I’ve been getting asked this a lot so I just wanted to drop a pin to help squash any speculation here.
The Bazzite team is extremely excited for the upcoming expanded launch of Steam OS. Obviously, none of us would be here if not for Valve lighting the way. That being said, we strongly believe Bazzite has a continued role to fill in a post-Steam OS future. A desktop release of Steam OS appears to still be a long way away, and handheld support is almost surely going to be focused on partnered devices first and foremost, and not on the breadth of devices we support today.
Additionally, the first builds of Bazzite were designed for the Steam Deck, which of course runs Steam OS. Bazzite was born out of supporting users with Steam OS in the Steam Deck Discord, and is designed to make up for some of the shortcomings of Steam OS, such as immutability preventing package installs when needed, lack of printing, lack of secure boot, lack of drive encryption, and so on. We also ship a number of helpers and extra packages to make non-Steam gaming easier and faster to get up and running, and are in a position to more quickly work with the community on improvements – all of which will continue to differentiate us.
It’s also important to note that Bazzite is a project and a delivery mechanism, not a product. Developers and users alike can fork, contribute to, and expand Bazzite. This is what makes us Cloud Native and what we’re trying to push for the Linux desktop.
We will continue to build Bazzite out long into the future. Thank you.
Thanks for all your hard work! I have it on a laptop, and it’s been perfect.
Also, I’m wondering if SteamOS for the desktop will still be the A/B format, like on the Deck. If so, I imagine there will be people who aren’t thrilled about how they have decided to do immutability.
valve is probably aiming steamOs more for windows users and most won’t know what immutability is or how it works
I don’t have a steam deck so what’s the A/B format for
A/B format (or A/B partitioning) refers to how Valve handles updates. There’s two partitions, each of which has a full copy of the base system files, and let’s assume you’re on Partition A. Each time you update, you would actually be updating Partition B, then you reboot and your boot system picks Partition B as the one you boot into. Next time you update, it’s back to Partition A, etc. This way, you always have a safe system state.
On some systems, if you run into a bug, you can rollback to the alternate partition manually. The way Valve does it, you automatically rollback when you crash, so players never know this is happening in the background.
Vanilla OS also uses A/B partitioning, and their program that handles it is called ABRoot.
Hi all,
I’ve been getting asked this a lot so I just wanted to drop a pin to help squash any speculation here.
The Bazzite team is extremely excited for the upcoming expanded launch of Steam OS. Obviously, none of us would be here if not for Valve lighting the way. That being said, we strongly believe Bazzite has a continued role to fill in a post-Steam OS future. A desktop release of Steam OS appears to still be a long way away, and handheld support is almost surely going to be focused on partnered devices first and foremost, and not on the breadth of devices we support today.
Additionally, the first builds of Bazzite were designed for the Steam Deck, which of course runs Steam OS. Bazzite was born out of supporting users with Steam OS in the Steam Deck Discord, and is designed to make up for some of the shortcomings of Steam OS, such as immutability preventing package installs when needed, lack of printing, lack of secure boot, lack of drive encryption, and so on. We also ship a number of helpers and extra packages to make non-Steam gaming easier and faster to get up and running, and are in a position to more quickly work with the community on improvements – all of which will continue to differentiate us.
It’s also important to note that Bazzite is a project and a delivery mechanism, not a product. Developers and users alike can fork, contribute to, and expand Bazzite. This is what makes us Cloud Native and what we’re trying to push for the Linux desktop.
We will continue to build Bazzite out long into the future. Thank you.
PS: If you missed it, we did an impromptu AMA in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bazzite/comments/1hvxtzs/who_does_it_and_why/
Feel free to ask more questions if you like, we’ll try to get to them all.
copied the post from the reddit link. I’m planing on switching to it in a couple of day so it better not go anywhere
Thanks for all your hard work! I have it on a laptop, and it’s been perfect.
Also, I’m wondering if SteamOS for the desktop will still be the A/B format, like on the Deck. If so, I imagine there will be people who aren’t thrilled about how they have decided to do immutability.
valve is probably aiming steamOs more for windows users and most won’t know what immutability is or how it works I don’t have a steam deck so what’s the A/B format for
A/B format (or A/B partitioning) refers to how Valve handles updates. There’s two partitions, each of which has a full copy of the base system files, and let’s assume you’re on Partition A. Each time you update, you would actually be updating Partition B, then you reboot and your boot system picks Partition B as the one you boot into. Next time you update, it’s back to Partition A, etc. This way, you always have a safe system state.
On some systems, if you run into a bug, you can rollback to the alternate partition manually. The way Valve does it, you automatically rollback when you crash, so players never know this is happening in the background.
Vanilla OS also uses A/B partitioning, and their program that handles it is called ABRoot.