I understand there's been drama, and someone walked away or was pushed out. I don't quite care enough to understand it all or point at guilty parties.
However, my current understanding is that the project remains active, so titling this article "Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over. It's certainly what I immediately assumed made it newsworthy.
>"Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over.
is it? outside of autopsies, i think i have only ever seen it used as a synonym for "incident report". i dont think ive ever associated the term specifically with the end of a project.
In the incident case, it's a post-mortem on the incident. The incident itself is (hopefully) resolved and can now be dissected to learn about what went wrong and how things can improve in the future.
That's what a post-mortem implies to me in the tech industry. A thing happened, it's over now, here are the lessons we learned to take into the future.
Gamasutra has a famous line of articles where game developers provide retrospectives on how the development of their titles went, maybe I'm influenced by that.
I'm aware about the use in incident reports of course, but then you still don't call it "<project name> Post-Mortem" but use a more specific namespace.
People should stop using it as a synonym, then. The Latin effectively means "after death", meaning its a poor synonym for "what happened wrong recently".
We are splitting hairs here probably. After reading the article it looks like the author wrote it as a look back on their relationship with bazzite. A more descriptive one could be “bazzite and me - a post mortem” or something. It doesn’t come across as a bad faith title, at least to me
Just based on this blog post it seems like he wanted the project to be more “professional” in some way that the rest of the developer group didn’t. I wonder if that difference in vision, combined with a (probably justified based on your comment) feeling that he was doing a disproportionate amount of the work lead to an unsustainable situation.
Calling it a post-mortem while others are continuing the project still seems kind of petty, though.
Doesn't look like he was, but then looking at the actual commit list: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/commits/main/?before=e49...
He definitely had more than the 14 commits listed. They might've lost their email due to the conflicts & lost ownership over the commits?
Software history is rife with projects that outlive a person like that leaving, though. Ulrich Drepper comes to mind immediately. They don't own the project.
Been on Bazzite for a while now and had very few issues, though to backup the sentiments of Antheas here, they have managed to upset the maintainer of the Go-XLR Linux Utility with their fast and loose HW changes: https://github.com/GoXLR-on-Linux/goxlr-utility/issues/239
Looking around a couple of adjacent communities, it seems the Bazzite maintainers might have acted in the best community interest on this one, so I'm optimistic things will continue in a positive way. Still, might make me a little less full-throated about recommending Bazzite, knowing there's such drama under the surface.
It’s worth pointing out that the official Bazzite position is that Antheas was removed from the project for breaching Code of Conduct and harassing people in their official Discord server
or depending on your point of view (I don't know which one is the correct one), it's very easy to find some rule that was infringed for a quick power grab, right at the time when Bazzite is becoming popular.
it was clearly bad enough for everyone else to decide that they didn't want to put up with him anymore. which is what happens in the real world.
online, everyone considers themselves a public figure. and because we can't seem to get shot of public figures, whether they be rapists, homophobes, or just arseholes, alleged or proven, they believe, logically, you shouldn't be able to be rid of them.
offline, if you have someone who makes your life a misery, you tell them to fuck off.
Boy i wish that principle held up in real medicine and other parts of life; "rep and skills" may in some ways equal power, but that false equivalency is how problematic behavior is excused in unfit individuals.
Pretty much. He said some mean words. The cult of personality around the other maintainer has spun it into something way worse that he someone made other people quit OSS or something. It's hog wash and not backed up by anything.
I guarantee you I can say some mean words that would upset you at some point. If you have to repeatedly deal with it, you'd likely leave the space we share or ask someone to make me leave. Words have power, we shouldn't pretend otherwise.
1. Being called an idiot or told my idea is dumb is not going to upset me. I guess I just have more emotional maturity than some OSS devs.
2. Why would I leave when I can just block you if you are harassing me?
3. Why are you inventing this hypothetical instead of just showing where that occurred?
4. No-one has said words don't have power. But being on the internet you should be able to recognize that you won't be friends with everyone. So you have to develop some basic emotional regulation for silly insults.
Why? What's the point of getting upset over any minor slight? Seems more disrespectful to yourself to waste time thinking about it. Why not laugh at the silly insults from people who don't know you and move on?
> Why would I leave when I can just block you if you are harassing me?
If you were involved with bazzite that was not necessarily an option. Hence why some people just elected to leave the project entirely, which is unfortunate to see because I’m sure some talented, contributing people are no longer making the project better.
Honestly I’m surprised that I need to explain the need for people to treat each other with basic decency and respect. Have you really never faced harassment that you couldn’t get away from without either leaving, their leaving, or external intervention?
Would you have the same laissez-faire attitude if I was harassing your partner or children? Would you simply tell them to not care about “mean words”? Should a coworker just be allowed to endlessly call you slurs at work?
Back to your questions: What hypothetical did I make up? Confused by that question and your first one. Those weren’t my examples (I gave none).
It’s one thing to deal with rude people online. It’s another when it’s when you’re at work, doing a hobby, or contributing your time and energy to an open source project. People shouldn’t be abused in general, however. Yes it is good to have thick skin but it doesn’t change the fact that if somebody behaves like that, they are ultimately in the wrong. I don’t know if he behaved as poorly as the bazzite team is claiming, but I’m not really here to litigate that. I just don’t love the idea of saying “just ignore mean words.” it’s flippant, unproductive, and downplays the power of words.
Getting into one fight and just leaving over it is pretty foolish.
What are you talking about? Of course you should treat everybody well. But that doesn't mean everyone will treat you well. Of course I've been harassed before. But that's not related to this at all. We're talking about Bazzite where someone got called an idiot once.
You're really reaching now. If you were harassing my partner or children this would be an entirely different conversation. Again, that's not relevant at all. You're just reaching for anything to make this emotional plea. Also slurs? Come on now. We're literally talking about someone getting called an "idiot". Not a slur. Stop stretching the truth.
Your hypothetical was "If you have to repeatedly deal with it, you'd likely leave the space we share or ask someone to make me leave".
Nobody was abused here. Good lord. So THAT'S what set you off. So "just ignore mean words" does mean "let everyone call you slurs all day". It's means what it literally says. Mean words. Mean words are "idiot", "stupid", etc. They are silly and childish insults. They are not harmful words. They are not slurs. They are not harassment. Do you understand what I said now? Because I think your invention of scenarios that didn't happen here is extremely unproductive and is derailing the conversation. Instead of using slogans and extremes, ask questions next time. Can really save you and others some effort.
> Getting into one fight and just leaving over it is pretty foolish.
> But that doesn't mean everyone will treat you well.
I never said either of those statements and I agree they are not worth flipping the table over for.
> Your hypothetical was "If you have to repeatedly deal with it, you'd likely leave the space we share or ask someone to make me leave".
