Tech Over Tea - Bazzite Linux Is SteamOS Minus Valve | Kyle Gospodnetich

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

The upload got delayed quite a bit but today we have Kyle Gospodnetich the founder of the Bazzite Linux project which if you're in the Linux gaming space you've 100% heard of before as a direct replacement to Steam OS==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Website: https://bazzite.gg/Github: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as always your host Brody Robertson, and today we have the founder of a project you've probably heard of before, maybe you? I don't know. Welcome Kyle from the Bazite Project. Is it Bazite or Bazite? I always say Bazite, I'm not actually sure on the correct pronunciation. Hi everyone, welcome to be here. It is Bazzite, but you can call it any which way you like it. I don't mind. Okay, awesome, awesome. Well, welcome to the project. Welcome to the show. And every time I do an intro, there's always something that goes wrong. I've done nearly 300 of these and I still can't get it right. So we're not going to change anything. Sounds good. So, um, we're not going to change anything. Sounds good.

So I feel like most people are probably, they may be like come across the project at some point, even if they don't necessarily daily drive it. But for anyone who maybe has no idea what the project actually is, can you give sort of a brief overview of it and then we can get sort of more into why it exists and sort of the the reason why someone might want to use it? Sure, yeah. Basite as it is today is a Linux custom image designed to make gaming on Linux as easy as possible for the average user. And that's for all hardware, whether it's a handheld or a home theater PC. If it's something you can game on, Bazite very likely runs on it.

How long has Bazite been around for now? Just over two years. Okay, I thought it'd been longer. Maybe up to... No, it's been a wild ride. That's for sure Yeah, my my center time over the past couple years I feel like this is for most people kind of just like out of the window I have no idea when anything came out when anything started Yeah, well, I mean the growth has just been crazy too too. It doesn't feel like a two year old project anymore.

So when did this Steam Deck come out? I feel like it is around the same time. Yeah, it was out for a fair bit before we started. That's kind of the origin story, actually. Yeah, because this is a yeah. So it's February 2022. This is something that often comes up whenever discussions of Bazite come up. You'll hear people talk, especially those who are maybe not necessarily Linux users themselves.

They'll see SteamOS as this sort of Holy Grail, this thing in the distance. When SteamOS is generally available, then gaming on Linux is going to be good. I've said my piece on that many, many, many times. But I do think Bazite is sort of in that position to fulfill the wishes that most people are looking for when they are looking for that magical SteamOS. Yeah, well, you know, first off, thank you for that magical SteamOS. Yeah, well, first off, thank you for that. Before I did Bazite, I was in game development, and even before that I made Half-Life mods.

So I've been doing Valve for a very long time. They're kind of in the position where everything they touch turns to gold, so the community sort of sees that they have're like, they have the minus touch. Like if SteamOS comes out, it must be good. But, you know, you and I are pretty deep into the Linux ecosystem. We're kind of able to see, you know, where the limitations are, right?

They have a smaller team, it's arch-based, you know, it's this sort of like snapshot amalgamation. So there's areas that SteamOS is just not ever really going to touch. And I think Bazite sort of fills in that gray area. That's kind of the life that it's taken on. So you mentioned that the Steam Deck is sort of part of the origin story of the project. How does that sort of come about? Like, why did the project sort of begin?

Yeah, well, that site started by accident. Um, I spent about six months in the Steam Deck Discord doing support. Uh, cause I had been using Fedora Silverblue, which is their atomic variant on my desktop computer. I was already very well versed in kind of working around having a read-only route and a lot of that translated to SteamOS. So I'd pop in there, you know, there'd be some question like, hey, you know, how do I use Docker? Like, how can I install my office tools?

Why is it when I install something and the system updates it gets wiped out? So I helped people through it. I kind of figured out all of the rough patches of Steam OS that needed work. And then one day I realized, you know, hey, these are just a few packages. I could port these over to the Fedora ecosystem and I could build this on top of Fedora Silverblue and have a much stronger, much more modifiable read-only route than what SteamOS offers. Let's give it a shot. So I did that in the weekend. I had something that worked well enough, and I dropped it. I walked away. And then about two weeks later, I came back and found like 14 open pull requests and said, okay, we have something here. And the project's just kind of ballooned ever since.

Is that part of the Bazite repo or is that its own separate thing? Is that, if it is, is it still somewhere online? I can see that. Yeah, I can probably link you to my personal Bazite repo that closed when we became part of Universal Blue. Okay, okay. So, okay, it is like a separate thing then.

It was like, okay, when we're doing our own thing under Silver Blue and now we're part of UBlue, so it's like a new continuation then. Yeah, well, it was a seamless transition. I just changed the from tag and the container file from Universal Blue. But I used to live under my GitHub repo because I wasn't part of UBlue

and I wasn't really intending on it being any more than just an experiment. Well why did you go from building things off of Silver Blue, which is the upstream fedora base, to being part of UBlue? Like how did that transition come about? Actually you know part of the inspiration behind Bazzite 2 was watching George Castro's videos where he was, you know, demonstrating, making custom images on top of Silverblue. So I was already using a lot of the things he pioneered. And then when he reached out to me and was like, hey, come join us.

I mean, that was a natural fit. Right. So you also gave us some really nice benefits for gaming too, because you already had Nvidia images. So we made a Bazzite Nvidia build pretty much the same weekend we moved. So you're effectively doing a lot of the stuff that UBLUE was doing anyway, so you might as well just take the thing that's doing the work so you don't have to do it again. Exactly, yeah. UBLUE has the main images, which are where most of the minor changes go into.

So that lets us all save work by having one repo for the solid base that we all build upon. I think we should probably talk about what, for anyone who's unaware, what U-Blue is, because that's going to come up a number of times throughout the episode. I feel like a lot of people probably have come across it or at least heard about some of the projects that are a part of it like Bluefin, like Aurora, like Bazzite. But for anyone who may not be aware of what this sort of collection of projects is and how it all fits together, I think just a brief explanation there is probably going to help as well. Yeah, Universal Blue is an organization dedicated to bringing

cloud native tooling to the Linux desktop. That doesn't mean it runs in the cloud or anything of the sort. It just means the tools and techniques that are used on the cloud in massive Linux servers being used to build a desktop image. Yeah, it's... Okay, so just one more thing. The cloud-native term, I know people like to use that term. It's not a term most people understand.

