I last reviewed Bazzite OS when it was in its early phase and even installing Steam on this distribution was done through containerization and installing that OS on a handheld device like the Steam Deck was a hassle.
However, things have changed quite a lot for this distribution and now, you don’t even need a keyboard or mouse attached to your handheld device in order for the installation. Apart from both the LED and LCD Steam Decks, the developers have also added support for a lot of hardware like the MSI Claw and ASUS Rog Ally X. In this article, we will further discuss the pro and cons of using this distribution on the Steam Deck and all the additional features and advantages it has over the stock Steam OS.
Bazzite OS – The Good
The distribution has been quite stable for me for the last 6 months. I have been using it on my Steam Deck OLED 512GB model, and didn’t really find any difference between this and the SteamOS in the gaming mode.
Bazzite OS also ships with the GNOME desktop environment along with the KDE build, and you can pick whichever version you want. I chose to install GNOME as it is already my DE of choice and because of the touchscreen on Steam Deck, GNOME was really the ideal candidate.
Since it’s based on the immutable atomic desktop model, if I encounter any bugs (which I will talk about later on in this article), I can just reboot and switch to the older version of the OS from the GRUB menu.
On SteamOS, you can only choose the OS version to be either on the stable channel or on the Beta channel, however, Bazzite OS allows you to select the version of the Steam client (Stable/Beta) as well as the OS version to be either stable or in the beta channel. Which is great because some features in the Steam Client Beta were really cool, including recording gameplay on the Steam Deck.
The developers added support for ASUS ROG Ally X handheld gaming device on day 1, which is quite an achievement. This meant that anyone could buy the device and instantly run this SteamOS like operating system without having to wait for some time. You can read more about this in their official blog post.
Bazzite OS does ship with a lot of applications which you may or may not use, such as Lutris and even Waydroid. I don’t use them at all, but for my Epic and GOG game libraries, I use the Heroic Games Launcher which I installed from the GNOME software via Flatpak. You can also use Lutris for this, and Waydroid is there for Android App/Game support.
The Bad and the Nitpicks
While I love getting regular updates on my Device…. the updates are too frequent for my liking. Even though I’m not on the beta channel, I receive an update notification every 2–3 days, and sometimes even more than that. Yes, I know I can choose not to update and simply ignore that annoying Icon that appear in the gaming mode on top, but that’s the thing, that Icon is quite annoying.
I have been unable to change the gaming mode clock from 24h to 12h format and while this is not a major issue, it is still annoying as my preferred version of time format is 12h.
Cold booting time has been minimal for the official SteamOS because of extensive work by Valve on that end, Bazzite OS on the other hand takes a noticeably long time to start up. If I want to start a quick gaming session, I do have to wait for quite some time for every process to start up properly.
This might have been a major bug earlier, but occasionally, the Audio on my Steam Deck OLED completely crashes in the gaming mode, and it does not fix itself upon reboot. Now, I don’t know if that is an issue of the GNOME DE or with the OS itself. This issue only gets fixed when I select a previous version of the OS from the GRUB menu.
The Judgement
Bazzite OS is an excellent Linux distribution, and it offers you a lot of choice and freedom, which the Steam OS doesn’t provide. You can run GNOME if you would like instead of KDE and, well, the updates are faster. The bugs might be a disadvantage if that affects you, but because of the updates, they get fixed really fast as well. If you want to run this OS on any Windows gaming handheld device for the SteamOS like experience, then surely go ahead, this is exactly what you are looking for.
But if you have a Steam Deck, then unless you really care about the fast updates, having the latest Mesa and graphics driver, and the Android application support, then my recommendation would be to just stick to the stock OS.
