I recently installed it on a new SSD I bought. The installation was very easy compared to the Linux Mint installation I did, Mint sharing a SSD drive with Windows.

The KDE environment is very nice, sleek, better than Mint Cinnamon IMO, but I still encountered technical problems, like I did with Mint. Linux handles desktops differently and seems to always mess up on my PC configuration. I was able to fix things on both Mint and Bazzite, but Bazzite has more functionality. The sticky edges are very nice, the desktop widgets have tremendous potential, and I can configure slideshow backgrounds separately for each monitor, with separate folder(s). The moving and adjusting window sizes is so much better too in Bazzite over Mint. I don’t like how Linux can only have one desktop, and other monitors have a weird ‘shared’ folder to represent other desktops. Moving items from one monitor to another is weird, creating copies instead. You cannot do the same things on all monitor desktops, options are literally not there if it’s not the main desktop.

It seems none of the Linux distributions are compatible with NTFS file system that Windows uses. This is because NTFS is proprietary, and that makes it really hard to support, forcing Linux devs to reverse engineer it. Bazzite recommends btrfs file system, which you can setup in the installation if you are doing the whole SSD (not dual installing.) Bazzite recommends physically removing any drives that have WIndows on it before the installation, but I saw some tutorials ignoring it, and I did as well, and it installed just fine without touching the Windows/Mint drive. I wish the documentation was a little more thorough in explaining the ‘why’ so that learning is easier. Instead it tells you to do stuff blindly, and you might know if it applies to you or not, a common problem I found with Linux documentation. In Mint, I could setup mounting other internal drives automatically without much trouble. Bazzite does not support this at all unless they are using a Linux format like ext4 or btrfs. I have to manually mount NTFS drives on every single logon to the PC, which is quite unacceptable for me. I’m not willing to ditch my current windows setup until I am comfortable with Linux, which I am not at this time.

I was able to get some games up and running very quickly in Bazzite, faster than Linux Mint, and installing other programs through the Bazaar app was a breeze. Factorio was a bit of a problem, because the Heroic app installs only one version of the game, and Factorio has experimental builds I played on. I learned a bit about Linux through that, like how permissions are tied with executables, not extensions like Windows does. I was able to create a shortcut, as well, that linked to the game and the icon pic. The process was pretty easy once I knew how things worked.

Then I tried to import my Windows Firefox profile into Bazzite with little success. I don’t want to use Firefox Sync because it seems to always choose the wrong browser to copy over, erasing the one I want to keep. Manually moving files seemed the best option, but finding the installation folder is impossible for a newbie to the file system like me, and the Firefox button to open the folder didn’t work. I managed to make a new profile in a local folder, in my user folder, and then transfer the profile over. It seemed to work until I logged on the next day. Firefox wouldn’t launch, giving me an error, not finding location of the profile folder. It seems that the atomic nature of the OS is making things like this very difficult, as I suspect it’s a permission issue or a persistent configuration issue, but I’m not sure. I also installed Vivaldi through the Bazaar, and installed ublock origin extension manually (because google doesn’t allow it anymore through their store). I noticed the extension wasn’t installed the next day too, probably a similar problem with Firefox. I know Firefox has a way to launch by selecting a profile first, through a profile manager, but haven’t looked into how to do that on Linux. It’s the “-P” launch instruction on Windows, which was easy to find, but not sure if it works on Linux or has a different method. The profile manager would only be a temporary fix, but I instead jumped back to Windows. I still haven’t found a way to make it work, mostly because of time and effort for a new person to Linux. Maybe eventually I will find the answer, because I really do want to ditch Windows eventually.

Bazzite updates can uninstall programs you have without any notice, mostly the programs that it comes with innately, which upset some people I saw on some forums. They liked using some of the programs, and didn’t like how they couldn’t opt out of those changes. It hasn’t affected me, but it could in the future. I mention it as a concern for those looking into Bazzite. But I think Bazzite does allows you to install almost anything you want, in different ways, mostly in container like apps, even Android and Windows apps. But it’s still kinda a pain switching files to new locations especially if it’s anything like the Firefox profile folder transferring problem.

After rebooting Bazzite for the first time, I noticed Grub didn’t seem to show up anymore upon booting, loading into Bazzite immediately. This made me go back into the bios and rearrange the booting drives, setting Mint to load first, like I had before installing Bazzite, and turned off a backwards compatible option of the booting options (forget the name of it), reducing the total booting options listed. I’m not sure what happened in the background, but Grub now saw all of my installed OSes, having Bazzite 0 as the top option, which I was perfectly fine with, and felt lucky with the order it made. (Bazzite has two booting options: 0 being the most recent update, 1 being the previous update). But now my Grub timeout was set for 3 seconds instead of the 10 seconds before. That was way too quick for me. Eventually I found out how to modify the grub configuration in Bazzite and find the command to update the grub. I almost used the wrong technique used on Debian Linux installations, but the atomic nature of Bazzite stopped me from making new scripts in the “src” folder. I’m not sure if there were other precautions even if I managed to place that script. I only tried to make the script because the Debian command to update the grub didn’t work, another newbie blunder.

I found the documentation of Bazzite very sparse, and not really suited for someone that only knows Windows wanting to move to Linux. Mint has better forums and documentation. Bazzite gets the main stuff okay, but not full documentation, and almost no links to pertinent sources, like KDE documentation that could have been useful. Some of the documentation is also buried in Bazzite’s github repository as well. Some forums suggest looking at other similar distributions for technical information and help. Bazzite is based on Fedora, specifically atomic versions, like Fedora Silverblue. Fedora’s forum is much more active and has more information, even a dedicated tips and tutorial section.

Despite the problems, Bazzite is still the best Linux distribution I have tried (also tried Ubuntu a decade ago), and I hope to over come the problems, but it can seem like an inscalable wall when new to Linux, but probably looks like a little hill or road bump to experienced Linux users. I’m not sure of how much experience you have with Linux, but wanted to share my foray for others as well on the fediverse wanting to try Linux. Thanks for reading. Cheers.