Yeah, I mean, this is kind of the funny part, right? This stuff is as Linux as it gets, right? The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is part of the funny part, right? This stuff is as Linux as it gets, right? The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is part of the Linux Foundation. Yeah. And the cloud native images are the majority of Linux. Yeah, when we talk about like the developer and yeah, like the developer and the enterprise space like this is a term that most people are aware of there, but Bazite isn't really focused towards those people.

It's to like general gamers. And that's more like Linux desktop-y people who, they're like aware of containers and things like that, but probably don't use the cloud native term much themselves or if ever. Exactly. I mean, and that's part of why we don't go way out of our way to say, you know, oh, this is cloud native. These are images, you know, it's it's Linux and it auto updates

and it doesn't break when it updates. Like that's the main benefit to the end user and why we push this tech. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the whole image thing's always an interesting conversation. Why do you feel like it is beneficial to have an image-based system? Because most people out there are still running these traditional desktops, whether it be something Arch, whether it be regular Fedora or, you know, anything else out there. But what is it that makes an image-based system make more sense, at least in your mind? For me, it's stability and testing. When I update an image-based system, I'm not updating individual packages. I'm just grabbing the absolute latest and greatest version

of that image and rolling it on top of my existing install. So that can be tested ahead of time. And you know, is that is a good known state where anyone who is trying to support you has the exact same files on their system bit for bit. And then there's all the other benefits of an image-based system like rollbacks, even arbitrary to a given date or by tag.

Like if you are an NVIDIA user and you decide the previous NVIDIA driver is a better fit for you, we tag our images by the driver in the image. So you can, with the one command, roll back to the last build of the previous driver, whatever that may be. So those sorts of benefits, I think, make for a much more compelling desktop experience where you're not really fighting package management problems. And if you need to, if there's some

package you need not in the image, that's where containers like Distro Box or, you know, features like Brew or any number of other systems we have come into play. Yeah, Distro Box is one of those tools that it really did make things a lot easier for regular people because you've always been able to set up Docker or Podman like manually yourself. up Docker or Podman like manually yourself, but to do the stuff that's being done in DistroBox, to have it that neatly integrated into the system where it just feels like a regular app, yeah, startup times a bit because you know, you have to start up the Docker environment, yeah, yeah, but like once that's all started up after like you've first booted. It is a very convenient tool and it really does make these image-based systems way easier than they used to be because when they when image-based systems were first coming along you really did have to rely on dealing with containers yourself or the early days of Flatpak and App

Images where there just wasn't really that much available. Nowadays, Flatpak is, you know, the FlatHub store is quite... there's quite a lot of software in there. But if you go back to those earlier days, it just... it just really didn't make much sense. Now with tools like Distrobox, really, I... like you could just, for the most part, do what you want on them. There's obviously limitations with that, but for the majority of use cases, you could use a system like that and not really be too worried about it. Yeah. I mean, I'll sing Distro Box's praises all day. It's great. Even outside of image base, just on a regular mutable distro. Being able to load up an Arch Distro Box and install

something like hard info from the AUR, export it to my desktop and run it like it's a normal installed application is amazing. Or I'm a software developer by trade. So having amazing. Or, you know, I'm a software developer by trade. So having containers I can, you know, start up, all my tools in use and blow up. It's fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. And for Flatpak, you know, another place where Valve I think has really helped to push Linux too. Steam OS and the Steam Deck being as flathead hub heavy as they are brought a lot of interest to it. And Universal Blue as well tries to, you know,

bring as much into it as we can. As you mentioned, you know, it was young and there wasn't a lot available for it, but now we've got pretty much every OBS plugin you could want, there's every browser on there now, and more and more things are getting verified. Like it's a great place to be. Absolutely.

So you mentioned that, sorry, so there's a bit more of a feedback when I... Some things I say I do hear a little bit of myself back. Just for we get too late in the episode and I don't deal with it. Sorry about that. No, no, it's all good. It's all good. Okay, it seems like it's fine now. We'll see what happens later on. What I was gonna say is You've mentioned that Bazzite came about because of things like steam OS and the Steam Deck

But going back to when the Steam Deck was announced What was your reaction with that? Because I remember when this happened, well going back even further, I remember when Proton was first announced. Back then I wasn't using Linux. Like I'd heard the Steam Machine thing years before that. I was like, this is cool, but I don't really care about Linux. When the Steam Deck came out, I was well into using Linux at that point. I'd already been using it for a couple of years, but what was your reaction there? What did you think when you saw that Valve was making a Linux gaming handheld

and was not just, hey, we're gonna work on the software side now, which they'd been doing for a number of years with Proton, but they are fully committing to doing this now. Yeah, well, you know, I was around for the first iteration too. I think probably best way to answer this, you know, with Linux, I got my start as a little kid, like I used to wait for a bunch of CDs in the mail to try them on our little next-gen computer in the house and you know, play with Comp Diffusion and all the wobbly window effects or whatever I can get my port computer to work with. So when Steam OS came out I immediately tried it like okay like this must be great and unfortunately it was a terrible

experience. Oh original Steam OS. Yeah because there was no Proton you know none of this stuff was here yet so TF2 kind of like ran worse than Windows. Most of your games didn't work like it just wasn't them Yeah, so when the same deck came out, I kind of looked at it with skepticism. I was more or less thinking like okay, this is potentially a better switch But they could make the same mistakes again switch, but they could make the same mistakes again. But I want to run Linux on my desktop. I'm going to support it. So I purchased the top end model thinking like, look, at the very least, if this fails, maybe we get anti-cheat finally. Like I'm going to,

I'm going to invest in this. Let's, let's give valve some, some leeway here. And then it came out and it was frankly awesome. I mean, the amount of work they put into proton was incredible The fact that HDR worked at all as quickly as it did was unheard of right like that had been bite-shed for god knows how long I Think it was an amazing transformation. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think anyone is gonna disagree with you there You skipped the one in the middle that's very important there, when our Proton came along.