It’s not hypothetical. It’s what people are claiming he was doing and you were saying people need to just shrug it off. My questions to you were an attempt to establish that there is a line at which someone can say “it’s not just mean words anymore.” More specifically, where you draw the line.
You keep trying to describe the situation as one very small slight that happened one time, which does not appear to be accurate. The accusation is a pattern of behavior. If you don’t believe the accusation that is an entirely different story, but if most or all of what is being claimed is true, then he was needlessly hostile and caused problems for multiple people for an extended period of time. He didn’t simply “call someone an idiot once.”
I would be very interested to see this repeated and consistent behavior then. Because all the evidence that keeps getting passed around is someone getting an idiot once. Which seems to clearly vindicate Antheas's claim that the other devs developed a sycophantic group inside the project around them. Groups like that pull this "he was harassing everyone and making everyone quit" story seems to have zero evidence to back it up.
Obviously if he was harassing people and forcing them to quit that's a different story, but that does not seem to be the case here unless you take the remaining Bazzite project leaders word for it. This seems more like a case of power hungry project leadership wanting to have an echo chamber in the project. Which is not an uncommon occurrence sadly.
Go to the discord server and search “antheas.” Even with its terrible search you’ll find the discussions (and his comments) illuminating. No need to take my word for it. You’ll see complaint after complaint from members of the community.
Sometimes I feel like Discord as been nothing but a bane on OSS. A chat is inherently less searchable than a wiki/forum/documentation, and those sources are often readable without needing to authenticate, which meant that you could find an answer through Google and such.
Most project now don't bother with publicly readable and archivable (and so offline viewable) information sources and just rely on Discord.
This lead to the same newbie question being answered over and over again, and is a clear degradation of the UX.
But on top of that, most people see Discord as a hangout. Almost all Discord server I know have an "offtopic"/"random"/"meme"/etc channel, if not several. This almost inevitably lead to drama on a scale that newsgroups and IRC fellows could have only dreamed off. And considering that a lot of devs are able to create drama over even a mailing list, Discord is turbocharging the ability for nuisance.
Maybe it's my "Am I out of touch ? No it's the children who are wrong" moment, but I really think OSS projects would benefit from ditching discord.
You are not out of touch, I rember in the 90s when people recommended using IRC for Linux questions and I hated it.
I didn't want to ask something and interacting in pseudo-realtime with another human being (that could potentionally laugh at me for asking a n00b question).
News groups were a little better for this, but the real progress was when you could search them or later read the answer in Stack Overflow. And the final step here is a LLM agent that has a web/doc search tool and can answer more difficult questions.
Strongly agreed. I'd like to see users pushing more for this. Return to IRC, try XMPP or Matrix, put up a forum. Lots of options exist that would be more freedom-respecting, stable, and publicly searchable.
> Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Wouldn't any platform have the same problem though? A forum would partition the community between those willing to make an account and submit private information and those who aren't. It seems like no matter what platform you choose there will always be those who are willing to participate and those who are not.
Not quite. Discord is a lot more invasive with their info collection than, let's say Github or Matrix servers. Second, the info posted to Github is accessible without account, which is not true of Discord.
It turns out that before Discord, we had project IRC channels, and they would splinter along various prosocial or antisocial lines over time. It was essentially guaranteed when the channel exceeded 150 regulars, but there were criticality points around 5-10 and ~50 as well. None of this excuses anyone from behaving badly, but certainly Discord is not the cause of communication breakdown and group shattering events — it’s just a chat server, same as all the ones before it. And as with all prior chat servers, they make horrendous technical LB replacements — but are a brilliant way to provide mentorship to (slash and infect enthusiasm upon) others, which is why they persist so strongly in the face of all of the problems these real-time group chain letters highlight in human behaviors: Hobbyists desire to socialize with other hobbyists.
I've been testing Bazzite and noticed a couple of things that raised an eyebrow for me. Sexual preferences in Bazaar options tool to update flatpaks seems out of place and even if not the limited subset of flags is odd. To me personally that is risking potential drama in the OS/apps.
There is also a suspiciously long delay in closing the shell terminal which feels like it is storing or sending something but I have yet to debug it. This does not occur on any other of the many Linux distributions I have tested.
It is a snappy and decent distro otherwise. Good thing they are removing drama, something that almost nuked Mint not long after its inception.
and then rebooted? I am on Bazzite 43, default desktop installation. If we are not seeing the same thing that is almost as concerning as the terminal shell exit delay.
I thought I provided detailed steps. Either way my solution was to whack that machine and install CachyOS since I am very comfortable with Arch. Bazzite can be someone elses problem if they care enough. The odd delay on terminal exit and random boot up and shut down times are the only real potential problems whereas the sexual preference is just a red flag to me personally as it suggests there will be other surprises or potential shenanigans in the OS pushing some agenda which as far as I am concerned my tools do not need these things. Some people may love it.
This is pure dramaposting- "post-mortem" is so misleading and mischaracterizes the situation. I don't use bazzite, I don't know Kyle or anybody here, but I am tired of the drama.
All of the things listed in the blog are personal and technical disagreements, nothing morally reprehensible, no disrespect, nothing that would make anyone want to burn bridges like this.
It's fine to leave a project and to publicize disagreements but this comes across as spiteful.
For everyone who thinks this is the death of Bazzite or whatever, keep in mind Bazzite, all the UBlue projects, are all based on Fedora Atomic which makes it super easy to make an immutable spin.
There's also Silverblue which is ready to go out of the box (unless you have Nvidia), Nobara which adds some gaming things. And on a different vein CachyOS is making waves with some gamers (but it's Arch based instead of Fedora and not atomic/immutable).
I guess the good thing about Bazzite, CachyOS, Omarchy and what have you, is that it brings new users to Linux.
I would still like to see most users pick established distros, as contributions there have a higher impact on the ecosystem. But self-named gamers are probably harder to reason with.
I've been using desktop Linux for 20 years in various capacities. I most recently picked Bazzite for my gaming/desktop VM because it's simple to set up and works better than other distros I've tried to game on in the recent past. It's that simple.
Using Fedora Kinoite/Silverblue is not really an option if you are using an Nvidia GPU. With Bazzite, the driver is pre-installed and also signed directly with a Secure Boot Key that you can import when installing Bazzite. With normal Fedora Atomic, you have to install and sign the driver manually, and with some updates, the whole thing breaks again, so you have to fiddle around with it.
In addition, Fedora Flatpak Remote has been removed, which is a “noobtrap” in normal Fedora Atomic. This allows you to install broken versions of browsers where the codecs are missing and videos don't work. In addition, Distrobox functions better than Toolbox, and in general, Bazzite's defaults are much more geared towards an immutable system. Silberblue/Kinoite's defaults are just like normal Fedora, and you have to layer dozens of things to achieve the same thing, whereas Bazzite is completely designed for a container workflow.
Even if you ignore any gaming optimizations, etc., this alone makes it a significantly better option than the official Fedora Atomic images.
