power management mostly fine. If not for the audio issues this would be a perfectly decent setup. As it is, I'm probably going to keep a Windows install on it for the foreseeable.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Unfortunately they also soldered half the RAM to the motherboard, meaning you can only upgrade half. My favorite feature is that the chassis screws are made of microwaved butter, so one of them has stripped. I upgraded the RAM to 24GB yesterday, and had to open the back at a slight angle and squeeze in there... couldn't disconnect the battery or anything. At least I can load up more KSP mods now!

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I know nobody really cares, but I had a bit of time to go mess with the audio problems and I ended up rewiring the speakers with alsa-tools. As suspected, the default install doesn't pick up the integrated speaker config properly, so it's only using two of the four internal drivers. Overriding the mapping to blast the audio signal out of every speaker possible fixes the audio issues, but then the volume controls only map correctly at the midpoint and changing the volume messes with the mix of the speakers unless you use the alsa mixer instead.

    I bet you can sort it out one way or another but man is this not practical compared to just... having per-model Windows drivers from ASUS.

    (oh, and while I'm here, who cares about laptop backplates, those things have a million screws for no reason on top of a million plastic tabs, just do what you gotta do to yank that thing out and then put some chewing gum in there to hold it together)

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