Early Proton was surprisingly good, cause Wine was, like Wine's been around for a very long time at that point. It just, Wine's always been a very general Windows software thing. Gaming had never really been the focus of the project. People had always been gaming with it, right? Like you go to WineDB or... no, sorry. Is it called...? Yeah, no WineDB is the thing. You could find people running like, you know, really old versions of League of Legends before they broke that with Anti-Cheat, really old versions of WoW, like you could absolutely do it, but

Proton came along and they're like, hey... So... I think it was like... Maybe six games in the original list? Something like that? Um... Yeah, I think you're right, like verified titles. Yeah, yeah, one of them was near because the person who started dxvk Specifically made it because they wanted to play near

Which I always love But that list very quickly expanded we look at proton db today I don't even know what the number is. I don't check the number anymore because it's so many games. Um... 25,000 of the proton DB numbers. If you just want to go Steam Deck verified or playable, we're almost at 19,000. Like, that is crazy.

19,000. Like, that is crazy. Like that is amazing. Yeah. Let's see. I have just shy of 500 Steam games. And according to ProtonDB right now, 92% of them are playable. Yeah. Yeah. Little me in 2006 would have done a backflip for those numbers. Yeah, like when Steam Machines came out, it was like you had the Valve games, and there was like a random other assortment of titles. I believe the Shadow of Mordor Linux port came out alongside the Steam machines and a couple other random like they're obviously indie games right like you're always gonna have the the random indie devs who also happen to either use Linux or have a Linux build but

nothing like it is today where Unless a game is multiplayer. I don't really think about being on Linux I don't I don't even know the last time I thought about being on Linux. I don't, I don't even know the last time I thought about being on Linux when I bought a game. I just kinda, I just bought it and maybe I changed a proton version, maybe I changed a like a run option. I'm an AMD user so obviously don't have some of the Nvidia problems, but... Right, best case. Yeah, yeah, and it like... 99% of the time, it just works without doing anything.

If it doesn't, it's maybe five minutes of tweaking. Yeah. I mean, even the anti-cheat ones, a lot of them are, you know, fully supported. Like I played Apex Legends for the longest time, or there was one glorious weekend where Rainbow Six Siege's anti-cheat broke and you can play it on Linux and it has a proper Vulkan renderer too. Like that was, that was awesome. I wish it would be soft-cared enough to just flip the switch. Yeah, the anti-cheat thing is... it's a problem, right? Because you're gonna have these game devs who do not want to enable the Linux support.

Whether it be your Fortnite, whether it be games like Apex Legends which had support and they were like, nah, you don't need that support anymore. Whether it be the various gacha games out there which to be fair Some of them actually are getting Linux support or they don't care that people are playing the game on Linux I there there are means that you can get games That are not necessarily supported on Linux working and people aren't getting banned anymore Linux working and people aren't getting banned anymore. So I guess either they don't care or it's such a little problem that they're just like, we'll deal with it later.

Um, but the ancient, we'll go on. I think Roblox and, uh, Minecraft are sort of that way. Cause Roblox lets the third party clients exist and function. And then Minecraft has the bedrock release that is just running the Android version on Linux and they let it happen. You know, that's fine. Yeah. And the entity thing is really big because obviously, you know, at this stage isn't GTA 6 next year. And GTA Online for GTA 6 is gonna be really big and

GTA 5 doesn't work right now with online. So that's very likely gonna be the same state and Yeah Yeah, I mean the good news with GTA is there's a dedicated modding community So I suspect Linux gamers will just be able to use Third-party servers to play that game and probably have a better experience anyway. Well, if some of the problems with GTA V still exist, like the whole peer-to-peer IP sharing, yeah, you're probably right then.

But this is a problem where there's been discussions of how it can be solved. It's not going to be solved without like, without support from the Antecheat developers, but there's been discussions of the possibility of maybe like a specific signed kernel. Like there would be a steam OS kernel, it would be, this is the kernel you would have to run. I heard some discussions of maybe site, like doing some sort of kernel module based system. What are your thoughts here on, like the approach that could be done, but like what would you like to see done to make this, cause the entity problem not gonna go away.

Like we're gonna have to deal with it some way and Valve's in the best position to deal with it like do something about it Yeah, it's the problem is it's multifaceted right right right? The anti-cheat companies already provide Linux support namely easy anti-cheat and battle-line Also, you know all this stuff like punkbuster works fine, too. Yeah, yeah Also, you know, all this stuff like Punkbuster works fine too. So that parts out the way, you know, it leaves it now up to the wider game developer community or worse, their publishers.

Some of them will put in the effort to turn it on and then just not support Linux. And that's fine because the community will generally support itself or Valve will through Proton or, you know, you get Glorious Eggroll coming in and making patches to his version, no matter what, it's going to run. But the opposite side of that is a publisher or a game developer going, hey, this is 4% of our audience, maybe, and it's going to cost me $100,000 to keep one developer running support for this for the next year. It's not worth it to me. I'm not going to pay it. So getting past that, I think is going to be the main hurdle.

The higher numbers SteamOS can push, and this is part of why we're so transparent with our user numbers too, just the more interest you can show, the better chance you get with developers paying attention. I think the most recent example that was Marvel Rivals, they actually listed Bad Light in one of their patch notes. So you don't get- I must have missed that one. That was a pretty cool one. But you don't get that kind of interest

unless you can show numbers and your users actually reach out and show that they care. So that's part one. Part two, the kernel thing is that one's going to be rough. I don't think the industry is going to go that route only because the sorts of invasive elements necessary for a kernel level anti-cheat are simply never going to be merged upstream. It is possible that Valve might ship their own custom patches, but I see them working through that in a different way. There's a path of least resistance there that doesn't involve kernel level stuff.

Yeah, the only reason I bring that up is because the kernel level anti-cheat is like that's that is the direction this industry seems to be going with anti cheat and I don't see See the one exception is the games that support Mac OS because Mac OS doesn't they don't allow any of this But there are some of these games that still work on Mac OS But it also is a much larger user base as well. So much larger user base as well. So there is a financial justification there that even if they can't run the entity in the way they wanna run it,

there's still enough people in that system where they will find a way to do it anyway. Yeah, well, that aspect I think is starting to flip. I think Linux will be bigger than Mac OS if it's not already, which will help. Part of it too is, let's see, part of it too is just this is a cat and mouse game. So you have kernel level being introduced to stop these software-based cheats from working. And then you have cheat developers doing things now outside of the running system, like watching the screen with a GPU ML program and then moving a USB mouse.

