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Gaming is a powerful force.
Unfortunately, Bazzite has been crapping out for me when entering and exiting sleep, so I may have to give it up. Which sucks, because there's a fair bit of customization and another shortcoming is no easy portability outside of rebasing.
Not sure if this will work for you, I had a problem with waking from sleep first few days, found a forum post that worked for me:
Set a color profile in the display settings - doesn't matter which one, it just wanted one selected. Been solid-as a rock since.
Are you kidding me, that worked?!
I mean, there's no color profile option in the current KDE Plasma display config for HDR on Wayland, but just for the crap of it I flipped their "efficient color precision" to the "accurate" setting, which gives you a performance warning and it went to deep sleep for several hours and recoverd once successfully.
I hate it here. I'm going to choose to believe this was a fluke and when I leave this thing on overnight it'll die in its sleep as it's been doing for a while.
That's... random.
But hey, I've tried a bunch of the logical, actually-sound setup tweaks unsuccessfully, who knows what dark rituals the proprietary Nvidia drivers demand to come back from the dead at this point. I'll give it a shot next time.
Are you kidding me, that worked?!
I mean, there's no color profile option in the current KDE Plasma display config for HDR on Wayland, but just for the crap of it I flipped their "efficient color precision" to the "accurate" setting, which gives you a performance warning and this thing went to deep sleep for several hours and recoverd once successfully.
I hate it here. I'm going to choose to believe this was a fluke and when I leave this thing on overnight it'll die in its sleep as it's been doing for a while.
LMAO I came back solely to see the end result
well, is it still working?
That's a weird bug but I'm going to give it a shot!
Huh, waking issues have been plaguing me for ~9 months in regular Fedora KDE, to the point where I don't let my PC sleep and just shut it down at night. Hopefully this fixes it there too.
EDIT: Working flawlessly for 5 days, thank you!
I was just coming back to post that it's been a week and my PC just turned itself back on from deep sleep after being left overnight, as it has for the duration.
I'm so mad. Dozens of forum threads and bug reports and online searches. I have fundamental questions about Linux's model for both development and support now that I didn't have two weeks ago.
My annoyance has been RAM - Bazzite is configured to use zram for swap, meaning it compresses part of your RAM to save space. That's great since it's a lot faster than swap to disk, but I've been running out of memory with Kerbal Space Program and my many mods. I've got 16 GB of memory installed, but without a swap partition/file it just kills the game when it uses too much.
I am ordering a larger stick, but I would personally prefer a slowdown (from getting stuff from disk) to a crash.
Yep, related root causes.
You can set Bazzite to use a swap file instead and turn on traditional hibernate, there's a tutorial in their documentation. It did not work for me, and it sure didn't fix my dedicated GPU refusing to wake up from sleep, but you could give it a try.
But in general Bazzite wants to do power management like it's on a handheld with an APU and limited performance, and it has been a bit of a mess to try to use it on a desktop. I really don't want to go distro hopping again, but it honestly may be required. Despite all the hype this stuff isn't Windows yet.
It may not be windows, but I'm still very happy with it overall. I'm willing to turn off my laptop completely to save battery because of broken sleep, and the nice thing is it boots faster than Windows for me!
It's actually noticeably slower for me, but both are... not fast having to go through Grub first, since I'm dual booting.
That makes the power management issues MUCH worse in my book. Windows hibernates very reliably, so once it goes to deep sleep, even if I boot back into Linux before coming back to Windows my session is saved. Bazzite won't do that with hibernation turned off, and if sleep is broken I end up having to do a whole bunch of manual resetting on every single session, because even with Plasma's baby steps towards session saving it's nowhere close to remembering what apps you had open.
And there are the usual issues. Gaming performance is worse on most desktops with dedicated GPUs (don't believe the hype, you'll only get better performance in heavily memory-limited systems like handhelds, and definitely not with Nvidia cards). Software compatibility is still spotty and stuff breaks more often and is fiddlier to fix, as shown in this whole conversation.
So am I happy with it? There are things where it's mostly on par, it feels snappier on the UX side and it's good to have an alternative. In practice there are still more downsides than upsides, I'd say, so it strongly depends on how actively you want to enforce change in this space.