On desktops and servers yeah. Bazzite was a bit of a special case as it was catered to handheld devices. So it did have that going for it. A one stop install that just supported everything on these devices from the start.
I've been thinking we could eliminate a lot of niche specialized distros by replacing them with system configs for Guix System or NixOS. Maybe if you got Ansible involved it could work for Debian and Arch also. Set your default packages, custom kernel, whatever else in there. Everything needing a big brand, name, logo, website, and so on seems a bit excessive at times.
Bazzite is sortof in that category, though. Fedora atomic is a podman container image, and Bazzite is using that as FROM in their Containerfile. It's niche and specialized only to the extent that they're providing gaming specific setup (like Nvidia drivers). It's mostly a Fedora system.
Now it’s your responsibility to explain what any of these words mean to an average user who just wants to play their Steam games. Like it or not, brands have power. It’s been hard enough to convince people already willing to try Linux gaming to use one of the dedicated gaming distros, instead of waiting for when SteamOS is going to support their hardware.
Some time ago I actually downloaded bazzite to run in a VM in order to play some indie games from itch.io and to not worry about them doing some shady things on my computer. I installed the OS and everything was fine, but to my surprise..... wine was not installed by default (I'm not familiar with wine environment, i just got that impression because the terminal didn't recognize the wine command when i typed it manually).
I get that the distribution is geared towards steam+proton usage, but I was disoriented to see that one creates "an operating system for gamers", which will most certainly run a lot of windows executables, and then won't include wine in it. There is lutris preinstalled and the documentation also hints towards installing winezgui from their appstore (which is what I did), but I wonder why wasn't that obvious for the developers of bazzite that after installing the system, user would just want to download a game, double click the executable and play.
On the other hand, wine tends to be quite heavy package (503MB installed size according to arch repo), perhaps that's the reason for not including it.
Glad I decided not to stick with Bazzite. I gave it a try a few months ago and had issues with Bazaar crashing (not at all low end hardware btw). If the primary method to install software was that broken on a fresh install, there was no way I was going to trust the OS at all, no matter how many people on YouTube and HN talked about how amazing it is.
I went with CachyOS. It's based off of Arch and compiles packages with flags for more modern CPUs. They also build extra packages that aren't normally provided by Arch (always nice to rely a little less on the AUR). And their default scheduler is supposed to provide a smoother gaming experience, though they have a selection of schedulers if you don't like that one.
Bazzite made it so easy to switch from windows. I first tried cachyos but bazzite’s gamemode worked perfectly from the start, hdr and vrr included, on nvidia. Turned an expensive PC into an expensive console and made me so happy. Just the fact I can sleep the system mid-game and resume is magic!
Guess I gotta go back to cachy and try again. Bummer
Well, yes, but that’s an over simplification. My main concern is the instability. I don’t want to deal with a project that’s in turmoil and Cachy feels like a more stable project, even before reading any of this. It’s a larger user base and therefore more likely to stick around (or so I tell myself).
i'd be surprised if there are more users of cachy than bazzite.
what gets missed is that bazzite is, to borrow video game parlance, a mod of fedora's atomic desktops. every piece created to build and maintain the system is on github. it's not rocket science, it's a collection of dockerfiles, rpm specs, config files and github actions workflows. and fedora is not going away any time soon.
It's silly to reduce all issues like this to just pointless drama between people. It affects the product, especially if key people are pushed out. From the sounds of it, the person left running the show has already made a bunch of bad decisions (as I already commented on I ran into one of the issues caused by those bad decisions).
If we take the post as truth (it's not clear to me whether we can), then Bazzite will get iffy kernel updates that will particularly break handhelds. But desktop will be more stable and you could even turn off automatic updates for 6months and see how things look after.
I think Bazzite has a very smooth experience for Windows gaming and even if you decide that you don't like it or that the distro really is falling apart, you'll have gotten the best Linux-gaming experience and can evaluate other distros more clearly.
Just install another distribution—Bazzite has some conveniences in setup, but doesn’t fundamentally provide anything that you can’t get elsewhere, and a lot of those customizations you probably won’t need.
I decided to try Fedora Kinoite for my gaming machine (to have something with less “maybe not maintained one day stuff” out of the box and a long term community of maintenance), and have been happy.
I've had issues with Wayland, even in 2025, but never with X11. X11 may be old, but it's stable. Mint is for normal people, not us. I do have it on my travel laptop though, because well, it never has any issues.
I tried Linux desktop for the first time in like a decade. Didn't know Xorg was deprecated for real, as in most distros moved to Wayland. Was surprised that the one hold out was Mint. And learned the hard way that Mint didn't work on my fairly normal PC, due to an Xorg issue.
This is the thing so many people recommend?! No wonder Linux is unpopular.
Also there like 20 competing ways to install packages now. Used to just be apt.
Flatpak and Snap are new to me, and that's the annoyance. Like I get if there's some technical advantage to a snap, but apt can install snaps too. Also idk what .appimage is.
rpm was a thing that existed but wasn't a Mint way of installing. Tar, yes. I can see why you'd consider a tar a package, but I was thinking of things actually designed for packages, and tar isn't really an extra thing to learn and deal with. Port tree, idk never heard of that.
> Flatpak and Snap are new to me and that's the annoyance.
These were designed to solve different problems.
PS - Just avoid snap. Fuck snap. All my homies hate snap.
Flatpak otoh is software basically delivered in a container with some security restrictions. It works great, but you may want a GUI problem called "flatseal" to enable access to certain parts of the host filesystem, device access, etc depending on specifics of what the particular application is supposed to do. That's a bit of a security boundary (good).
Flatpak does solve several big issues with the minor and only occasional need to use flatseal to enable access to say something in /proc /dev etc
MacPorts vs Homebrew is actually my biggest gripe with Mac dev, but at least it doesn't get in the way of installing basic software. Regular stuff is always intuitive and ends up with a .app. Even lots of dev stuff is just a .pkg you download, macports/homebrew is for niches.
You said it yourself, "fuck snap." But Snap is the default for a bunch of things. There's probably someone else saying "fuck flatpak." The user doesn't win this way, it's not a feature.
If you want to base it on popularity then you should use Debian. Debian and its child distros (of which Ubuntu is one) make up the majority of Linux distros and the child distros are still 99% Debian.
Professionally I've only ran into a handful of Ubuntu installs.
Dozens of SUSE
Hundreds of thousands of RHEL.
So if I wanted to help someone new, I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu because it would be somewhat of a dead end.
Fedora gives you familiarity with the largest deployed commercial Linux, while still getting the newest packages out there through either fedora yum or flatpak. Best of both worlds.
Look I have no love for snap in particular, but it exists as a default in serious places. If you can bury it then great, the less confusion the better. I'm not going to install some alt distro just to avoid it though.
Send Xorg to a nice farm too. Or Wayland. Whichever the bad one is. Competing window servers is a way bigger problem.