So eventually, the kernel level is not going to be good enough. And I think the industry will be forced to move to server-side server authoritative methods, which would probably include some kind of ML to detect input behaviors reminiscent of, say, being able to see through walls. Because a player that knows where another player is does not behave the same as a player that doesn't. And that is a detectable state. Yeah, then I Don't know which game it was

Yeah, I don't know which game it was but this is probably a technique that's already been dealt with by the cheater because as you said is a cat-and-mouse game a few years back there were players being like player models being placed in areas where a regular player would not be able to get to and they were using that as a means to detect people who are cheating because if you detect if you focused on the player who could not be seen in an area they could not get to the only context that you would do that is if you could see through walls, if you had some form of aimbotting. That's brilliant.

I never thought of that, but I love the idea. A honeypot player. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like there's like a whole deep rabbit hole you can go down. Some games, cheaters have like handshakes of how they interact with other cheaters um like I think it was like Tarkov or something

there's like a a wave back and forth they'll do with it they like bob their head back and forth if they see another cheater through the wall so they they know that like you know we're like we're allies here we're both cheating let's let's like go after the other people like it's it's It is really it it's a really fun rabbit hole to go down and just explore like what is um,

Like just how weird things get Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm just seeing like all the creative ways that companies deal with it is always fun, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The VAL, right? They've already spent a lot of time on this and their answer was server-side anti-cheat. That's what VACnet is. So hopefully other companies follow and that's the direction this ultimately goes. I don't think kernel can stick around forever. There's already workarounds for it. Mm-hmm. The argument against that is... The cheetah situation in a lot of Valve games isn't super great.

But to be fair, the games are really old as well, and I'm not sure how much Valve is really investing in fighting cheaters. Like, obviously those games make like TF2, you know, TF2 still makes a lot of money. Counter-Strike, you know, everybody knows the counters. Everybody knows like people who gamble on skins. Like, we all know those make a lot of money. But I don't know how much money Valve is putting back into it to resolving the problem. Yeah. Well, and I think ultimately Valve's in the only position to be able to answer that. CS2 was the only one with VACnet, so those are the only numbers that matter for determining

how effective server-side anti-cheat is. And then VAC as a whole has always done delayed bans to keep cheater developers from figuring out if their cheats were actually detected or not. And therefore, hopefully, honeypotting other people that then go buy their cheats. Yeah, yeah. So, while on one hand that's beneficial,

on the other, it might give the perception that the anti-cheat is ineffective because of that grace period. Right, yeah. Yeah, the um, the delayed ban thing is... I've heard the explanation for it and it makes sense. Uh, like if you, if you immediately ban someone for something they're doing then you can use that as a way to A-B test whether or not something is going to get detected by the system. Like it makes sense as a, as a, but it does mean that you're going to have quite a long time for there to be issues to be resolved.

And look, I just wish people didn't cheat in online games. That would be nice. Like then we wouldn't have a problem. That's the easier fix. Just please don't cheat. We're having fun here. No need for that. Yeah, like, just, if you want to do that, like,

it would be nice if more games had the ability to set up like, um, like custom matches and private lobbies where you can just like, mess around. You know, if you wanted to go back and play like, if you wanted to go back and like, do like Quake for example, like go play some Quake 3. If you wanted to set up a match where it's like everybody here is cheating, everybody here is aimbotting. It's like you can just make it very clear from the outset that like this is going to be an absolute disaster.

You could do that. But now with like games having these like auto quick matches, and then not having like server software available as well. Like, you know, it's... You get convenience with the new systems, but at the same time, you lose some of that ability to sort of curate the experience. Yeah, the death of custom servers, I think, has been a negative to the game industry as a whole. Even on the cheaters situation, like at least if I join a community server there's a you know admin that will go ahead and ban them almost right away. Right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. We kind of

got sidetracked a bit there and started talking about anti-cheat. Let's shift back over to Bazite. over to Bazzite. Um, where do we go from here? Well, actually, you want to talk a bit about the the distro model of Bazzite. I guess we can talk about that because we did bring up the fact that it is built off of U-Blue. But I guess we can talk about how the update model works, how all of this fits together, like what changes are made on top of Baz- uh on top of you, Blue, and how much stuff you really like can pull from being based on that project? Sure, yeah. Um, so part of Bazite's uh, you know, lore is that we don't consider ourselves a distro. Bazlight is a custom image and the actual distro here is Fedora. So we take a regular copy of Fedora, silver, blue or Kinoite. It gets brought into Universal Blue and turned into a Universal Blue main image.

That just means that a lot of the tweaks that end users would apply to a normal Fedora install are already applied. There's another image made that has the NVIDIA drivers installed, all that really nice stuff. And then Asite consumes that. From there, we add our kernel tweaks, some of which come from Cache-GOS, some of which are from the Nuquara project, a lot of which are developed in-house. some of which are from the Nuqvara project, a lot of which are developed in-house. That gets thrown into the image. All of the SteamOS packages that we've ported get added so that you have game mode,

and the updater gets connected into Steam, and all the other niceties that you expect from a home theater PC experience. We add our custom packages like HHD for handling all of the different obscure handhelds out there, everything from the Legion Go to the Rogue Ally to the Zotac Zone. And then we apply a couple extra fun tweaks for users to use as well. So if you're more of a power user and you want to customize your CPU scheduler, some of the nice features from cache.gos, like the SketchX schedulers are already there for you to play with,

and that gets shipped out to the end user. Updates, if you're, we put out two different images. One is a desktop image and one is a deck image. The desktop image is meant for home, just desktop PCs. The deck image is meant for handhelds and HT PCs. The only real difference is the deck ones boot to Steam game mode automatically. And all of them auto update to the next image, whether it's through Steam or just automatically in the background for the desktop images. I don't think I put this video out yet, but I was making a video on how much I love

the way that the downloader is done on Bazzite and a couple other things under YouBlue where it breaks it down into the different kind of device you have and even though a lot of the options you have here literally just point you to the exact same thing. For someone who has no idea what they're looking at, like you can say, okay, well, this is an image that'll work on the Steam Deck, on this, on that, and another handheld. But the fact that it's broken down into those different devices, even though at the end you're still gonna, I think in most cases, get the same image,

it gives someone who has no idea what they're looking at, that sort of reassurance that the thing they're downloading is actually going to work on the hardware they have. Yeah. Well, thank you. I mean, that was the end goal. It's kind of it's multifaceted on one hand. Yeah.

