Yeah my Bazzite definitely doesn’t auto launch Steam. I think that might be an option during setup?

I installed it in a VM and after installation Steam launched. Didn’t check if that persists after several reboots. Why would I?

Then I tried Aurora and with the exception of a Terminal app in Plasma’s quick launch panel and no gaming launchers installed, it’s pretty much the same thing, so might just as well recommend Aurora instead of Bazzite if the person in question doesn’t care much about gaming. It’s the workstation variant of Universal Blue.

it doesn’t auto launch anything on desktop

I installed Bazzite just last weekend and I was definitively greeted by a Steam client login window right after logging into SDDM. No idea what you’re talking about.

Just FYI in case you don’t know - SteamOS has changed and is now based on Arch, which means Bazzite is still fundamentally different.

Both are immutable distributions, meaning software installation via Flatpak and Distrobox is exactly the same.

System-level differences are mostly irrelevant which is a fundamentally different approach from Ubuntu, Mint, etc. where users are expected to juggle with PPAs to get newer drivers on their ancient Ubuntu LTS base.

Bazzite is great on desktop

Absolutely but people not interested in autolaunching Steam and other preinstalled launchers can use Aurora which is just the workstation flavor by the same people.

Aurora is the desktop/workstation version of Bazzite, btw.

Aurora, it’s the desktop version of massively popular Bazzite (which targets gaming). That means you’ll find tons of up to date tutorials online (Bazzite tutorials are usually applicable unless they are about the few features Bazzite and Aurora diverge specifically).

I explicitly advise against Ubuntu and Mint for the reasons I outlined here. Ubuntu and Mint have the added downside that almost none of the guides you’ll find about SteamOS will work: Different desktop, different philosophy.

People need to realize that since the success of Steam Deck the “old classics” of newbie recommendations are out of the window and what helps these users the most is a Linux distribution as close as possible to SteamOS but SteamOS is not available for random PCs, so Bazzite/Aurora are currently the way to go. Personally I like Fedora KDE but I shifted my stance since the linked post and trying out Aurora.

Sure, you get an A for answering the question, but my point was that the hate they get today on Linux is misguided because people only have vague or non-specific complaints.

Not learning from the past means repeating the same mistakes. I see little evidence that NVidia’s overall approach changed. It’s always that everyone has to adapt to their way of doing things and rarely that NVidia seek collaboration first. That’s why it has taken years and three entirely different memory management technologies.

With NVidia it’s always “This is the last piece of technology and then everything will be perfect.” ExplicitSync is only the latest episode. Now that ExplicitSync is there, compatibility on Linux is still a crapshoot with NVidia.

When Nvidia announced that they were going to move the proprietary parts of their driver into the GPU firmware, and open source the kernel module, there was a lot of hate about how they’re being assholes for not releasing the whole thing as open source, relying on proprietary blobs, etc. Yet that’s stupid, because it’s literally the exact same thing AMD and Intel do for their much beloved drivers.

Where is the closed source user space of Intel and AMD drivers? It doesn’t exist because they use Mesa for the best possible compatibility. NVidia don’t. I’ve read comments by people bashing the recent Baldur’s Gate 3 Linux release and being full of graphics glitches. Then they list their hardware as proof how great it is and they all have NVidia GPUs.

Afaik, their drivers support GBM today so it’s kind of outdated.

Well, of course. I literally said this was a fight over years, so of course in the past. You wanted to one example of why the hate and I gave you one example of why the hate.

Can you give an example?

Trying to push three different technologies years after AMD, Intel, Mesa, … agreed on GBM.

In case you aren’t aware, Nvidia was the main driving force behind getting explicit sync support into Wayland, which is a feature that greatly improves performance for modern graphics APIs.

In case you’re not aware but it took years of fighting NVidia for them to finally conform to standards and conventions agreed by everyone when NVidia didn’t care to participate.

The issues may be totally valid but yeah, Nvidia can be expected to have patches ready.

Looks similar to the Google ffmpeg situation where Google AI file bug reports, bury the developers, and don’t send any patches at all.

Patches welcome

Seems excessive when you can just as well use RustDesk.

Sure. That’s why I wrote “mostly pointless” but the runtime stack is self-contained in Steam and proprietary games are compiled by the developer anyway. There are limits to what CachyOS/Gentoo/… can do.

This is only relevant for people exclusively running open source games from the distro’s repository.

Steam games (incl. the Windows games on top of Proton) run inside Steam Linux Runtime, a container based on Debian 11 that is identical on every distribution. Use whatever distribution you like but the optimizations of CachyOS are mostly pointless.

Somehow with XWayland enabled, the app still specifically demanded an actual X11 session

I guess it’s because Horizon can probably act as a host to control the desktop and as client to control other desktop. The latter should work with XWayland, the former not. As I wrote: RustDesk works just fine. What RustDesk doesn’t currently offer with Wayland is unattended access. The desktop that’s about to be remote controlled gets a question to confirm remote access, at least under Gnome.

My somewhat educated guess is that it’s more likely that Gnome’s permission system gets a “always allow remote access” button before a X11 application gets a Wayland port when the decade until now a Wayland port was no priority.

Heck, I had trouble installing remote desktop for my work (they use Omnissa Horizon) on Fedora, because the app still exclusively supports X11, and Fedora removed it in version 42.

X11 applications still run under XWayland. The X11 session is gone, not all compatibility with X11 applications. Steam wouldn’t run if complete removal was the case.

What’s Omnissa’s stance there? Will they port their application? Will they hire a developer to maintain a X11 session?

ditching X11 will still be catastrophic for many users’ workflows.

Are these users hiring a developer to maintain the X11 session? If not, they need to adapt then and go with the times and migrate to other solutions. RustDesk supports Wayland just fine, for example.

I’m using Linux because I like þe control; if I wanted a nanny OS, I’d use a Mac.

I’m currently trying to read your comment on macOS and whatever your X11 system does somehow glitches some characters and swallow words? You like to be in control?

Say “screw it”, shift blame on Nvidia and not do anything to support Nvidia users (halving the userbase)

So keeping the X11 session around for a decade after Intel and Radeon had their drivers ready is “not do anything to support Nvidia users”?

Or do something about it and implement what is necessary to keep them supported.

Who is paying for this task? Have NVidia users set up a pledge drive? Did any PC manufacturer?

It’s not up to Linux “to support Nvidia”, it’s up to Nvidia to properly support Linux.