(Even if they're all true) Do any of those things matter to a user? If the goal is to ditch Windows and have something else that can run Steam and a web browser and maybe some other applications, being "ancient" sounds just as likely to mean "stable and actually works"
One immediately noticeable thing is the lack of gestures on X11. Touchpad and touchscreen gestures just work in Wayland, most DEs implement them OOTB, even Hyprland has them.
Imagine going from a modern OS to one that doesn't have touchpad gestures in 2026. Yeah there's workarounds but having to config that isn't a good user experience.
Mint won't even boot for me because it doesn't support my year old GPU (9070 XT). That's a huge miss when someone is looking at an OS primarily for gaming.
AFAIK, removing Antheas from Bazzite opened the door to discussions for forming the OGC. Prior to that, Antheas had created such difficult situations that many of the member groups in the OGC did not collaborate with Bazzite because of his presence. Whether or not the OGC actually works (ex: getting patches upstreamed faster), only time will tell.
This is a shame, I’ve been running Bazzite on my gaming PC since Christmas and have been pretty happy with it. To the honest I don’t really care who is at fault, I don’t want the maintainers of my OS to be a drama show, so I’ll probably switch to Cachy. Building my own image would be cool but it’s not high on my list of priorities.
As a happy Bazzite user, I had no idea things were so bumpy. At least the migration to other os-tree distros is trivial (Fedora Kinoite -> Bazzite was one or two shell commands). My main reason for using the distro was the built-in nvidia drivers for my old graphics card.
what exactly happened to bazzite? I've seen so much hype around the distro and buzz among normal people, that it almost became THE normal gamer distro, so much so it completely overshadowed nobara and whatever other gamer gimmick distros are out there
You like me for my (always right) conspiratorial takes
I got another one:
Look, follow the money, Microsoft knows Windows 11 on handhelds is a dumpster fire right now, and they are not ready to drop their own "Xbox Portable" yet
So how do they keep the market from moving to the alternative SteamOS/Valve?
They trojan horse the "alternative"
Think about it: Bazzite pops up, gains massive community "trust", every traditionally pro-MSFT media talk about it, and then coincidentally becomes the loudest voice trashing GPD's HW support, why would they do that?
It's a classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish play
FUD: Use Bazzite as an "undercover" $MSFT project to make GPD look like a risky, unoptimized mess
Damage: GPD takes the hit because they are actually trying to innovate, while the "community" devs (who are definitely on a $MSFT gang) tell everyone to just buy an Rog Ally ($MSFT Partner) or wait for the next Microsoft Xbox handheld
Pivot: Once GPD is sidelined as a "niche hobbyist risk", Microsoft drops a polished Handheld UX for Windows, Bazzite magically "loses funding" or support, and everyone gets funneled back into the Game Pass ecosystem on "approved" hardware
Bazzite isn't a "community project", it's a trojan hose
GPD bet on the wrong horse thinking that community was neutral
I don't care enough about the drama to deep-dive, but as far as I can tell both parties are at fault. At least Bazzite did not make a "post mortem" blog post on a project that is still active. Bit petty if you ask me
I understand there's been drama, and someone walked away or was pushed out. I don't quite care enough to understand it all or point at guilty parties.
However, my current understanding is that the project remains active, so titling this article "Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over. It's certainly what I immediately assumed made it newsworthy.
>"Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over.
is it? outside of autopsies, i think i have only ever seen it used as a synonym for "incident report". i dont think ive ever associated the term specifically with the end of a project.
e.g. cloudflare uses the tag for all of their incident reports (https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/post-mortem/), not as a signal that they are closing shop
In the incident case, it's a post-mortem on the incident. The incident itself is (hopefully) resolved and can now be dissected to learn about what went wrong and how things can improve in the future.
That's what a post-mortem implies to me in the tech industry. A thing happened, it's over now, here are the lessons we learned to take into the future.
Yes, but Bazzite is not over.
Gamasutra has a famous line of articles where game developers provide retrospectives on how the development of their titles went, maybe I'm influenced by that.
I'm aware about the use in incident reports of course, but then you still don't call it "<project name> Post-Mortem" but use a more specific namespace.
> ... as a synonym for "incident report"
People should stop using it as a synonym, then. The Latin effectively means "after death", meaning its a poor synonym for "what happened wrong recently".
>The Latin effectively means "after death"
language evolves over time
post mortem is even in dictionaries (meriam, oxford, american heritage) as "an analysis or review of a finished event"
"Finished" being an important word. Seems like this Bazzite project is not finished and so post mortem is in fact a poor choice of words.
We are splitting hairs here probably. After reading the article it looks like the author wrote it as a look back on their relationship with bazzite. A more descriptive one could be “bazzite and me - a post mortem” or something. It doesn’t come across as a bad faith title, at least to me
Antheas was the #1 most active developer, and responsible for almost all low level integrations.
Just based on this blog post it seems like he wanted the project to be more “professional” in some way that the rest of the developer group didn’t. I wonder if that difference in vision, combined with a (probably justified based on your comment) feeling that he was doing a disproportionate amount of the work lead to an unsustainable situation.
Calling it a post-mortem while others are continuing the project still seems kind of petty, though.
Looking at the contributor analytics: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/graphs/contributors
Doesn't look like he was, but then looking at the actual commit list: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/commits/main/?before=e49... He definitely had more than the 14 commits listed. They might've lost their email due to the conflicts & lost ownership over the commits?
Software history is rife with projects that outlive a person like that leaving, though. Ulrich Drepper comes to mind immediately. They don't own the project.
Nope, he was not, and his software will be replaced.
https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/commits/main/?after=e49f...
"someone" is the main developer behind Bazzite. That's some context your post is missing.
As a bazzite user who had no idea anything was up until this headline, yes that was very concerning at first glance
[dead]
Been on Bazzite for a while now and had very few issues, though to backup the sentiments of Antheas here, they have managed to upset the maintainer of the Go-XLR Linux Utility with their fast and loose HW changes: https://github.com/GoXLR-on-Linux/goxlr-utility/issues/239
Looking around a couple of adjacent communities, it seems the Bazzite maintainers might have acted in the best community interest on this one, so I'm optimistic things will continue in a positive way. Still, might make me a little less full-throated about recommending Bazzite, knowing there's such drama under the surface.
Welcome to the comment section Kyle! https://github.com/GoXLR-on-Linux/goxlr-utility/issues/239#i...
It’s worth pointing out that the official Bazzite position is that Antheas was removed from the project for breaching Code of Conduct and harassing people in their official Discord server
or depending on your point of view (I don't know which one is the correct one), it's very easy to find some rule that was infringed for a quick power grab, right at the time when Bazzite is becoming popular.