It's... viable. Is that fair? Viable is better than whatever it was a decade ago, so... progress?
Performance wise, I actually did a benchmark in Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows vs. Bazzite on my laptop (Nvidia graphics card) and came out a bit ahead with Bazzite for most settings. Windows framerates were all over the place.
I guess I'd ask which card and with how much VRAM.
Linux has a significantly lower memory footprint and that is even more so if your Bazzite install was on game mode. For modern games that REALLY want more than 8 GB that can make a huge difference on stability, average fps or both unless you are fine tuning your setup. Most portable hardware tops out at 8GB of VRAM, and APUs tend to dedicate 3 or 4 to the GPU at best.
Balls-to-the-wall on desktop hardware, though, if you're not constrained by memory you get more fps on Windows. Sometimes dramatically so. Not because of anything wrong with Linux, it tends to be some combination of having a conversion layer and less cherry-picked, optimized drivers. Stuff that really relies on GPU-specific features in particular, like the Spider-Man games, can grind to a halt with high end features enabled on Linux. At least that's my experience dual-booting Linux and Windows across a bunch of laptops, desktops and handhelds for the past bunch of years.
On the flipside some games that have broken or inconsistent performance on Windows can get those same types of optimizations or fixes directly in Proton and get smoother performance (although rarely outright higer averages). Elden Ring is the one everybody knows about, but there are a few more out there.
Being very OS-agnostic, I'm actually excited for Windows' upcoming game mode equivalent. It could be the best of both worlds. This is a big part of why you'd want Linux to do well, it pushes MS to refocus on actually useful stuff, whcih in turn has a good chance of moving Linux in the right direction.
RTX 3070 (laptop) with 8GB vram
Gotcha. That should be right at the edge of where you may see some benefits from memory, but it certainly shouldn't show better performance across the board.
I don't have that exact spec available, but I do have a 3080 mobile I'm dual booting, so I checked a few games I had installed or were small enough to conveniently download and boot up on both.
Couple caveats: Linux audio is outright broken on this laptop, which is a bit of a dealbreaker and a real bummer. Also, it's running Win 10 on the Windows side, not Win 11, which is one of the reasons I'm dual booting it despite the speaker audio being busted. I don't think that impacts performance either way, though. Also also, man, am I sweating now. This thing is a fantastic space heater when cranked up. Also, also, also, all of these are maxed out at 1440p, for reference. RTX on, DLSS on at max settings where available, since we're testing for Nvidia feature performance as well.
So, spoiler alert, this went how I expected it to go:
Quake II RTX: 44-46fps on Windows, 40-43 on Linux. Basically the same. Linux was more stable and frankly, if I didn't have a FPS readout I wouldn't have thought to lower settings for more FPS, it felt so smooth.
Bloodstained RotN: waste of time, it has a 60fps cap and it runs identically on both, down to brief stutters when changing rooms. I had it installed, so now you know.
Lost in Random The Eternal Die: Super optimized game on Windows, shockingly much worse on Linux. 125-135 fps on Windows, just 110-119 on Linux, and more stuttery. Was not expecting that.
Abyssus: Unreal 5 game. Another surprising Linux loss I wasn't expecting. 70-120 on Windows, but a bit stuttery, but only 53-77 fps on Linux. Windows was more stuttery this time and showed some glitches I didn't get on Linux.
Lego Builders: Raytracing showcase, pretty even. 45-60 on Windows, 53-55 on Linux. Again smoother on Linux despite lower max FPS.
Orcs Must Die Deathtrap: More Unreal. 36-43 on Windows, 33-38 on Linux. Another case where max fps is lower but it feels a bit smoother on Linux. You'd definitely crank settings down on this one for both OSs.
So yeah, like I said, no surprises. Linux is generally a bit slower in terms of max fps, which is expected, but a couple of games really don't like it. Proton tends to fix some stuttering and often that offsets the lower max fps loss. So, big things we learned: Proton is really good, I wish ASUS had better Linux support for audio and Linux gaming is very, very doable but not perfect. I haven't changed my mind much since the last time I tested this sort of thing.
Hey, if nothing else, that's a great list of games and they all run fine on Bazzite, so if anybody is looking for game recommendations I stand by all of them.
