Bazzite – a SteamOS-like OCI image for desktop, living room, and handheld PCs (opens in new tab)

I had a living-room media server for many years. My recommendation: Don't put a media server in your living room.

Instead, get a tiny, quiet, privacy-respecting client (e.g. Apple TV) and put the media on a NAS that lives elsewhere. Depending on your preferred client UX, you may (Plex) or may not (Infuse) need a separate app to serve the media.

Whether the server lives in your living room or office/homelab doesn't really matter in terms of its effect on the popularity of "self-hosting". If anything, local media library management is likely to become less popular, and any "Trojan horse" effect has happened by now since people have been doing this for a couple of decades.

So yeah, I'm very keen for something plug and play in this space.

I might have to do a comparison of NixOS and bazzite since bazzite has me curious.

Flash Media HATES overwriting data in place because it requires the block to be freed, then re-written.

Now, modern flash firmware tries its best to allocate new blocks anyway, so some of it is a wash, but it is overall a better way to write to flash media.

I run a homegrown gaming htpc with an R5-5600, Radeon 6800XT, and then the Xbox wireless dongle and 4 Xbone controllers with Bazzite.

You'd be surprised at how much of heavy lifting is done by the kernel and mesa stacks, that's where the real work is done. Fedora does a good job pulling in kernel and mesa updates relatively quickly and the steam client handles the proton updates.

There's also great synergy between Bazzite, ChimeraOS, and Nobara, which are all gaming focused distros. Lots of code sharing and teamwork happening there, which is awesome to see. Everything is open for people to hack on.

It acts like a big steamdeck, all the performance overlays work, all the xbox controllers work ootb, fsr works, etc. - you do need to pair the controllers with each controller but that's a one time thing. I've personally completed God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Baldur's Gate 3 and other AAA campaigns in 4k. And then when I need to travel all my game progress is on my deck. It's a full multi device experience.

But to set expectations: VR and multiplayer games that don't opt into EAC or use kernel-level anti cheat are a no-op, as well as anything Epic makes. To me it's just like any console platform, you get lots of games, and some games you can't play. At this stage in the game both Windows and Linux suffer from the same UX shit show, horrible third party launchers are the worst problem with either set up.

Disclaimer: I'm involved in universal blue but don't directly contribute to bazzite.

Deduplication can be useful if you store the Proton/Wine runtimes on the same disk. Different games may need different runtimes, the latest version isn't always the best, and a Wine environment without any games inside of it can take up a couple hundred megabytes just for DLLs and other common dependencies. Deduplicating can save a chunk of wasted storage, although with current flash storage prices that's probably not worth worrying about in practice.

Some people like the checksumming but IMO that's not all that useful without ECC memory.

Main benefits are compression, and increased read speeds from compressed drives, especially from the MicroSD.

BTRFS de-duplication also solves the issue of wine prefixes with similar dependencies taking up more space than needed.

Every single one of these should be present, along with our own tweaks and changes made upstream at Fedora.

It's a shame other FS's don't have it.

Originally I wanted something akin to SteamOS that allowed packages to be installed and maintained through updates, and knew Fedora could offer that after using Silverblue for about a year, and it just kept evolving and growing from there.

We just launched HDR in testing, and are working on custom kernel signing so we can move that to stable without breaking secure boot support.

If you want to support us for the time being, all I can ask is that you give it a try and report any bugs you may find to us. The more users the better!

But a home folder encryption rather than full disk might solve the touch input problem.

My recommendation: Get a tiny, quiet, privacy-respecting client (e.g. Apple TV) and put the media on a NAS that lives elsewhere. Depending on your preferred client UX, you may (Plex) or may not (Infuse) need a separate app to serve the media.

https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/container/ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/OstreeNativeContainer...

The OS itself is run on the bare metal.

Installation is pretty quick too! Here’s a video I made showing the process https://youtu.be/doQW1FyAISQ

I would like to know this too.

You could run any of the replacement Steam Deck OSes (Jovian/NixOS, Bazzite, Chimera...) and get a UI that's identical to what's on the Steam Deck, down to the "Deck Verified" badges and sidebar sliders that may not work on your machine. They're all essentially running the Steam Deck UI atop whatever distribution each one chose.

I'm not sure you'd want the literal Steam Deck image on your machine. It's an older kernel with a bunch of patches that expect the SD's hardware. But if you want to explore that more, there was an excellent article on the front page this morning about building your own clone of Steam OS.

Here is Containerfile from the repo: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile

Steam, gamescope, and nearly every other listed feature are native packages.