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It didn’t impact me as a user, and I let the maintainers deal with their drama.
it was clearly bad enough for everyone else to decide that they didn't want to put up with him anymore. which is what happens in the real world.
online, everyone considers themselves a public figure. and because we can't seem to get shot of public figures, whether they be rapists, homophobes, or just arseholes, alleged or proven, they believe, logically, you shouldn't be able to be rid of them.
offline, if you have someone who makes your life a misery, you tell them to fuck off.
was publicly being rude to the point of making other contributors leave (even after being asked to stop) and at least one case of using a slur
they said it themselves in this post
> Yes, I know I am hard to work with. Yes, I know that I pushed certain OSS contributors away.
generally the kind of person that gives open source a bad reputation, you can be critical or anti-social without being an asshole
what about linus torvalds
You can be Dr. House MD only when you have the rep and skills of Dr. House MD. I think Linus definitely cleared that threshold.
Linus got counseling to get better at communication. Even he recognized that was bad. Don't use him as an example to accept bad people.
Boy i wish that principle held up in real medicine and other parts of life; "rep and skills" may in some ways equal power, but that false equivalency is how problematic behavior is excused in unfit individuals.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...
he's the guy that created the linux kernel
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Pretty much. He said some mean words. The cult of personality around the other maintainer has spun it into something way worse that he someone made other people quit OSS or something. It's hog wash and not backed up by anything.
>He said some mean words.
I guarantee you I can say some mean words that would upset you at some point. If you have to repeatedly deal with it, you'd likely leave the space we share or ask someone to make me leave. Words have power, we shouldn't pretend otherwise.
1. Being called an idiot or told my idea is dumb is not going to upset me. I guess I just have more emotional maturity than some OSS devs.
2. Why would I leave when I can just block you if you are harassing me?
3. Why are you inventing this hypothetical instead of just showing where that occurred?
4. No-one has said words don't have power. But being on the internet you should be able to recognize that you won't be friends with everyone. So you have to develop some basic emotional regulation for silly insults.
> 1. Being called an idiot or told my idea is dumb is not going to upset me. I guess I just have more emotional maturity than some OSS devs.
Alternatively, other people just have more respect for themselves (and others) than to stand to repeatedly be called an idiot.
Why? What's the point of getting upset over any minor slight? Seems more disrespectful to yourself to waste time thinking about it. Why not laugh at the silly insults from people who don't know you and move on?
> Why would I leave when I can just block you if you are harassing me?
If you were involved with bazzite that was not necessarily an option. Hence why some people just elected to leave the project entirely, which is unfortunate to see because I’m sure some talented, contributing people are no longer making the project better.
Honestly I’m surprised that I need to explain the need for people to treat each other with basic decency and respect. Have you really never faced harassment that you couldn’t get away from without either leaving, their leaving, or external intervention?
Would you have the same laissez-faire attitude if I was harassing your partner or children? Would you simply tell them to not care about “mean words”? Should a coworker just be allowed to endlessly call you slurs at work?
Back to your questions: What hypothetical did I make up? Confused by that question and your first one. Those weren’t my examples (I gave none).
It’s one thing to deal with rude people online. It’s another when it’s when you’re at work, doing a hobby, or contributing your time and energy to an open source project. People shouldn’t be abused in general, however. Yes it is good to have thick skin but it doesn’t change the fact that if somebody behaves like that, they are ultimately in the wrong. I don’t know if he behaved as poorly as the bazzite team is claiming, but I’m not really here to litigate that. I just don’t love the idea of saying “just ignore mean words.” it’s flippant, unproductive, and downplays the power of words.
Getting into one fight and just leaving over it is pretty foolish.
What are you talking about? Of course you should treat everybody well. But that doesn't mean everyone will treat you well. Of course I've been harassed before. But that's not related to this at all. We're talking about Bazzite where someone got called an idiot once.
You're really reaching now. If you were harassing my partner or children this would be an entirely different conversation. Again, that's not relevant at all. You're just reaching for anything to make this emotional plea. Also slurs? Come on now. We're literally talking about someone getting called an "idiot". Not a slur. Stop stretching the truth.
Your hypothetical was "If you have to repeatedly deal with it, you'd likely leave the space we share or ask someone to make me leave".
Nobody was abused here. Good lord. So THAT'S what set you off. So "just ignore mean words" does mean "let everyone call you slurs all day". It's means what it literally says. Mean words. Mean words are "idiot", "stupid", etc. They are silly and childish insults. They are not harmful words. They are not slurs. They are not harassment. Do you understand what I said now? Because I think your invention of scenarios that didn't happen here is extremely unproductive and is derailing the conversation. Instead of using slogans and extremes, ask questions next time. Can really save you and others some effort.
> Getting into one fight and just leaving over it is pretty foolish.
> But that doesn't mean everyone will treat you well.
I never said either of those statements and I agree they are not worth flipping the table over for.
> Your hypothetical was "If you have to repeatedly deal with it, you'd likely leave the space we share or ask someone to make me leave".
It’s not hypothetical. It’s what people are claiming he was doing and you were saying people need to just shrug it off. My questions to you were an attempt to establish that there is a line at which someone can say “it’s not just mean words anymore.” More specifically, where you draw the line.
You keep trying to describe the situation as one very small slight that happened one time, which does not appear to be accurate. The accusation is a pattern of behavior. If you don’t believe the accusation that is an entirely different story, but if most or all of what is being claimed is true, then he was needlessly hostile and caused problems for multiple people for an extended period of time. He didn’t simply “call someone an idiot once.”
I would be very interested to see this repeated and consistent behavior then. Because all the evidence that keeps getting passed around is someone getting an idiot once. Which seems to clearly vindicate Antheas's claim that the other devs developed a sycophantic group inside the project around them. Groups like that pull this "he was harassing everyone and making everyone quit" story seems to have zero evidence to back it up.
Obviously if he was harassing people and forcing them to quit that's a different story, but that does not seem to be the case here unless you take the remaining Bazzite project leaders word for it. This seems more like a case of power hungry project leadership wanting to have an echo chamber in the project. Which is not an uncommon occurrence sadly.
Go to the discord server and search “antheas.” Even with its terrible search you’ll find the discussions (and his comments) illuminating. No need to take my word for it. You’ll see complaint after complaint from members of the community.
Sometimes I feel like Discord as been nothing but a bane on OSS. A chat is inherently less searchable than a wiki/forum/documentation, and those sources are often readable without needing to authenticate, which meant that you could find an answer through Google and such. Most project now don't bother with publicly readable and archivable (and so offline viewable) information sources and just rely on Discord. This lead to the same newbie question being answered over and over again, and is a clear degradation of the UX. But on top of that, most people see Discord as a hangout. Almost all Discord server I know have an "offtopic"/"random"/"meme"/etc channel, if not several. This almost inevitably lead to drama on a scale that newsgroups and IRC fellows could have only dreamed off. And considering that a lot of devs are able to create drama over even a mailing list, Discord is turbocharging the ability for nuisance.