And user who's never touched this stuff before knows exactly where to go. And on the other, it's the reinsurance that if your device is in my hardware list there, we're going to support it. Like that is the supported hardware list, even if changing that hardware doesn't actually change your final image. Yeah, like it. Oh, you're budgie coming soon. Is that how long has that been there for? That's been there for a bit. Um, Budgie is the next desktop that we're choosing to support We're waiting for the Wayland update that's supposed to add HDR and VR to Budgie And then after that we're considering visiting cosmic, but we'll see where that goes

Yeah, cosmic is supposed to be entering beta at this stage Next cycle is the is the plan. From my experience using it, next cycle makes sense. If you're waiting for full release to do it, my expectation probably late Q3. That would be my guess. Yeah, that's fair. And that works out for our timing too,

because we got to get Budgie out of the way first anyway. That's, that's goal number one. Right, right, right. And we're trying not to ship beta stuff if we can, you know. It's already hard enough trying to modify Gnome to be a good gaming experience out of the box. Like the more, the more we add, that's not already there, the harder our lives are.

Actually, yeah, let's, let's go to that. What sort of changes do you have to make to Gnome? Is there anything you especially have to do with KDE? Obviously that's on the Steam Deck as well. It's a pretty, from my understanding, pretty clean experience on the Steam Deck besides very minor theming changes to make it branded Steam OSC? Yeah. That package we include,

so all the fun Valve themes for KDE are already there. On the Gnome side, I spent some time actually making a Valve theme for Gnome. So just to offer some feature parity or adding the right-click add to Steam option and Nautilus, those sorts of things. Feature-wise, KDE has been the gold standard. HDR, VRR, the ability to allow for screen tearing

under Waylands, all that really nice stuff. A lot of the work for the Bazite Gnome images has just been merging clutches before they were ready so that you could use HDR, you could use VRR, or now in the modern versions, toggling on those features, despite them being labeled experimental as the default because gamers would expect that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, or just fighting things where necessary, like mouse input patches we have in Mutter right now, or patches for screen tannery, just things to try and get them up to feature parity. I think GNOME now is finally catching up to where KDE was, so hopefully we'll have more competition between them in that space, but the last couple cycles have been a little rough.

Yeah, yeah. Hopefully things do speed up soon, because I know the next version is At this stage the next version is when they're fully dropping the x11 side so hopefully not having that baggage with them even though the code kind of was just there and wasn't really being touched having that completely gone takes that of everyone's mind and having that completely gone takes that of everyone's mind and Energy can be shifted whatever little energy was focused on that can be shifted over to dealing with further way the Waylon problems

Absolutely, it's nice seeing that wine taking that direction now, too. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that was a a Very long sequence of patches. I think it's, it's broken down as like 10 different patch parts, but each part is like a lot of code. I don't know right now the state of the Wyn Whelan stuff. I know that it was like mostly merged upstream and it's like marked as experimental now and you can make use of it But it's not It's not the default yet. I have not played around with it. I should go and do so though It's worth it wine 10 has it and now proton GE 10 one just came out which Ported all of those whaling patches over to Proton, which is nice.

And the user benefit is now if you toggle on the Wayland renderer, you can just use HDR in games on your desktop. It now just works. You don't need to do any other WSI workarounds, any of that crazy stuff. It's just out of the box Okay, okay. I don't have an HDR screen But who's who do that is a that is a nice thing to have Absolutely because I like my money HDR screen is my steam deck And it looks great. I like it Like I don't know how much an HDR screen is now, at least for like, you know, for the cheap ones, they can get a bit rough with the level of brightness they hit. So you don't really want a super cheap one.

The cheap ones aren't even HDR. They're just lying about it. Yeah. Yeah. Like they will report as HDR and you'll get the HDR option. But are you really getting that experience? No No Yeah, um It is nice that we are seeing things fully go like actually fully go Wayland now like we it has been a very slow very long process to get here I

Remember I think the first time I time I properly took notice of Wayland was when George Stavrakis got the patches for capturing your desktop in OBS done. I didn't have any interest in touching it before you could, like, if I couldn't consistently capture things with one tool across everything for me, it just was not at all viable and there were people running it back then and you know, you've always had you always had the naysayers about Wayland, but it's it's It's kind of like the naysayers with system D The longer time goes on, the less it matters because the problems that were there are resolved.

Any like any issues that are brought up now are either issues that used to exist or issues that aren't. They're not really issues, they're just things you're just not used to because you don't feel like changing things out. Wayland still has problems and especially on the accessibility side. But it's mostly there for most people now. Yep. I think the accessibility will get better too, cause if Redpat wants to ship Wayland as the default for RHEL, they're going to need to support accessibility. Well, they actually have now.

RHEL 10 is the first one where they do Wailand only. And that's out now. Right, so that's the next fight for them. It's gonna have to be that. Yeah, yeah. Hopefully we see a sort of investment like back in the early 2000s with Sun investing a lot of money in building the accessibility stack.

So that's the only reason we have an accessibility stack, really, like there was something, like some sort of thing before then, but most of that investment was when Sun cared about the desktop. And then people have sort of supported it over time and done what they can, but things are kind of rotted away.

And then the swap from X11 to Wayland, a lot of those things need a fundamental rework and yeah, it's gotten there. But like for people that desperately need accessibility and like cannot use their system without a screen reader consistently working, there are still people that are locked to the X11 side at least for now. Yeah, no, absolutely agree. But I think it'll get better rapidly. It has to really.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially if X11 gets winded down like it has been. Yeah. I think it helps too to make sure that you look at this without any rose-tipped and goggles because that's 11 I mean even at its height had issues like Not allowing multiple monitors with different refresh rates Edit a config to get the system back up and running like really just terrible UX stuff that would be a

Show stopper for any normal user. Mm-hmm stuff that would be a showstopper for any normal user. Yeah. Well, X11 did get better over time, but it kind of stopped development. If you look at the graph of commits in X11, I think it's the peak was about 2007 and then it just plummeted down after that. Yeah. I think one of the things that made X11 actually usable and I it's good that I think it's important people to remember this things like X-Render were not like part of the

X11 protocol initially. There was a time where if you wanted to change your monitor configurations, you would have to change the config file, restart the server, and boot back into it. Yep. Yep. I mean, that's funny. Those were like the golden days of Linux when it really was just for nerds. No one has to get into it. Yeah.

