Look, I’m a Debian user for 15 years, I’ve worked in F/OSS for a long time, can take care of myself.
But I’m always on a lookout for distros that might be good fit for other people in my non-tech vicinity, like siblings, nieces, nephews… I’m imagining some distro which is easy for gaming but can also be used for normal school, work, etc. related stuff. And yeah, also not too painful to maintain.
(Well, less painful than Windows which honestly is not a high bar nowadays… but don’t listen to me, all tried in past years was to install Minecraft from the MS store… The wound is still healing.)
I have Steam Deck and I like how it works: gaming first, desktop easily accessible. But I only really use it for gaming.
So I learned about Bazzite, but from their description on their main site I’m not very wise:
The next generation of Linux gaming [Powered by Fedora and Universal Blue] Bazzite is a cloud native image built upon Fedora Atomic Desktops that brings the best of Linux gaming to all of your devices - including your favorite handheld.
Filtering out the buzzwords, “cloud native image” stands out to me, but that’s weird, doesn’t it mean that I’ll be running my system on someone else’s computer?
Funnily enough, I scrolled a bit and there’s a news section with a perfectly titled article: “WTF is Cloud Native and what is all this”.
But that just leads to some announcements of someone (apparently important in the community) talking about some superb community milestone and being funny about his dog. To be fair, despite the title, the announcement is not directed towards people like me, it’s more towards the community, who obviously already knows.
Amongst the cruft, the most “relevant” part seems to be this:
This is the simplest definition of cloud native: One common way to linux, based around container technology. Server on any cloud provider, bare metal, a desktop, an HTPC, a handheld, and your gaming rig. It’s all the same thing, Linux.
But wait, all I want to run is a “normal” PC with a Linux distro. I don’t necessarily need it to be a “traditional” distro but what I don’t want is to have it running, or heavily integrated in some proprietary-ish cloud.
So how does this work? Am I missing something?
(Or are my red flags real: that all of this is just to make a lot of promises and get some VC-funding?)
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Hi I’m the guy who posted the report. Your quote is exactly what it is, we use cloud native server tech to make Bazzite. Things like bootc, podman, OCI containers, etc.
all I want to run is a “normal” PC with a Linux distro.
That’s exactly what’s happening!
I don’t want is to have it running, or heavily integrated in some proprietary-ish cloud.
It does, just not ours, Valve runs that part. 😼 I’m happy to answer specific questions if you have any!
Hello Jorge, you rock man! Thanks for all your Ublue contributions. I saw your YouTube video and article in the docs and now I’m planning on installing Bluefin on a thumb drive to use on my work laptop. On my desktop I’ve been running Bazzite for a year, it’s been rock solid. Except for that one time when you did an oopsie with the keys 🤣, at first I felt inconvenienced, but then when you took full responsibility, I immediately thought you made a mistake like any human would, but you fixed it like a real hero. I want to use a distro made by people like you.
Thank you so much for everything you do.
Awesome, glad it’s working for you!
The buzz word is not aimed at the regular gaming nerd. It is aimed at gaming nerds who are also developers. Universal blue, the project behind Bazzite, Bluefin, and Aurora, aims to market to developers to use their systems first, on the basis of the tech backend. So then they make the cool FOSS things that the nerd public can use. Cloud native just means that something is engineered and made to make use of the container based devops pipeline.
For example, an atomic immutable OS that is meant to be developed and distributed via the container infrastructure (this is what Universal Blue is). So, instead of working on making an OS the regular way, collecting packages and manually connecting and tidying up absolutely every puzzle piece so it fits together, then pushing it through the installer packaging wizard, etc. This OSs are made by taking an already existing distribution, in this case Fedora atomic distros (but this is by no means mandatory), then customizing some things. Like installing libraries, applications, firmware, kernels and drivers. Then putting it all into a container image, like you would do with a docker or a podman server image. This way, on the user side, they don’t need to install the OS, instead they already have the minimal atomic system handling framework and just copy and boot into that OS image. This automates a lot of the efforts required for bundling and distributing an OS, and it makes new spins on existing distros really fast and efficient to make. It also means that users don’t need to be tech savvy about stuff like directory hierarchies or package management, and updates, installs, upgrades can all be automated to the point of the user barely even noticing them.
On a similar note, these distros, as development workstations, are usually pre-configured to make use of a container based dev pipeline. Everything is flatpacks and development is handled all via docker, pods, etc. Keeping the system clean from the usual development clutter that sediments over time on a traditional development cycle. As a happy coincidence, this makes the dreaded “works on my machine” issue less prevalent, making support of software a tad easier.
it’s really bad marketing, i had to look it up to make sure there wasn’t any weird cloud shit in the distro
bazzite is now my daily driver 3 machines
I’ve heard Bazzite mentioned repeatedly as a popular distro for Linux gaming (and I plan to test drive it on my old laptop soneday when I get around to it). My understanding is that it’s a standalone distro you can run locally, same as Debian/Arch/Ubuntu/etc. I suspect the “cloud native” marketing term in this context just means you can run the same image file in a vm, vps, bare metal, whatever.
If I’m dead wrong, hopefully my reply will be sufficiently inflammatory to trigger a correction, lol.
I think this is very much it yes. I run bazzite on my laptop as is such basically an atomic distro. That’s it
I suspect the “cloud native” marketing term in this context just means you can run the same image file in a vm, vps, bare metal, whatever.
…yeah that’s what makes it suspicious. Alone it can be a good thing but why rush to mention it for a fricking gaming/home distro? As if running gaming/home distro anywhere else than as close to the hardware as possible was somehow inherently normal or even good.
(The idea of cleanly separating “user user space” does sound inherently good, if achievable…)
Again, who are they marketing to?
They call Bazzite cloud native because they use a lot of technology often used in the cloud, but it’s still a locally run OS with no dependence on the internet apart from getting new updates.
Unlike traditional distros, it uses flatpak for apps, comes with podman (similar to docker) if you want to use containers, and has a more robust update mechanism.
Generally the industry shifted in a direction where it heavily relies on containers for running cloud applications. This solves many problems with traditional server systems where you’d be sticking to certain distro, so certain dependencies are in fixed versions, which brings some limitations. Container is an environment to run process in an isolated way so that it had its own root filesystem, its own view on what resources are available, sort of like it was separate machine, but it’s still running on the same machine natively using the same kernel as the host. You can then have multiple of such containers, all serving its narrow purpose and they all come with the complete fs and whatever distro release they are tested with. Nowadays cloud computing is all about containers and they come from images that are built in OCI format using Dockerfile syntax. After building an image, it is typically pushed into registry where it can be pulled from over network to be utilized across different nodes, which makes it pretty easy to scale and propagate changes in cloud environments.
Now what that means to Bazzite/Universal Blue is that it uses similar tech to deploy the system, though the target here is your local machine. Of course some of the characteristics aren’t relevant in this scenario, but it solves some of the same problem - build predictable and reproducible environment that can be thoroughly tested before publishing. The general idea is similar to how devops build cloud apps: there is CI pipeline that runs the build using giant Dockerfile (or Containerfile, same thing) inside of which they include everything that the system needs (running traditional package manager and act as it was normal Linux distro during the build), which then results as image that’s being pushed to registry. Bazzite users then install updates by pulling new version of the image and ‘rebasing’ to it. It is called rebasing here, because rpm-ostree lets users add additional layers with more packages on top of that.
EDIT: here’s the Containerfile I’ve been talking about: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile Might give you some idea on how this works.