Maybe it's my "Am I out of touch ? No it's the children who are wrong" moment, but I really think OSS projects would benefit from ditching discord.
You are not out of touch, I rember in the 90s when people recommended using IRC for Linux questions and I hated it.
I didn't want to ask something and interacting in pseudo-realtime with another human being (that could potentionally laugh at me for asking a n00b question).
News groups were a little better for this, but the real progress was when you could search them or later read the answer in Stack Overflow. And the final step here is a LLM agent that has a web/doc search tool and can answer more difficult questions.
Strongly agreed. I'd like to see users pushing more for this. Return to IRC, try XMPP or Matrix, put up a forum. Lots of options exist that would be more freedom-respecting, stable, and publicly searchable.
It is. I'm not a fan of Drew Devault, but I can agree with this article of his:
https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS...
The most salient part:
> Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Wouldn't any platform have the same problem though? A forum would partition the community between those willing to make an account and submit private information and those who aren't. It seems like no matter what platform you choose there will always be those who are willing to participate and those who are not.
Not quite. Discord is a lot more invasive with their info collection than, let's say Github or Matrix servers. Second, the info posted to Github is accessible without account, which is not true of Discord.
It turns out that before Discord, we had project IRC channels, and they would splinter along various prosocial or antisocial lines over time. It was essentially guaranteed when the channel exceeded 150 regulars, but there were criticality points around 5-10 and ~50 as well. None of this excuses anyone from behaving badly, but certainly Discord is not the cause of communication breakdown and group shattering events — it’s just a chat server, same as all the ones before it. And as with all prior chat servers, they make horrendous technical LB replacements — but are a brilliant way to provide mentorship to (slash and infect enthusiasm upon) others, which is why they persist so strongly in the face of all of the problems these real-time group chain letters highlight in human behaviors: Hobbyists desire to socialize with other hobbyists.
I've been testing Bazzite and noticed a couple of things that raised an eyebrow for me. Sexual preferences in Bazaar options tool to update flatpaks seems out of place and even if not the limited subset of flags is odd. To me personally that is risking potential drama in the OS/apps.
There is also a suspiciously long delay in closing the shell terminal which feels like it is storing or sending something but I have yet to debug it. This does not occur on any other of the many Linux distributions I have tested.
It is a snappy and decent distro otherwise. Good thing they are removing drama, something that almost nuked Mint not long after its inception.
> Sexual preferences in Bazaar options tool to update flatpaks seems out of place and even if not the limited subset of flags is odd.
I've been using Bazzite for almost a year and I have no idea what this is referring to
Click Bazaar in menu bar -> Click hamburger button -> Scroll Down
Still don't see what you're talking about
When is the last time you ran
or at least and then rebooted? I am on Bazzite 43, default desktop installation. If we are not seeing the same thing that is almost as concerning as the terminal shell exit delay.Can you provide a screenshot or explain what it is for those of us who don't have a Bazzite install to check with?
Maybe some day I will make a video. A video would be required to get all the sexual preferences via mouse-over.
At this point it sounds like you're being intentionally vague. Why not just describe what you're talking about
I can't replicate whatever they're talking about, and they also won't describe it in any further detail, so I think it's safe to assume it's nonsense.
I thought I provided detailed steps. Either way my solution was to whack that machine and install CachyOS since I am very comfortable with Arch. Bazzite can be someone elses problem if they care enough. The odd delay on terminal exit and random boot up and shut down times are the only real potential problems whereas the sexual preference is just a red flag to me personally as it suggests there will be other surprises or potential shenanigans in the OS pushing some agenda which as far as I am concerned my tools do not need these things. Some people may love it.
This is pure dramaposting- "post-mortem" is so misleading and mischaracterizes the situation. I don't use bazzite, I don't know Kyle or anybody here, but I am tired of the drama.
All of the things listed in the blog are personal and technical disagreements, nothing morally reprehensible, no disrespect, nothing that would make anyone want to burn bridges like this.
It's fine to leave a project and to publicize disagreements but this comes across as spiteful.
Very nice of Bazzite to adopt Drama Tuesday. They are true gamers.
It's as if everything gaming related attracts immature types. YouTube comment sections, forums, software projects...
Kids and people who identify as such are overrepresented among gamers. Can't really blame the teens for immaturity.
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For everyone who thinks this is the death of Bazzite or whatever, keep in mind Bazzite, all the UBlue projects, are all based on Fedora Atomic which makes it super easy to make an immutable spin.
There's also Silverblue which is ready to go out of the box (unless you have Nvidia), Nobara which adds some gaming things. And on a different vein CachyOS is making waves with some gamers (but it's Arch based instead of Fedora and not atomic/immutable).
Also Jovian Nix, which is great if someone is already invested in that ecosystem.
I guess the good thing about Bazzite, CachyOS, Omarchy and what have you, is that it brings new users to Linux.
I would still like to see most users pick established distros, as contributions there have a higher impact on the ecosystem. But self-named gamers are probably harder to reason with.
I've been using desktop Linux for 20 years in various capacities. I most recently picked Bazzite for my gaming/desktop VM because it's simple to set up and works better than other distros I've tried to game on in the recent past. It's that simple.
Been running cachyos for months, drama-free
The good part of Bazzite is I can just rebase to fedora kinoite and continue to be happy.
Relevant comment from some months ago [1].
Personally I find that sticking to distros backed by companies or very large communities is just easier in the long term (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46092225
Using Fedora Kinoite/Silverblue is not really an option if you are using an Nvidia GPU. With Bazzite, the driver is pre-installed and also signed directly with a Secure Boot Key that you can import when installing Bazzite. With normal Fedora Atomic, you have to install and sign the driver manually, and with some updates, the whole thing breaks again, so you have to fiddle around with it. In addition, Fedora Flatpak Remote has been removed, which is a “noobtrap” in normal Fedora Atomic. This allows you to install broken versions of browsers where the codecs are missing and videos don't work. In addition, Distrobox functions better than Toolbox, and in general, Bazzite's defaults are much more geared towards an immutable system. Silberblue/Kinoite's defaults are just like normal Fedora, and you have to layer dozens of things to achieve the same thing, whereas Bazzite is completely designed for a container workflow.
Even if you ignore any gaming optimizations, etc., this alone makes it a significantly better option than the official Fedora Atomic images.
On desktops and servers yeah. Bazzite was a bit of a special case as it was catered to handheld devices. So it did have that going for it. A one stop install that just supported everything on these devices from the start.
I've been thinking we could eliminate a lot of niche specialized distros by replacing them with system configs for Guix System or NixOS. Maybe if you got Ansible involved it could work for Debian and Arch also. Set your default packages, custom kernel, whatever else in there. Everything needing a big brand, name, logo, website, and so on seems a bit excessive at times.
