technology

This is a pretty comprehensive list on their Github. Some notable things include multimedia codecs needed for some file formats to function out of box, xone driver pre-installed for controller support, Waydroid pre-installed for Android emulation if you like gacha games or anything, Steam ready to log in and go.

Are you familiar with Atomic desktops already? It's worthy of a whole other thread/debate, but you can get all of this yourself with Fedora KDE. However, the standard Fedora KDE is the 'old' way of doing things where you install packages from the Fedora repositories. These packages can sometimes conflict with each other if they're trying to install similar components, different versions, automatic updates, etc. Atomic distros primarily rely on Flatpaks, which are a universal packaging format that works for any distro instead of being specific to one like RPM is to Fedora, Deb to Debian, etc. But otherwise that's how people have used Linux for the past decades.

Atomic distros are relatively newer, though not actually that new or untested or anything, and function more like you might think of a phone. That is, the 'image' you install is a stock OS like Fedora with things bolted on. Every time you update your computer, the image is replaced entirely with the new one, but your saved settings, programs, personal files and all that are preserved. This is why I mentioned stability in my post, because either these updates are either successful or they aren't. There's no halfway or package conflicts that will break your computer. Flatpaks are sandboxed like Android apps to where they should theoretically only have permissions for what they need to access. I say theoretically because it isn't as robust as Android yet and is still being worked on, but the idea is that if something doesn't need your microphone, it can't use it without your explicit permission. If something isn't available in Flatpak, there are other methods to install them though. Otherwise, it's as easy as opening the app store and hitting Install.

A big advantage of them is something I mentioned in my last post where you can do something called "rebasing" where you're replacing your image with a different one entirely. So any programs you didn't install yourself and that were baked in get replaced. So you can go from Fedora KDE Atomic to Aurora to Bazzite to Zirconium to Origami Linux and back again with no to minimal issues without ever needing to reinstall your OS, move your files, re-get your software, etc. This is the beauty of the newer bootc technology. On a traditional non-atomic variant, you need to re-install the OS and mess with custom /home partitions.

I've been running Bazzite for about 2 years now, first with an NVIDIA card, and have minimal issues in that timeframe. Whatever issues I did have, I rebooted my computer and they were fixed in an update by the developers. Because it's downstream, they take whatever Fedora does and add onto it, so you're never behind on anything from the base OS. And as far as longevity, the developers are serious people with long-term goals who are well known in the Linux space, unlike the chuds who run projects like Omarchy and Hyprland. Even if the project were to die, you can just rebase back to Fedora KDE Atomic and everything is fine.

EDIT: I strongly dislike Discord, but the Bazzite Discord has all the developers in it and they and the community are constantly answering questions. You can also join their dev channels and see what they're cooking up under the hood.