My experience maining Linux (Bazzite) for a month
TLDR;
Its actually doable for daily use and professional creative work, no copium here. I keep my old Win11 desktop on a closet just in case, so far its a great dust collector.
Last month my and my wife's computers started to really show the pass of time. We originally bought twin low end spec desktop PC's 8 years ago and have done minimal upgrades since then, really pushing what that hardware could do to catch up to modern gaming and media production needs. Some savings and the news that she was getting a bonus was all we needed to decide it was finally time to upgrade one of our most important pieces of tech in the house. We went with high (but not top) hardware specs this time around and decided to build them ourselves since we both hated how the shop techs built our previous ones.
Once built, I helped her setup Win11 on hers but me? I thought: well I've been looking for an excuse to try maining Linux again so why not? I have been distro hopping on a laptop recently so I knew I didn't want something that meant taking time away from games or creative hobbies to spend it troubleshooting basic OS functionality, so when I heard about Bazzite and the concept of immutable distros I knew that felt fun to try. Besides, I always had a very deep hate for Windows apps leaving behind temp files, saves and other trash around even after using the official uninstaller, so self-contained flatpaks and clearly separating personal files from OS directories sounded like a win-win to me.
So, how has my experience held up to my expectations on all my PC needs?
Gaming
Let's get the easiest one out of the way. 99% of games work on Bazzite nowadays. Even old deprecated, modded, windows-only games work flawlessly via Lutris (although I guess there may be random exceptions here too). The main exceptions however are those where their developers spent active efforts to block their use on Linux. There's a common misconception that anything with anticheat by default doesn't work in Linux, which is untrue. The game I work at has EAC yet we are "Deck Verified" via Proton. On the other hand, EA games are the big majority that used to work on Proton until they literally implemented blockers for that. I used to play Apex on my Steam Deck (Javelin anticheat and all) and I can't anymore π€· I guess we have EA to thank for the opportunity to support their competitors.
One very niche requirement for me was that I wanted to play SteamVR games (streamed to my old Quest 2, yes I'm one of those skepticals waiting to only replace it for a Steam Frame) with my FBT SlimeVR trackers. After a disappointing experience hoping native SteamVR would just work (I hope they have some upcoming work just before the Frame launches that stabilizes the experience) I learned about WiVRn (a SteamVR replacement) and WayVR (an overlay app to see your desktop windows on VR). I loved XSO but its lack of Linux support is, also, quite disappointing. The experience was as flawless as you could imagine, like oddly smooth. Install WiVRn and SlimeVR flatpaks from Bazaar, download the WayVR app image and load it via WiVRn. Install the WiVRn app from the Quest Store. Open the apps in the right order, connect, success. The only issue I found was that WayVR doesn't like opening both my monitors so I have to only open 1 monitor, which is fine. Greatly performant VR gaming in less than 10 mins. Wild.
Gamedev
It depends on your game engine of choice, since mine is Godot that's a simple pass for me. I've heard there are good guides for Unity too.
Screenshots and GIF Recording
As an avid user of ShareX and LICEcap on Windows I was expecting some trade offs here for quick recordings of my screen. I was pleasantly blown away by KDE's default tool Spectacle! It does everything I needed, in a very similar UX with some small improvements here and there.
Fancy Zones
I like organizing my windows on a zones layout around my multiple monitors, on Windows I had to install PowerToys which had a lot of multiple tools out of which I only needed one called FancyZones. In KDE Plasma guess what, that's natively supported so bim bam boom that's done. The only thing it was missing (which I hear is in development) is windows remembering their last open position and dimensions, something that a quick user script fixes instantly. Again, no terminals, no messing around with my OS config files, just a couple button presses in the settings UI was all I needed.
Music Production
Ok this was my biggest concern, most VSTs are Windows/Mac only and/or they came with a proprietary installer that automatically hides some authorization register somewhere in your system. This was a huge headache...until it wasn't :) Thankfully there was a very simple workflow here to make most Windows VSTs compatible on Linux using yabridge, bottles and this user script. Reaper (my DAW of preference) and yabridge were the only things that needed to be installed natively, bottles could be a flatpak thanks to the user script I mentioned before.
Now I just point yabridge to the folder where my Windows plugins are on my external HDD, sync them and for any that are "broken" (remember when I mentioned those dirty installers?) I just have to run the installer again this time via bottles and authorize as normal. Easy peasy, all my old music projects load up with their correct settings and all! The only caveat are specific plugins (usually from bigger companies like iZotope) which made their whole authorization process pretty inconveniently complex, boooo. Still figuring those out.
One important note is that lowering the DAW buffer size (to get lower input latency) is done via terminal. Not ideal yeah but it's a simple line, 1 time and I don't have to install drivers for my interface and have that program taking extra resources on my PC every day for a UI I don't have to use, so all good π.
Image & Video Editing
This one is simple, I don't have many needs here other than the occasional image/video editing for promoting my music work & covers. I used DaVinci Resolve which was pretty overkill for what I needed so Kdenlive seems to fit the bill just fine for me. For image editing I really liked Canva anyway but for anything local Krita is also overkill so I guess I'm quite covered.
Backups & Archiving
Bazzite's KDE environment comes with Dolphin which natively supports compressing and unpacking 7z archives (my preferred compressing format). On top of that I got Pika Backup which looks veeeery user friendly so we'll see how it goes!
Hardware RGB control
OpenRGB supports all my hardware except my GPU (there's already a request open for it). With a simple argument line and the autostart settings UI I got it setup so that on every boot OpenRGB opens up minimized, sets my color profile, waits a few secs just in case and closes itself. Nice β¨. I also had some fun checking out CoolerControl, very well done tool. Not something I really need but cool to see it exists...get it?
OS Rollback
Ok so at one point I tried playing smart and changed a critical boot file so that at boot my external HDD could be bind-mounted to a specific home directory. I didn't realize that I needed to add a "nofail" flag so that in case it failed it didn't prevent the entire OS from booting up, rookie mistake. I thought this whole experience came to an end when I found myself bricked out my new PC. The solution? Easy, turns out Bazzite always keeps a snapshot of your system from the last time you updated it. Just selected the old snapshot, boot into that instead, and that was all there was to it! I updated again which overwrote the borked snapshot with a fresh one and just keep going. No stopping, no terminal troubleshooting, nothing. Just pure "you messed up? no worries pal, here's the last stable version keep rolling". Pure definition of "it just works".
So after all that, what's my current setup like?
I once heard a Linux enjoyer say that modern distros felt like ADHD heaven. No distractions, no unwanted ads on your app drawer, no annoying pop-ups offering you an NVIDIA promo, or yet another reminder to that free Copilot/OneDrive/bloatware offer that Microslop really wants you to use. Nothing. Just you, whatever you want to do and nothing else. Heck I sometimes open up System Monitor just out of curiosity and look at the 3~5 apps running out of paranoia, that is including "Background Services". There is nothing there that I didn't actively open myself. NOTHING. And that feels so calm π.
Anyways, I kept my old Win11 PC with its original hardware and all frozen in time on a closet "just in case", which gives me peace of mind that my personal and creative work won't be stopped in a worst case scenario, but so far I've only used it to fish for a file or folder I forgot to move to my external HDD which I use for storing projects I can now open on either PC.
Life, in fact, can be good.