Bazzite is sortof in that category, though. Fedora atomic is a podman container image, and Bazzite is using that as FROM in their Containerfile. It's niche and specialized only to the extent that they're providing gaming specific setup (like Nvidia drivers). It's mostly a Fedora system.
https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile
Now it’s your responsibility to explain what any of these words mean to an average user who just wants to play their Steam games. Like it or not, brands have power. It’s been hard enough to convince people already willing to try Linux gaming to use one of the dedicated gaming distros, instead of waiting for when SteamOS is going to support their hardware.
Maybe SteamOS will help with this!
What do you mean? SteamOS is backed by a large company.
As it slowly starts working on another platforms, it can fill in Bazzite's role (a bit ironic I guess, given Bazzite is inspired on SteamOS)
The fix for being held captive by a large company is not to hand yourself over to a different large company.
Some time ago I actually downloaded bazzite to run in a VM in order to play some indie games from itch.io and to not worry about them doing some shady things on my computer. I installed the OS and everything was fine, but to my surprise..... wine was not installed by default (I'm not familiar with wine environment, i just got that impression because the terminal didn't recognize the wine command when i typed it manually).
I get that the distribution is geared towards steam+proton usage, but I was disoriented to see that one creates "an operating system for gamers", which will most certainly run a lot of windows executables, and then won't include wine in it. There is lutris preinstalled and the documentation also hints towards installing winezgui from their appstore (which is what I did), but I wonder why wasn't that obvious for the developers of bazzite that after installing the system, user would just want to download a game, double click the executable and play.
On the other hand, wine tends to be quite heavy package (503MB installed size according to arch repo), perhaps that's the reason for not including it.
Glad I decided not to stick with Bazzite. I gave it a try a few months ago and had issues with Bazaar crashing (not at all low end hardware btw). If the primary method to install software was that broken on a fresh install, there was no way I was going to trust the OS at all, no matter how many people on YouTube and HN talked about how amazing it is.
What alternative did you switch to?
I went with CachyOS. It's based off of Arch and compiles packages with flags for more modern CPUs. They also build extra packages that aren't normally provided by Arch (always nice to rely a little less on the AUR). And their default scheduler is supposed to provide a smoother gaming experience, though they have a selection of schedulers if you don't like that one.
I tried it but couldn't get it stable on my system. Ended up with EndeavorOS which is arch-based with a much better-install process.
I never tried Bazzite, but have been using Jovian, which is a NixOS-based gaming setup.
I have heard that CachyOS (Arch) and Nobara (Fedora) are two other decent options.
Bazzite made it so easy to switch from windows. I first tried cachyos but bazzite’s gamemode worked perfectly from the start, hdr and vrr included, on nvidia. Turned an expensive PC into an expensive console and made me so happy. Just the fact I can sleep the system mid-game and resume is magic!
Guess I gotta go back to cachy and try again. Bummer
Why? Because some guy was pushed out of the friend group?
Well, yes, but that’s an over simplification. My main concern is the instability. I don’t want to deal with a project that’s in turmoil and Cachy feels like a more stable project, even before reading any of this. It’s a larger user base and therefore more likely to stick around (or so I tell myself).
i'd be surprised if there are more users of cachy than bazzite.
what gets missed is that bazzite is, to borrow video game parlance, a mod of fedora's atomic desktops. every piece created to build and maintain the system is on github. it's not rocket science, it's a collection of dockerfiles, rpm specs, config files and github actions workflows. and fedora is not going away any time soon.
It's silly to reduce all issues like this to just pointless drama between people. It affects the product, especially if key people are pushed out. From the sounds of it, the person left running the show has already made a bunch of bad decisions (as I already commented on I ran into one of the issues caused by those bad decisions).
The guy that did the bulk of the hardware integration work...
man, i was JUST thinking about switching out windows for bazzite, because the only thing i use my windows machine for is video games...
might need to hold off on that, as much as it pains me, with all the weird & sloppy updates windows is pushing out.
I would still recommend trying Bazzite today.
If we take the post as truth (it's not clear to me whether we can), then Bazzite will get iffy kernel updates that will particularly break handhelds. But desktop will be more stable and you could even turn off automatic updates for 6months and see how things look after.
I think Bazzite has a very smooth experience for Windows gaming and even if you decide that you don't like it or that the distro really is falling apart, you'll have gotten the best Linux-gaming experience and can evaluate other distros more clearly.
Just install another distribution—Bazzite has some conveniences in setup, but doesn’t fundamentally provide anything that you can’t get elsewhere, and a lot of those customizations you probably won’t need.
I decided to try Fedora Kinoite for my gaming machine (to have something with less “maybe not maintained one day stuff” out of the box and a long term community of maintenance), and have been happy.
As I understand it, the primary advantage of Bazzite is that it handles "odd" (read: "nVidia" or handheld) hardware out of the box properly.
If you have normal hardware, something like like Fedora Kinoite should be mostly equivalent.
I’d recommend trying Linux Mint with Steam.
Mint needs to die. It's the most ancient, archaic distro ever.
Replacing something that's SOTA with something that still uses X11 and years old software isn't it (it makes Debian Stable look modern).
I've had issues with Wayland, even in 2025, but never with X11. X11 may be old, but it's stable. Mint is for normal people, not us. I do have it on my travel laptop though, because well, it never has any issues.
Yeah, sorry, I’m a normal person I guess.
I tried Linux desktop for the first time in like a decade. Didn't know Xorg was deprecated for real, as in most distros moved to Wayland. Was surprised that the one hold out was Mint. And learned the hard way that Mint didn't work on my fairly normal PC, due to an Xorg issue.
This is the thing so many people recommend?! No wonder Linux is unpopular.
Also there like 20 competing ways to install packages now. Used to just be apt.
> Also there like 20 competing ways to install packages now. Used to just be apt
This is very incorrect. There's been far more for 35+ years
* apt/.deb
* yum(dnf)/.rpm
* Tarballs
* Ports trees
* Flatpak
* Snap
* Etc, etc, etc
Flatpak and Snap are new to me, and that's the annoyance. Like I get if there's some technical advantage to a snap, but apt can install snaps too. Also idk what .appimage is.
rpm was a thing that existed but wasn't a Mint way of installing. Tar, yes. I can see why you'd consider a tar a package, but I was thinking of things actually designed for packages, and tar isn't really an extra thing to learn and deal with. Port tree, idk never heard of that.
> Flatpak and Snap are new to me and that's the annoyance.
These were designed to solve different problems.
PS - Just avoid snap. Fuck snap. All my homies hate snap.
Flatpak otoh is software basically delivered in a container with some security restrictions. It works great, but you may want a GUI problem called "flatseal" to enable access to certain parts of the host filesystem, device access, etc depending on specifics of what the particular application is supposed to do. That's a bit of a security boundary (good).