Interesting that your Asus device has audio issues. my laptop is the Zephyrus G15 I think? (I know it's GA503QR) and audio is fine out of the box. definitely a great space heater too though, the power supply is 200 W, and I usually run Cyberpunk at reduced graphics settings to cut down on heat and fan noise. It will legit heat up a small room
It's a bit of a shame it works for you, because yeah, they're similar devices but whatever software nonsense ASUS did on Windows to try to fix their crappy downward-firing speakers on mine is not on Linux and they just sound like a 1950s radio. I don't know that there is or can ever be a fix, honestly, since it's clearly a quirk of this particular model. I could try to manually EQ them back to life or something, but... yeah, neither ASUS nor Linux maintainers are going to fix it for me.
I agree that it's definitely worth losing performance most of the time, too. If not for the heat for the fan noise. It's actually not whiney or high pitched, but it's definitely not quiet.
I got this thing as a desktop replacement because I was working on the go for a while, and it did that job pretty well while I needed it. I'm not complaining. It's still a beast of a laptop, honestly. As you can see from the benchmarks it absolutely holds up. Still, there are better, cheaper ways to get that kind of performance if you don't need to carry them inside a backpack.
FWIW, Bazzite's build for ASUS laptops does pick up the iGPU/dGPU system correctly and it does handle power management mostly fine. If not for the audio issues this would be a perfectly decent setup. As it is, I'm probably going to keep a Windows install on it for the foreseeable.
Unfortunately they also soldered half the RAM to the motherboard, meaning you can only upgrade half. My favorite feature is that the chassis screws are made of microwaved butter, so one of them has stripped. I upgraded the RAM to 24GB yesterday, and had to open the back at a slight angle and squeeze in there... couldn't disconnect the battery or anything. At least I can load up more KSP mods now!
Thinking of making the switch away from Windows and I've been looking at Bazzite as an alternative since I game fairly frequently.
Does anyone know if there is a way I can play my game pass games if I switched?
Gamepass is Windows only. One of the very few things (gaming wise) that doesn't work on Linux.
Appreciate the heads up, ended up making the switch to Bazzite anyhow and I'm currently enjoying it a lot.
Hell yeah!
Two of those are here! waving
Bazzite is an awesome OS, so I’m glad to see people switching to it. I run it on my living room PC. It’s great for TVs.
i just installed bazzite on an A6-6400k system and it works really well. i first installed Fedora, but an amount was missing to get my 1030 running for media decoding. Yeah this system should be sent to the grave, but it's working and doing what i need.
I also run this on my daily laptop and works very nice.
I switched to Bazzite as well!
bazzite runs well enough on most of my machines but there are a couple that really struggle with it.
looking for alternatives that will handle amd cpu and Nvidia gpu because that fell in my lap
Have you taken a look at Aurora yet? It asks if you have an nVidia chipset and will automatically build an iso for you to install. It wasn't the distro I wanted, but it was a smooth install and ran well.
The more I learn about Bazzite the cooler it seems, but I'm not in a position to switch away from windows right now. Anyone had experience with running it dual-boot?
As long as you have a spare drive for it, it works great. It does not support dual boot on a single drive.
But SSDs are dirt cheap these days.
It actually does support installation on a single drive but it requires tinkering so I wouldn't recommend if you are just starting with Linux. Source: me, did it last year to test out, but don't recall where I found the tutorial for it.
Ok cool, I might give that a try!
It does not support dual boot on a single drive.
this is not true, but they don't recommend it. they provide instructions for single-drive dual boot on the website.
The official stance is that it is not supported. That doesn't mean there aren't ways to do it.
right, which is literally what I said.
I just upgraded my version to the newest one.
It's sleek af now. Like iOS levels of professionalism - you'd think it comes from a corporation sized staff with the level of polish it has.
I am currently dual booting bazzite and win 11 and I don’t even use the 11 drive anymore. I’m going to get rid of it and go full bazzite.
Same here. Booted windows one time because I needed to fix my 8bitdo controller.
I tried hard to get into Bazzite, it went really well for a while but I had issues after every update. Most recently something to do with the os-tree got corrupted and refused to boot, ended up having to boot into a live iso to edit some files on the disk.
I will absolutely be trying it again in 6 months because its really good and I'm sure they'll smooth out those update issues.
