Half a Year Later using Bazzite: The Road So far
Alright, most of this will be parroting my video about this, but I've been using Bazzite as my "Co-OS" for around 6-7 months. It's been pretty good, so I'll give information about some things I liked, some things I loved, and some things that aren't really a Bazzite issue but just a workflow speed bump in general. I have a bit of an unorthodox case, in that I run a Dual-GPU system. One card is an AMD Card, and the other is a NVIDIA card, so it was very interesting to see how Bazzite handled this setup, and very pleased to say it handled it well.
My Bazzite Desktop + Fastfetch
Gaming
The gaming aspect of Bazzite is more than good for me. It's great. Originally, in my Week-Long challenge, I had said that I was a bit sad that I could not play Fortnite for that entire week, since me and my friend agreed we weren't allowed to swap back over for anything at all during the challenge. As of now, it's not exactly an issue for me, seeing as I don't like the way the game and it's company is going in terms of their actions. I've been playing a lot less and less and it finally reached a point where I haven't thought about playing the game at all these recent months. I've been playing other multiplayer games I could find with friends. It's sad, because it's one of the main games in my friend group that we found each other and bonded with each other in, but it is what it is.
Aside from that, all the multiplayer games that I do play currently, play, and they play really well. I absolutely love the processing of shaders before I hop into the game. Everything is super smooth. I actually had a problem on my Windows install where indie games, mostly Unity ones, would have a weird micro-stutter issue. It'll be smooth when starting up the game for a few seconds, and then it'll immediately start chugging along at around 30-20fps with horrible frame times. Turning off vsync fixes this, but some games don't have that option, and I would have to go in and force it off through the driver software, and that may break the game in terms of physics. Playing those same games on Bazzite, I do not have this problem at all. The games run extremely well, basically locking to my monitor's refresh rate if vsync is indeed on.
The biggest thing I like is being able to easily implement FSR4 into many of the games I play. Goverlay's optiscaler command makes it super easy to just copy and paste it into the launch arguments. I'm on an RX 6800, which is still a really good card, and I usually play at 1080p. FSR4 Quality looks pretty much close to native on my monitor, so having good quality plus more frames is a huge plus for me.
Content Creation
This one is the iffy part. I got Affinity Photo V2 and Affinity Canva to work finally via Lutris. The one weird quirk for them both is that they always start up pretty small and I have to maximize them every time, and the welcome screen setting doesn't save between restarts so I have to close it every time. But the most important part is that I got it working. I was also able to get OpenCL Compute working on both as well, so the app is pretty much as responsive as native. The only thing that I need to get used to is not being able to quickly export my finished files since Wine's file explorer is a little weird.
Affinity Photo working on Bazzite
Affinity is a huge pillar in my content workflow. I've used it since I was in college and it's the closest thing to Photoshop in terms of power and features. I tried GIMP but it really just wasn't for me. When I couldn't figure out Affinity on Linux, I used Photopea for a while and that was pretty good, but nothing really could beat Affinity.
OBS is the one that's a little weird. A lot of the plugins I use on Windows are also there on Linux, and that's great. The one weird thing I've been experiencing is, on some boots, OBS just kind of...stops recognizing my RTX 4060? Even on reboots, it would still forget it exists and the only way to fix it was by completely reinstalling OBS's flatpak. Now this isn't a huge issue since I have the scenes and profile exported, so I can just import them all back, but it was something that I noticed. Other than that, and it being weird about VKCapture (I just got rid of that plugin, I don't really use it), OBS worked fine. Basically no different than using it on Windows 11 for me.
EasyEffects is a great audio tool. It doesn't really compare to Elgato Wave Link, but it's been good enough in what I need. My only main issue is that it doesn't have VST support. I have a few VSTs that I would really like to use on Linux like Supertone Clear, Elgato's Suite of VSTs, and Reaper Plugins, but the ones given to you are acceptable. I've never been a fan of RNNoise, cause it honestly just kinda transforms my voice in a way that I don't want. Supertone Clear doesn't do this, so I had hoped there was a way to just pop it in. It works well enough for me when I'm recording a game or video focusing on Bazzite, but when it comes to things like Voice Over and other things, I swap back to Windows to record it there.
Speaking of Audio, I did have an issue where my Elgato Wave:3 would always not have the microphone portion activated when I started Bazzite up on boot. I would have to fiddle with the audio settings and switch it from Digital to Analog or vice versa (depending on how I left it when shutting down) to get the microphone to start working. It was pretty tedious, doing this every time I turned on my PC, so I went looking, and found that someone had made config files for every Wave device to work on boot. I pasted it in the proper wireplumber config folder and upon reboot...it worked! It started detecting my microphone right off the bat, and that was one of my biggest pain points. I thought about completely replacing my microphone to have it work across both Windows and Linux, but that would've been a pretty expensive replacement that I wasn't really wanting to do, so I'm really glad someone out there smarter than me was able to get it working. If you have an Elgato Wave device as well, here's the link: https://jmansar.github.io/wavexlr-on-linux-cfg/
In terms of Video Editors I'm pretty much stuck on Windows. KDEnlive and ShotCut are serviceable. When it came to making videos that I didn't want anything more than some quick cuts and whatnot in, they worked, and they worked well (aside from some weird trimming things with KDEnlive). But when it comes to something like high energy editing, captioning, transitions, and deep customization of video and audio, it just kind of falls off for me. I usually use CapCut desktop and Filmora 14 for my more edited videos, as the features they give are extremely attractive to me. I tried getting both to work on Bazzite, but I would run into issues that make it unusable. I noticed that ElementalWarrior Wine (the same fork used for Affinity) got me almost there for the editors, but the things like preview window and such were a pitch black screen, so I could not continue. I might download Davinci Resolve with the ujust script to make a distrobox for it, but as of now, I just move my footage over to an SD card and pull it into my Windows video drive and edit it. The workflow works for me so far, so it doesn't really bother me. I just hope one day someone's able to get Filmora 100% working in the future.
How my more in-depth videos usually look like in CapCut
Personalization and Miscellaneous
Honestly, Bazzite's been pretty perfect for me in terms of customizing how it looks and what I want it to look like. A lot of people talk about it's immutability, but honestly, I've been able to get into what I want to get into, pretty much without problem. I think a lot of the system files that are read only, I haven't really wanted to get into? When it comes to downloading apps and programs, flatpaks have been just fine for me. I never really felt the need to use rpm-ostree at all, so it was never really a pain point for me. That's the beautiful part about Linux, if the immutability bothers you, I mean there's Nobara right there if you still want something Fedora-based. For me, it's amazing. I like how rock solid my OS is, and I like that it's really really REALLY hard for me to break something. I always feel at ease when I'm using Bazzite, free from the fears of getting a blue screen while scrolling tiktok or booting into a BSOD cause my bluetooth driver loaded wrong.
Anywho, this has been my current experience and workflow for the past half year, and I really do like how nice it's been using Bazzite in times when I don't need to get on Windows. I'll continue to have it as my "Co-OS". It's not really a backup or a secondary anymore with how often I use it. if I somehow ever make another PC, I'll probably make my own little Steam Machine with Bazzite Gaming Mode on it. I think it'd be a really fun project.