If you have to deal with stuff like that, no one else is going to try to deal with it. Exactly. It's fun though. I do miss projects like Compass Fusion and, you know, a lot of the other crazy 3D effects that were built on X11. Just given the era, the decade, you have Microsoft fighting to get Aero Glass and DWM out and then you have Linux projects with rotating 3D desktop cubes with a fish tank rendering in the background, you know? Mm-hmm. I will say that I...

Part of the fun of desktop design has sort of been lost as things have gotten more polished and there's been more of a focus on let's have a like clean good experience and KDE still has you know it still has the cube as an option but it's like in a menu somewhere and it's not enabled by default. You're gonna like know where it is Gnome doesn't really have any of this stuff pre-installed most of its in like extensions You'll find like burning windows and things like that And I understand why it's gone this way like you want to have a good experience

You want people to you don't want people to show up me like why it like yeah, it's it's fun It's neat to see but like you don't want to see people be like why am I Windows burning away? Why is like there are cube to swap my desktop? But that doesn't mean I can't think it was fun and a part of me does sort of Sort of wish that I was a Linux user back then Looking back at what it was like there. But then I remember like, yes, that's cool. But then all of the problems that were around at the time,

all of the issues that are not yet being resolved. Yeah. Or even just in it systems like you mentioned system, these bring up, like, imagine going back to when it was 50 different config files and you know a bunch of random bash scripts joined together like no one wanted to deal with that. Yeah. You're kidding yourself if you think system D is not a better experience. Random side tangent on the note of init scripts, upstream system D is dropping support for Upstream system D is dropping support for

sys via knit scripts So devian now has to clean up all of the packages they had that still had Scripts with that and other distros that happen to have anything around are gonna have to deal with it as well So it's sort of the it is the last death throws of that older approach. This is obviously going to be distros like devil in doing their thing, but it's very much going to be they are doing their thing. Pretty much everything else is going to move on and has moved on long since then. Yeah, I mean, that's the beauty of Linux as a whole, right? You're allowed to be opinionated and you're allowed to continue to use old stuff.

And we all just get to work together and make whatever it is that we want to make. So you've talked about the growth of Bazite a couple of times. When the project first started, what sort of reception did you get from it? And how did things sort of go from there? Yeah, well early reception was fairly positive. We had our fair share of bugs, you know, there were lots of hardware features that didn't work because we were still figuring out what kernel patches were necessary on top of Fedora or even what regressions had happened. For a minute we had a bug where 64 gigabyte Steam decks would randomly corrupt the entire drive.

That ended up being an upstream change to how they handle NVMe driver for EMMC cards. So getting through all that was a challenge, but as things progressed and got more stable and we were able to focus more and more on the user experience, the numbers just kind of went off the chart. Let's see where we're at here today. I'm just kind of scrolling down the website.

Right now we're sitting at 16.7 thousand active weekly users. And that's just based on count me stats, which Fedora does. So when RPMOS Tree runs to do an update, it will ping a server saying, you know, hey, I exist. That server doesn't save IP address in the sort, but you know, it's an anonymized like user count. And that's the number that we then consume to make that chart.

Okay. So this is probably as reasonable of a number you can get without you know spying on users right like it's it's like we never do we don't collect any stats of our own mm-hmm that's actually really and like I'm looking at this graph that's a really impressive growth because this is yeah the graph here stops it well there's not it that's not even this since like early in the project. That's going from 2024.

Okay, it has grown very quickly then. Yeah. Four times in a year. Yeah. What's that like? What is it like to have a project that is mentioned alongside things like SteamOS as a, you know, just like if you can't run SteamOS and you want something SteamOS like, like, here you go. Yeah, it's hard to describe, right? I never set out to build this the way that it is. I didn't think it was going to get popular and that was never a goal. But to be sitting on here now, it's hard to believe every time I see it. It really is. And I guess just the pressure to make sure that we put out quality software that people enjoy is what keeps this project going. That and the fact that we use it day to day. So, you know, if I want to play Doom,

the Dark Ages and it needs kernel patches, those are going in Bazite. So that keeps things flowing too. So that keeps things flowing too. It is very important to be dog fooding the software that you're working with and ensuring that Not only does it just like it work at a sort of, I guess surface level, like, you know, it's booting and all of that,

but like things that people are trying to actively do on the system are also working like you would expect. Yeah, exactly, exactly. If you don't have a developer at least using every feature you're shipping, it means things can become vestigial or not get supported. So having a large number of developers working on your stuff is very important. I think that's where Universal Blue excels in being built in GitHub means anybody can contribute and we get patches from all over the place now.

I assume there are cases where you get patches sent to you where you're like, this is a great patch, but it makes more sense to sort of go to the upstream project instead. Yeah, that happens from time to time. Sometimes we'll do both where we ship the patch and then we help that person get upstream it so we can stop shipping it. It really depends on the nature of it. Right. I'm a Fedora packager now. And then Bowsite as a project, you know, tries to work with Chimera OS, we've done work with

Nobara, with Glorious Eggroll. So a lot of this too is this communal sharing of information. We're all just trying to make Linux gaming better. So there's no reason for us to compete or fight with each other. You know, we share openly and freely. Kind of the beauty of this model and this entire Linux ecosystem that we're a part of. I think a lot of people don't realize how much sharing there is amongst these distros. You mentioned before about, um, kernel change you make, you were talking

about, um, uh, cachey or catchy. I don't know the correct way to say it. I sort of just jumped back and forth whenever I'm saying the name, but like using some of it, yeah, like using some of their kernel changes, using kernel changes from other places. using some of their kernel changes, using kernel changes from other places. And it can be easy to forget that, yes, they are tech, like,

yes, these distros technically are competing. There is a certain number of people who are gonna be using distros, right? Like most people aren't gonna be running five different gaming distros. They're gonna pick one and they're gonna use that. But at the same time, it's's like most people doing this are operating from a volunteer perspective it's not like you're dealing with a company-to-company like

operations where there is like a direct monetary loss if somebody goes over to another system so there is a lot of... A lot of like... I guess, yeah, generally just sharing of useful things that's gonna make everything better. Yeah. I think that's especially true in this space, because, you know, we're not a distro. I don't necessarily care if someone uses my stuff.

