Very nice of Bazzite to adopt Drama Tuesday. They are true gamers.

God damn it Kyle.

I understand there's been drama, and someone walked away or was pushed out. I don't quite care enough to understand it all or point at guilty parties.

However, my current understanding is that the project remains active, so titling this article "Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over. It's certainly what I immediately assumed made it newsworthy.

Glad I decided not to stick with Bazzite. I gave it a try a few months ago and had issues with Bazaar crashing (not at all low end hardware btw). If the primary method to install software was that broken on a fresh install, there was no way I was going to trust the OS at all, no matter how many people on YouTube and HN talked about how amazing it is.

man, i was JUST thinking about switching out windows for bazzite, because the only thing i use my windows machine for is video games...

might need to hold off on that, as much as it pains me, with all the weird & sloppy updates windows is pushing out.

As a happy Bazzite user, I had no idea things were so bumpy. At least the migration to other os-tree distros is trivial (Fedora Kinoite -> Bazzite was one or two shell commands). My main reason for using the distro was the built-in nvidia drivers for my old graphics card.

Bazzite made it so easy to switch from windows. I first tried cachyos but bazzite’s gamemode worked perfectly from the start, hdr and vrr included, on nvidia. Turned an expensive PC into an expensive console and made me so happy. Just the fact I can sleep the system mid-game and resume is magic!

Guess I gotta go back to cachy and try again. Bummer

For everyone who thinks this is the death of Bazzite or whatever, keep in mind Bazzite, all the UBlue projects, are all based on Fedora Atomic which makes it super easy to make an immutable spin.

There's also Silverblue which is ready to go out of the box (unless you have Nvidia), Nobara which adds some gaming things. And on a different vein CachyOS is making waves with some gamers (but it's Arch based instead of Fedora and not atomic/immutable).

It’s worth pointing out that the official Bazzite position is that Antheas was removed from the project for breaching Code of Conduct and harassing people in their official Discord server

I don't care enough about the drama to deep-dive, but as far as I can tell both parties are at fault. At least Bazzite did not make a "post mortem" blog post on a project that is still active. Bit petty if you ask me

Been on Bazzite for a while now and had very few issues, though to backup the sentiments of Antheas here, they have managed to upset the maintainer of the Go-XLR Linux Utility with their fast and loose HW changes: https://github.com/GoXLR-on-Linux/goxlr-utility/issues/239

Looking around a couple of adjacent communities, it seems the Bazzite maintainers might have acted in the best community interest on this one, so I'm optimistic things will continue in a positive way. Still, might make me a little less full-throated about recommending Bazzite, knowing there's such drama under the surface.

This blog post is the only exposure I have to this whole thing, and from it, all I can say for sure is that this post is incredibly immature.

I guess the good thing about Bazzite, CachyOS, Omarchy and what have you, is that it brings new users to Linux.

I would still like to see most users pick established distros, as contributions there have a higher impact on the ecosystem. But self-named gamers are probably harder to reason with.

>Bazzite's fate is sealed as a non-commercial hobbyist-like OS.

Sounds like good news to me.

Community member is problematic, makes themselves the victim

what exactly happened to bazzite? I've seen so much hype around the distro and buzz among normal people, that it almost became THE normal gamer distro, so much so it completely overshadowed nobara and whatever other gamer gimmick distros are out there

Relevant comment from some months ago [1].

Personally I find that sticking to distros backed by companies or very large communities is just easier in the long term (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46092225

You like me for my (always right) conspiratorial takes

I got another one:

Look, follow the money, Microsoft knows Windows 11 on handhelds is a dumpster fire right now, and they are not ready to drop their own "Xbox Portable" yet

So how do they keep the market from moving to the alternative SteamOS/Valve?

They trojan horse the "alternative"

Think about it: Bazzite pops up, gains massive community "trust", every traditionally pro-MSFT media talk about it, and then coincidentally becomes the loudest voice trashing GPD's HW support, why would they do that?

It's a classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish play

FUD: Use Bazzite as an "undercover" $MSFT project to make GPD look like a risky, unoptimized mess

Damage: GPD takes the hit because they are actually trying to innovate, while the "community" devs (who are definitely on a $MSFT gang) tell everyone to just buy an Rog Ally ($MSFT Partner) or wait for the next Microsoft Xbox handheld

Pivot: Once GPD is sidelined as a "niche hobbyist risk", Microsoft drops a polished Handheld UX for Windows, Bazzite magically "loses funding" or support, and everyone gets funneled back into the Game Pass ecosystem on "approved" hardware

Bazzite isn't a "community project", it's a trojan hose

GPD bet on the wrong horse thinking that community was neutral

Sometimes I feel like Discord as been nothing but a bane on OSS. A chat is inherently less searchable than a wiki/forum/documentation, and those sources are often readable without needing to authenticate, which meant that you could find an answer through Google and such. Most project now don't bother with publicly readable and archivable (and so offline viewable) information sources and just rely on Discord. This lead to the same newbie question being answered over and over again, and is a clear degradation of the UX. But on top of that, most people see Discord as a hangout. Almost all Discord server I know have an "offtopic"/"random"/"meme"/etc channel, if not several. This almost inevitably lead to drama on a scale that newsgroups and IRC fellows could have only dreamed off. And considering that a lot of devs are able to create drama over even a mailing list, Discord is turbocharging the ability for nuisance.

Maybe it's my "Am I out of touch ? No it's the children who are wrong" moment, but I really think OSS projects would benefit from ditching discord.

This is pure dramaposting- "post-mortem" is so misleading and mischaracterizes the situation. I don't use bazzite, I don't know Kyle or anybody here, but I am tired of the drama.

All of the things listed in the blog are personal and technical disagreements, nothing morally reprehensible, no disrespect, nothing that would make anyone want to burn bridges like this.

It's fine to leave a project and to publicize disagreements but this comes across as spiteful.

Leftism and OSS share a similar problem, being that good ideas, intentions, and works are squandered by petty drama and insecure egos.

Linking related post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46818467

AFAIK, removing Antheas from Bazzite opened the door to discussions for forming the OGC. Prior to that, Antheas had created such difficult situations that many of the member groups in the OGC did not collaborate with Bazzite because of his presence. Whether or not the OGC actually works (ex: getting patches upstreamed faster), only time will tell.