I had a day of low-brain fog yesterday, so I decided to install the Bazzite "gamer's" Linux distro last night as a test. It's a Fedora-based distro that includes the Steam client by default. We just got a new laptop for 15YO, because we just got a lump of cash, and his old one had become un-useably slow, after a recent win11 update that foobarred the AMD Radeon driver (as far as I can tell, AMD haven't updated the driver for this chipset and a recent update has caused some kind of shared memory bottle-neck). Part of the idea was to test to see if Linux was also affected by this problem, and part was to try out a Fedora-based distro as suggested by @Erik L. Midtsveen so I guess that's an item ticked off the to-do list ;-)
Installation was relatively straight-forward, and very reminiscent of the RHEL installer, but with lots more eye-candy. It's a big one though - needed an 8GB flash drive for the installer ISO.
A few observations:
1. This distro uses Gnome 3, and after 10 or so years of avoiding it, I can confirm I still hate it. Seems snappier than windoze though.
2. Steam seems to work pretty well. My grown up step-enby logged in with their account, and installed Detroit (man, that took ages) and it ran pretty well, though it did crash once. Apparently it even does that on windoze. Frame rate was mostly ok - this is a very intensive graphical game - and only got laggy when there was a lot of complex movement on screen. Again, apparently windoze does this too.
3. This morning we tried to test the game, "Linbus Company", that 15YO was having trouble with, but it won't install on Steam on Linux. Working through suggestions to try to get it going, but it's an alien world to me, though - I'm SO not a gamer, and there are whole swathes of terminology to wade through. Hope the brain fog holds off.
4. The "Bazaar" app installer seems to be quite friendly and usable. Still expecting to have to do some command-line shenanigans at some point though...
#linux #steam #fedora #bazzite