There's no benefit to me. I just want people to have a good experience. I want them to have a nice place to play and use their stuff. So whether someone's using Bazite or they're using Nobara or they're using Pimera, I get the same benefit. I've made Linux gaming better. So my fight is not to get Bazite more users, it's to uplift all these patches into upstream and make this process easier everywhere.

Bazite's just a place where I have the most control to try to drive that. Right, right. I think it's a very healthy way to look at it. Like it's a... How would I put it? How would I put it? I think a lot of people can, even though there is this communal thing, people can still get competitive with it and sort of lose sight of the overall goal of generally just making things more pleasant to use. Yeah, it can happen. I think it's less likely in the Linux space, but only amongst people doing this in their spare time.

The job aspect of Linux, of course, where your financials are directly tied to your user number changes things a little bit, but there's also a lot less of that, I think, in the Linux desktop than in other places too. Right, right, yeah, for sure. And even under that scenario, everything being open source and GPL incentivizes community effort, right? Like Google and Microsoft are some of the biggest

contributors to Linux, despite money being involved. Like that is ultimately a net benefit to everyone. Like that is ultimately a net benefit to everyone. So one thing you'll see from time to time, you mentioned the thing with like Marvel Arrivals, where like Bazzite got a mention in their patch notes, but you will see the odd mention of Bazzite from various Linux handheld companies like it'll it's usually not like a main focus, but they'll be doing like a Presentation and they'll be talking about oh, hey we you can either we have Linux supported on this device directly we ship something with Linux or

It's hey we're interested in doing Linux and then like one of the examples that will come up is It's hey, we're interested in doing Linux and then like one of the examples that'll come up is something like like like Bazzite or like a Camaro OS things like that and I always think is this it is it is really neat to see that Even though valve did do this thing with steam OS. We're not We're not necessarily seeing everybody Go and spin up their own distros because you in that corporate settings you very likely could start to see that where Hey steam OS is doing one thing and then another like let's say

Asus OS and then Lenovo OS and they sort of just exist in their own little bubbles and Don't really try to do anything where like they're like existing in open source ecosystem But it seems like with the ones that are doing stuff in this space At least the engineers on their team Seem to understand the value of a shared approach here as well Yeah, I Part of it too is just it makes presenting the idea easier. So if I want to, you know, if I'm part of a handheld company and I want to say, you know, hey, let's try Linux on the next one, having an existing solution that works that you can just load up and put into a, you know, demo, all the execs, I think that's a very positive option for them.

execs, I think that's a very positive option for them. And then, you know, part of it too, is if you're trying to start something like this from scratch and have it in-house, that is a lot of extra effort to get to that point. You need to hire people that understand the Linux graphics stack. You need to hire people understand security under Linux graphics stack. You need to hire people that understand security under Linux and the right ways to build this and ensure that packages stay up to date. That's no small task. So sharing that load and entering a community project, I think is the path of least resistance.

On the note of the Linux handheld, what is your general thought of the growth of these Linux first handhelds? It's not, hey, you can take a handheld that already exists and install Linux on it. It's, we are selling a device that has Linux installed, like the Lenovo Legion Go S. Like Zotac recently announced a new device where that's going to have Manjaro installed. I don't exactly know what they're doing there. I assume they're spinning something themselves based on Manjaro. Like this is what I was talking about about most companies not doing this because Manjaro out of the box is not pre-configured for gaming. It doesn't have Steam installed things like that. So I'm not entirely sure what that's going to entail

if they're gonna sort of rebuild a SteamOS-like experience on top of Manjaro. Yeah, they actually, they did already. There's a device called the OrangePie Neo, which is another game that runs Manjaro. And it is very similar to Bazite where they have brought in SteamOS patches and Steam game mode,

and it behaves almost identically to SteamOS out of the box. I'm very happy to see these devices where they are being sold with Linux, not necessarily because I care too much about whatever they decide to run on it, whether it's Manjaro, whether it's SteamOS. But by releasing it with Linux installed, they are in a position where they are committed to supporting the device on Linux.

So if they do something weird, where it needs some weird drivers, those drivers are going to be available somewhere. You might have to extract them out of the distro, they might not be readily available to download off of a GitHub, but by being a device they're selling Linux on, there is going to be a way to support that device in things like Bazide or anything else out there. a way to support that device in things like Bazaar or anything else out there. Yeah, it compounds too because if those devices exist, you have individual component manufacturers that are going to want to make sales, but they now have to have Linux supported hardware drivers. You're going to have them pushing to get that upstream because they don't want to have to keep maintaining these drivers themselves. That's not work that anyone really wants to pay to do.

They'd rather that be a communal effort. And then you have, you know, this looks back to our anti cheat discussion where now there are more Linux devices in the wild that only run Linux that users that would like to play your games. So there's a financial incentive for flipping the anti-cheat switch. Yeah, I'm all for it. The more of these devices we sell, the better. Absolutely. It benefits everyone for every single one of these sold. Well, we've been talking a lot about handhelds, but it's not just handhelds we can do this on. Is that... I've noticed that, like, in your background this entire time, is that

we can do this on. Is that, I've noticed that like in your background this entire time, is that attached to like a home theater PC? What are you, what's powering the projector there? Or screen, is it screen? That's my home theater PC running Bazite. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And yeah, that's the other thing. Bazite isn't just for handhelds.

We've mainly been talking about handhelds, that's sort of like the thing that's caused a lot of growth in the Linux space, but there is also the desktop and home theater PCs and laptops as well. All of these things that Bazzite also exists on also has a separate image for that, like, what is the actual difference between the desktop and... Is there much of a difference between like the between the desktop and... is there much of a difference between like the desktop, laptop and home theater and then compared that to the like the handheld one or the those ones sort of similar to each other? From the hardware picker standpoint, desktop and laptop are the same image. It's just the image and then home theater and handheld are the same image, Bazite Deck.

