https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg
Graphs can be found here on their github. Since around mid November the active user count for Bazzite has gone up by around 16k active users.
buy, buy, BUY!
Huh I guess it’s “normal” but I hadn’t heard of Linux OSes tracking active user telemetry. Turns out this is a fedora / rpm mechanism that tracks the ip addresses of people updating their system. Something to think about. Archlinux for example does not do any form of this tracking as far as I can tell
Debian has an option to anonymously report packages installed. There’s a question about this at install time and at any time you can install or uninstall the popularity-contest package.
In Debian, that’s opt-in, whereas in Ubuntu it’s opt-out. Tells you something about the core values, doesn’t it.
Sure. On the other hand, one implementation seems like it would be fairly useless.
iirc it doesnt track ip, it just sends a ping for counting, the unique ID is when you installed your distro. its easy to opt out of. in the past it used IP but they changed it because they didnt like the privacy implications of it. regardless, you should use secureblue if you want a fedora atomic image focused on privacy and security. personally i consider the risk of being included in the count negligible (and on par with pinging timeservers imo, so unless youre making your computer completely silent its kinda nonsensical to worry about) so i keep it running. you still ultimately pull data from fedora/bazzite servers for updates (and thus, show IP) so i dont really understand consternation over this.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/counting/
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/infra/sysadmin_guide/dnf-counting/
hell yeah! linux for the win! I’m working on a computer and might try that one out when I get it to work. hopefully the hdd isn’t dead
im in that chart! i just built my wife a gaming PC, she is not a PC person and knows exactly nothing about linux as a whole, but she loves her steamdeck and bazzite means she never has to worry about opening a terminal (or even the desktop if she doesnt want to)
Excuse my ignorance. I know nothing about this stuff. Aren’t Steamdeck and Bazzite completely unrelated things? Or is Bazzite something that you install on Steamdeck? Your comment confused me.
Bonus question: what would be a good piece of used hardware to install Bazzite on? Could I install it on an older MS Surface for example?
Many had cool presents it seems 🤭
As a normie, I love Bazzite because it’s as intuitive as Microsoft without the intrusive and monopolistic proprietary features, and Bazzite is also built for gaming.
In my mother language, kinoite sounds like “what a night”, ans I can’t read it without some giggling >.<
Also, TIL that kinoite is a mineral
I think its a new shiny thing but I expect most users to go back to ordinary Linux, and in a year there wont be many still using bazzite. But thats fine. I love playing with new tools myself. But most of them are just temporary and then its back to what works the easiest.
But this is what makes Linux fun. Its not just one system. Tons of desktops, tons of apps, tons of configs.
Personally I tried Bazzite because it was the recommended distro for a gaming device, and I liked it so much that it quickly became my main.
Bazzite may present a bit more friction if you want to do something “advanced” that would otherwise be trivial on other distros perhaps with just a couple terminal commands, but it makes all the “simple” things super-duper easy, and the system is almost impossible to break.
I would say this model makes sense for “ordinary” users that just need a computer to read email, view cat videos, open office documents, and in the specific case of Bazzite also gaming. In my specific case I also needed to write code (I use VSCode + Godot), besides the initial friction of learning to work with containers and SELinux, Bazzite seems to be fit for coding.
Thus, I hope immutable distros will stay and thrive. I hope that one day someone will make a distro that you can just set and forget on your grandma’s laptop, and I think this distro should be immutable, like Bazzite.
For development there’s also Bazzite-dx
People have been saying this for a year, and the line only keeps going up.
Yeah ok. Well we will see. Im sometimes wrong. :)
Long time Debian user, short time Arch user, even shorter Fedora user.
I Switched a few devices over to Bazzite this year, and it’s genuinely game changing. A distro that just works, and stops me from breaking core system stability? But also allows me to install stuff using rpm-ostree and add other distros using distro shelf?
Don’t get me wrong I love compiling from source on Arch, but god damnit, sometimes I need an OS with guard rails, and it won’t be Windows or MacOS for damn sure.
This isn’t your average Glupshitto Linux
You act like arch is gentoo :P compiling on arch is like a blue moon event. You complie on arch about as much as you would on fedora.
Exactly this.