Flatpak does solve several big issues with the minor and only occasional need to use flatseal to enable access to say something in /proc /dev etc
Snap happened in 2014
Flatpak in 2015
So you've got about 10 years of catch-up ;)
I'm not really obligated to catch up on that. I'll try Linux again if they ever sort these things out, until then Mac is a fine dev/personal machine.
Are you sure that's okay? It has App Store, .pkg, drag-to-install, homebrew, MacPorts, and who knows what else!
MacPorts vs Homebrew is actually my biggest gripe with Mac dev, but at least it doesn't get in the way of installing basic software. Regular stuff is always intuitive and ends up with a .app. Even lots of dev stuff is just a .pkg you download, macports/homebrew is for niches.
> I'll try Linux again if they ever sort these things out
You don't understand. This won't be "sorted out", this is a feature.
Maybe it's just not for you, and that's ok.
You said it yourself, "fuck snap." But Snap is the default for a bunch of things. There's probably someone else saying "fuck flatpak." The user doesn't win this way, it's not a feature.
Snaps are a Canonical thing and is only used by default on Ubuntu and distro's based on Ubuntu. No other distro uses or recommends them.
Those are the popular distros though. Switch to something else and you trade 1 problem for 10.
If you want to base it on popularity then you should use Debian. Debian and its child distros (of which Ubuntu is one) make up the majority of Linux distros and the child distros are still 99% Debian.
Flatpak is available on every distro.
Ehhhh
Professionally I've only ran into a handful of Ubuntu installs.
Dozens of SUSE
Hundreds of thousands of RHEL.
So if I wanted to help someone new, I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu because it would be somewhat of a dead end.
Fedora gives you familiarity with the largest deployed commercial Linux, while still getting the newest packages out there through either fedora yum or flatpak. Best of both worlds.
Snap is Ubuntu and derivatives only which is a respectable but smaller segment of the options.
It's also a fucking system daemon that runs in the background. Avoid.
Flatpak is available on every distro.
Look I have no love for snap in particular, but it exists as a default in serious places. If you can bury it then great, the less confusion the better. I'm not going to install some alt distro just to avoid it though.
Send Xorg to a nice farm too. Or Wayland. Whichever the bad one is. Competing window servers is a way bigger problem.
(Even if they're all true) Do any of those things matter to a user? If the goal is to ditch Windows and have something else that can run Steam and a web browser and maybe some other applications, being "ancient" sounds just as likely to mean "stable and actually works"
The stability is why I prefer Linux Mint for gaming. Everything just works, even on my modern hardware.
dismalaf: I definitely don’t care about gestures on my desktop computer.
One immediately noticeable thing is the lack of gestures on X11. Touchpad and touchscreen gestures just work in Wayland, most DEs implement them OOTB, even Hyprland has them.
Imagine going from a modern OS to one that doesn't have touchpad gestures in 2026. Yeah there's workarounds but having to config that isn't a good user experience.
The latest version (with support through 2029) was released last month. It installed and runs flawlessly.
https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_zena_whatsnew.php
It's literally based on a 2 year old Ubuntu LTS... This is what I mean. It's very outdated.
So what’s your alternative?
Bazzite or Cachy
Mint won't even boot for me because it doesn't support my year old GPU (9070 XT). That's a huge miss when someone is looking at an OS primarily for gaming.
I’ll look into Cachy. Bazzite I’m not going to touch because it seems politically toxic.
Fedora Workstation, Fedora Silverblue, regular (non-LTS) Ubuntu are in my experience best for newbs. After that Debian. After that Arch.
For gaming specifically, I've heard good things about Nobara (dev is a RedHatter, though it's his personal project) and CachyOS.
Linking related post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46818467
AFAIK, removing Antheas from Bazzite opened the door to discussions for forming the OGC. Prior to that, Antheas had created such difficult situations that many of the member groups in the OGC did not collaborate with Bazzite because of his presence. Whether or not the OGC actually works (ex: getting patches upstreamed faster), only time will tell.
This is a shame, I’ve been running Bazzite on my gaming PC since Christmas and have been pretty happy with it. To the honest I don’t really care who is at fault, I don’t want the maintainers of my OS to be a drama show, so I’ll probably switch to Cachy. Building my own image would be cool but it’s not high on my list of priorities.
As a happy Bazzite user, I had no idea things were so bumpy. At least the migration to other os-tree distros is trivial (Fedora Kinoite -> Bazzite was one or two shell commands). My main reason for using the distro was the built-in nvidia drivers for my old graphics card.
what exactly happened to bazzite? I've seen so much hype around the distro and buzz among normal people, that it almost became THE normal gamer distro, so much so it completely overshadowed nobara and whatever other gamer gimmick distros are out there
Its fine and did not die. In fact its growing as always, even with "drama". https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_bazzite...
This blog post is the only exposure I have to this whole thing, and from it, all I can say for sure is that this post is incredibly immature.
>Bazzite's fate is sealed as a non-commercial hobbyist-like OS.
Sounds like good news to me.
You like me for my (always right) conspiratorial takes
I got another one:
Look, follow the money, Microsoft knows Windows 11 on handhelds is a dumpster fire right now, and they are not ready to drop their own "Xbox Portable" yet
So how do they keep the market from moving to the alternative SteamOS/Valve?
They trojan horse the "alternative"
Think about it: Bazzite pops up, gains massive community "trust", every traditionally pro-MSFT media talk about it, and then coincidentally becomes the loudest voice trashing GPD's HW support, why would they do that?
It's a classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish play
FUD: Use Bazzite as an "undercover" $MSFT project to make GPD look like a risky, unoptimized mess
Damage: GPD takes the hit because they are actually trying to innovate, while the "community" devs (who are definitely on a $MSFT gang) tell everyone to just buy an Rog Ally ($MSFT Partner) or wait for the next Microsoft Xbox handheld
Pivot: Once GPD is sidelined as a "niche hobbyist risk", Microsoft drops a polished Handheld UX for Windows, Bazzite magically "loses funding" or support, and everyone gets funneled back into the Game Pass ecosystem on "approved" hardware
Bazzite isn't a "community project", it's a trojan hose
GPD bet on the wrong horse thinking that community was neutral
Convoluted, but hypothetically possible. We have no reason to think that right now, though…
not undercover, kyle is microsoft employee based on his github bio.
also if you wanna support linux on gaming, just buy hardware that support steamos like steamdeck, steam machine, steam frame, legion go s, rog ally.
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this is why I don’t pay attention to most Linux distros except debian and fedora
Community member is problematic, makes themselves the victim
God damn it Kyle.
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I don't care enough about the drama to deep-dive, but as far as I can tell both parties are at fault. At least Bazzite did not make a "post mortem" blog post on a project that is still active. Bit petty if you ask me
Leftism and OSS share a similar problem, being that good ideas, intentions, and works are squandered by petty drama and insecure egos.
Right-ism is the same, without the good intentions or ideas.