cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39776658
Bazzite is seeing an insane amount of growth right now
Just switched today. What a great experience, wish I've done it before.
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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Yeah I tried Bazzite. Idk if its because I'm already in club tuxedo, but the whole immutability thing did not work for me when it didn't work with my hardware out the gate.
But if it had, wow, what a slick experience.
If I'm not mistaken (and I might be) the immutability can actually be toggled off for power users.
Not so much toggled, but you can break out of it. At that point it just becomes a fedora install with a somewhat different set of defaults.
Hmm. Well I was on a tear of trying new operating systems trying to get a bit of bleeding edge kit working. I was about to be traveling and I needed it to just work. Bazzite had a release specific to my model... and it all seemed hunky dory, until it wasn't and I couldn't get in and wrench. I think in that week I probably went through 20+ different ISO's and install scripts trying to get to an install that would let me use the GPU acceleration I paid for. Tried fedora, bazzite (and bazzite did work, but I had issues with the wifi/ blue tooth driver, but I had to do containers/ sandboxes to actually use RoCM), ubuntu, others.
I ended up on Ubuntu for this machine because at least I can wrench on things, and I wasn't prepared to take the Arch jump off the diving board (at least not on a new machine before traveling). And its been "fine".
But I genuinely do no like the Ubuntu experience. Once I can slick this machine (when I'm done with my current project), I'm going to go to Fedora because that should allow me to stay with the most up to date kernel.
Have you given Kubuntu a try? KDE Plasma is wonderful.
Its more about being on the edge of hardware. The kernel is still being updated to support my chip. What wrapper goes around that kernel is secondary. What fedora allows is for me to stay up to date as relevant kernel patches come through.
If you haven't seen it yet there is CachyOS if you want something Arch-based. I have been wanting to try it but for now I am still using vanilla Arch on my desktop and my laptop.
I went and jumped off the deep end and went straight to Arch with my main rig. However without reading and tinkering you won't exactly have a fun time. But if you're comfortable enough with command line, then you can get it working how you want. It does work quite well now that I have it setup. Even with Zen kernel and NVIDIA open dkms.
Yeah I'm paying attention to some arch builds for my machine. I've gone deep enough that I'm literally following the https://lkml.org/ to see how support for my machine and the chipset is going. Its why I'm prob going back to fedora after this, so I can stay on the latest kernel.
No, I don’t think that’s correct
Yeah, I think they're thinking of SteamOS which has a steamos-readonly command which can be used to disable immutability (though, changes of course get wiped upon a system update).
And on DistroWatch (last 30 days) its still place 16, just above NixOS. :D Shows again why DistroWatch shouldn't be used as a generalized popularity comparison: https://distrowatch.com/index.php?dataspan=4 (Note the link will have different data after time goes on.)
Last 30 days on Dec. 4, 2025:
Rank Distribution HPD*
---------------------------------
1 CachyOS 4695>
2 MX Linux 2460<
3 Mint 2325>
4 Debian 1611<
5 EndeavourOS 1536>
6 Zorin 1420>
7 Pop!_OS 1316>
8 Fedora 1080<
9 Ubuntu 1061<
10 Manjaro 1045=
11 AnduinOS 914>
12 Arch 853<
13 openSUSE 729<
14 antiX 726<
15 Nobara 714>
16 Bazzite 692=
17 NixOS 647>
How can they even tell how many truly downloaded a distro?
No, they don't. Its actually described. Distrowatch just tracks how many clicks the pages on Distrowatch has. That's all. But lot of people don't understand and take these numbers as general popularity index.
Makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.