I am likewise a long time Debian user, different flavors, on and off. Played with Arch a little. Never touched fedora.
Installed Bluefin on my main laptop almost a year ago, haven’t looked back. The stability is exactly what I was looking for. It just works, and protects me from myself.
But still my proxmox is full of mostly Debian servers, I still value a traditional install.
But you better believe that when my buddy asked for help with Windows 10 EOL, one of the options I gave him was Linux. He was curious, we went over pros and cons, now he’s running Bluefin too.
What I would like to know is what data they use as a reference to produce that graph and whether that data can be audited.
Probably data from their Bazaar or I heard some other Fedora tool. I believe the growth, its actually good and not in a gimmicky way.
I’m in this picture. Installed bazzite on steam deck and it’s fucking awesome!
What does it do better than SteamOS? Genuinely asking as I didn’t really see any need to switch even as the compulsive tinkerer that I am…
Generally no… Cachyos steam deck version is better in basically every test iv seen them compared head to head in.
Bazzite is more or less the default choice cause it’s a flavor of the month more then it makes any kind of actual sense.
If your going to bazzite your typically better off staying on the stock OS.
Being able to install it yourself on any device seems like a big advantage :P
Got it, thank you.
I don’t have any device, I specifically own a Steam deck and if that’s the main benefit, I probably don’t want it on my other devices (I use Arch, btw).
Should’ve added “on the Steam Deck” in the first place, sorry 😅
bringus studios referense??///?
Sample size of 1, here.
Bazzite was my initial entry-point into Linux, but I bounced off it within 48 hours as its immutable nature made it impossible for me to install the native PIA VPN client and for the life of me I couldn’t get the OpenVPN to play nice.
Currently on CachyOS, and seems to run just fine - giving an end user just enough rope 😅
Plus it’s Arch underneath the hood too, so I can still cheekily say that I run Arch!
ETA: I wonder if/how long I would count as part of this Bazzite cohort?
Yeah, getting PIA running without the native client has been a bit rough. These days I’ve just gotten use to starting a terminal as soon as I log-in, but I probably need a more permanent solution. maybe it’ll be switching to cachy as well.
PIA has OpenVPN or IPsec profiles (I forget which) that can be imported into NetworkManager. You just have to put in your account info.
I don’t think every location has one…but a lot do.
There are apparently OpenVPN profile you can import, but as I said in my earlier comment - I just couldn’t get it to work (connection attempts would just time out).
I still have like ~18 months of PIA left (joined under a 100% cashback offer), but will likely switch to Proton or Mullvad afterwards - as they both seem to work better under Linux from what I’ve read.
I’m sure over time I’ll tinker more under the hood over time, but for now - I’m just trying to ease myself into Linux with pre-configured installers when particular apps aren’t available through the Cachy Package Manager.
30-odd years of Windows usage has dulled my IT skills!
Proton has a client app as well, doesn’t it? If it doesn’t have OpenVPN/Wireshark config support I would avoid it
PIA VPN
Holy mother of blob, Batman
I barely know what I’m looking at! 😅
Pretty sure I tried poking around that file on Bazzite also to see if I could locate the RPM to try and do a manual terminal install - but gave up after a few minutes.
you can layer vpns via rpm-ostree install [.rpm location]
I don’t think PIA uses RPMs
mullvad is a better choice anyways. you can also download a wireguard config and load it directly into the network manager
While I agree, it’s a pretty lame thing to say “This doesn’t work for your use case? That’s because your use case is wrong” If the distro doesn’t support PIA, then that is an issue with the distro, not the user.
Nah, it’s an issue, full stop. PIA isn’t responsible for making its shit work everywhere (tho it would be a more responsible approach to use an universal approach) and Bazzite isn’t responsible for making sure every program works on the distro.
Yeah I struggled with reading my rom library over SMB so also had to install something else.
It’s amazing. Everything works perfectly, all my favorite games run smooth and gnome is amazing.
I left Linux 10 years ago because I didn’t have the time to maintain a system.
Now it’s less work than Windows to set everything up
How do they get those data? Telemetry?
I’ve been using Bazzite for a while and mostly happy with it. So from 2026 and on, I’ll start donating a Windows license amount of money to Bazzite and other fundementals every year. Because fuck Windows, that’s why.
