OtterCachyOS Is Now the Most Popular Desktop Distro on ProtonDB
harmbuglerMe? Oh, Flatpak Linux, of course.
They include a note about that on the page
Flatpak is NOT a distro, but that’s what Steam reports when it’s running on Flatpak, and Flatpak being distro independent we report it as a separate environment, if that makes sense. Feel free to ignore it if you wish.
Thanks for the note, I don’t mean to be too snarky–I do actually run the Steam flatpak.
Interesting write-up about Bazzite. I had Bazzite on one of my kid’s PCs just because it had an Nvidia card but last week reinstalled Fedora Silverblue. Bazzite has some rough edges and some choices I don’t really understand, like using Topgrade and Bazaar. Everyone seems to like it though, maybe I’m in the minority preferring Fedora.
Rebels_DroppinI’m a Linux noob and ended up with Bazzite a bit ago and really like how straightforward Bazaar is, typically what are the shortcomings or downside of Bazaar?
sp3ctr4lAs far as I can tell (I am use Bazzite), the main problem with Bazaar was basically that it was kind of undercooked, had some bugs, both surface level and under the hood, when they first pushed it as the bundled app store for Bazzite.
But its been some months now, and they seem to have been ironed out?
I guess possibly a ‘downside’ could be that it only handles flatpaks, as opposed to also allowing other kinds of direct package installs, but the whole idea of Bazzite is ‘no touchy core os, use flatpak’.
Or, ok, Bazaar is either GNOME only, or GNOME first, whereas Flathub pretty well supports KDE and GNOME, so, if you prefer KDE, I can see the reasoning there for preferring Flathub.
Thanks for the explanation, that all makes sense.
randoughI’m afraid that last sentence makes very little sense. How could it be GNOME only when Bazzite ships KDE and Bazaar? Regardless of toolkit and UI, Bazaar is simply a DE agnostic front end for flathub.
According to the github page for Bazaar (which I may not be fully understanding correctly), it seems like Bazaar is designed for GNOME primarily, and then there is essentially a seperate thing, basically a kind of plugin or sort of like a patch, that is layered over top of the main Bazaar, which enables it to work with/in KDE.
Bazaar proper:
Bazaar is fast and highly multi-threaded, guaranteeing a smooth experience in the user interface. You can queue as many downloads as you wish and run them while perusing Flathub’s latest releases. This is due to the UI being completely decoupled from all backend operations.
It runs as a service, meaning state will be maintained even if you close all windows, and implements the gnome-shell search provider dbus interface. A krunner plugin is available for use on the KDE Plasma desktop.
The krunner plugin:
github.com/ublue-os/krunner-bazaar
A KRunner plugin for searching and installing Flatpak applications through the Bazaar store.
Sorry, I’m not a fequent KDE user, I may be misunderstanding something here.
Doesn’t steam run as a flatpak on bazzite?
No, it actually does not run the flatpak version.
Steam is essentially treated as part of the core Bazzite OS.
Bazzite runs more or less the latest Fedora version of Steam, and then has a ton of custom scripts, as well as accomoanying core-Fedora library utilities to accomodate integrating Steam more fully into Fedora, so that things like Gaming Mode/Desktop Mode basically work as they do in SteamOS.
Doing it the way they do it, this makes it so you can use the various u-just terminal commands and pre-packaged flatpak apps to tweak things that basically affect or touch or may touch Steam.
So uh, right now, on my Bazzite Steam Deck, if I do:
rpm -qa | grep “steam”
(which is basically Fedora-speak for 'show me all installed libraries that have “steam” in them)
I get:
steam-1.0.0.85-3.fc43.i686
So that would be the current, Fedora 43 version of Steam, from the Terra repo, I think… its not the 44/Rawhide version.
Where the Terra repo is the community repo, sort of roughly analagous to the AUR, compared to mainline Arch libraries.
…pkgs.org/…/steam-0:1.0.0.85-3.fc43.i686.rpm.html
That command also lists out a number of steam-related utility libraries, which comprise parts of the core, ‘no touchy’, atomic part of Bazzite.
Hmm interesting thanks!