Okay. The only difference is... Well, Bazite Deck is built on top of Bazite, so Bazite Deck is just Bazite with more. The more is Steam Game Mode as a session and as the default session. And all of the necessary SteamOS packages we ported and HHD for handheld input control. So just the extra glue to make the more unique pieces of hardware function in that environment. So if you look behind me, there's a framework 16 laptop right about here.

That's running Bazite. Home theater PC here is running Bazite. And then the desktop that I'm talking to you on is also bad I'm mmm What do you what do you have in your home theater PC? What sort of hardware is in there? It's a AP APU so okay, it's in low power, but still very capable. Mm-hmm Yeah, one of the things with them

with the the steam deck, especially that's that's sort of happening it's Powerful yes, you got oblivion right there. This is a great example a Lot of people are now starting to notice with the Steam Deck being like three years old now New games are starting to become a bit of an issue with it I know the new triple a gay like obviously indie games are starting to become a bit of an issue with it. The new AAA game, like obviously indie games are going to be fine forever, they're indie games. You can probably, you're probably going to run an indie game that comes out in 20 years

from now on a Steam Deck, if it's some like 2D thing. But the AAA games, Oblivion, I know Doom the Dark Ages is also, people are having issues with it even on very low settings. Obviously the Steam Deck is a very impressive device. There's... Always been talks of a Steam Deck 2 and I know Valve is like, Hey, we want to wait for like some big performance upgrade. I am...

I know they've never said they're not gonna do it. I would not be surprised though if they decided to again sort of shift focus back into just the software side, sort of release the Steam Deck as a one-off thing as like a way to initiate this market and then go back to like, hey we're're going to work on Steam OS. And as these like other devices are coming out, sort of let them take over that space. Yeah, it's possible. I mean, the handheld market's definitely taken off.

The amount of manufacturers doing it's just, you know, out of this world. And there's so much creativity now in that space that Valve could very likely just throw in the towel and say, okay, we're doing software now. But it's also very possible if they keep this up as a sort of entry-level point into the handheld gaming space. Because Valve's in the unique position of being able to sell these devices at a loss because you're going to buy Steam games. And it also lets them be the kind of more casual battery life focused option by being the 15 watt handheld in the room of you know 30 to 80 watt handhelds. Right, right, right.

Yeah, I mean as it is now maybe it can play AAA games, but it's the closest analog to something like a Steam deck that exists in the PC handout. Or sorry, a Nintendo Switch that exists in the PC handout space. Yeah, I think a lot of people sort of fail to realize how tiny Valve is as a company. sort of fail to realize how tiny Valve is as a company. Like for all the money that Valve pulls in, for how big Steam is. I don't remember the number of employees they have, but at some stupid low number. It's under 200, if I recall. Probably closer to 100. Uh...according to...as of 2021, apparently they have 336 people there now.

181 in the company's game department, 80 people on Steam. I don't know if this is accurate, this is just the first number that I saw. It might be, because they had that lawsuit that had a lot of this come out of discovery. Okay yeah that would make sense then. But for something like you know you think of a company like a Sony for example obviously Sony does a lot of other things but just like their gaming side way bigger just like the people that work on the software side of the PlayStation I'm sure is a vastly bigger team and then valves just here's like yeah We can show PC gaming. We have all of this cool stuff. We sometimes release the game once every 10 years

Yeah Yeah, I mean as a company they're quite the enigma. It's fun. One of the only companies pushing numbers like they do while being privately owned and not having to constantly show a profit every quarter, justify their actions. That is a powerful force and there's a reason that they can make so much change in any space they enter. Yeah, yeah for sure for sure. On the Steam Deck 2 thing again, it's not like I would like that to be Steam Deck 2. I really would.

I'm just... You know with there not being any su- there was that um, there were those patches that were discovered like with people going through the repo referencing some sort of device, whether it be, you know, people, anytime there's any like, slight tiny little thing that they can latch onto, people are going to go crazy with it. Like, there's the idea of is Valve going to make some sort of... Are they going to redo this, the Steam machine thing again and make more like a home theater PC powered by Steam OS?

Yeah, I mean, we'll see, right? I'm a long time Half Life fan, so I have lived this... watch what Valve does and throw a pegboard on the wall with some new string every time they move. Yeah. For the last 20 years. Yeah, I remember there being renewed rumors of a Half-Life 3 being in development. I didn't really look into it because I've heard this a million times before. It's got to be at this point too. I hear about it and it's like, no, no, don't give me hope, please don't do it. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, just Valve, just let Valve operate on Valve time. If

something happens, it happens. Don't get your, Do not get your hopes up for anything until there is something actually physically in your hand, or there is a direct release page for it, and they've made it clear that this is a thing that is really going to exist. Because the other thing is that even if they do make changes, right, like engineers are going to make prototype changes. Some of those changes may be made in public. They might be, especially if you're doing stuff with the Steam OS, like you might make a change for some prototype device, commit it to the public repo. And, you know, like it's a device that never actually manifests into something past the prototype stage.

into something past the prototype stage. Yep. Or I mean, you know, Valve's in the very privileged position of being able to work on something for a year and then decide like, hey, you know, it's not that great and drop it and go do something else. Like they're able to fail and only really show their successes. So for every, probably for everything that we've ever gotten,

there's at least 30 things that we never even saw And then even for the things we got like you saw how many prototypes there were for the steam deck. I'm sure Like they experiment they have a lot of fun with it. I do remember seeing some of the There was some early renders of the steam deck Maybe that maybe there were 3d models. I like printed 3d models. I remember there was a there's one I saw where it was basically just a screen glued to the original what do you call it? Steam machine controllers the original what they called? The steam? Were they just

called steam controllers? The one with the big... Steam controller, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait, do you have one? I might still have mine. Let's see. I look like a fake gamer now. Where'd it go? There are people that still swear by them who love these things. I never had one, sadly. You know what? It's in the shelf behind me, but I do have one. What was the experience of that like? I never used one. I played

pretty much everything with it for a good three or four years. I played RTS games with it. I did third-person shooters, first-person shooters. Once you got used to the track pads, nothing came close. And I think Val figured that out early on. That's why every prototype of the Steam Deck has the Steam Controller touchpads. prototype of the Steam Deck has the Steam Controller touchpads. Or even just versatility, like one of my favorite games on my Steam Deck is Stalker's Shadow of Chernobyl, kind of an older title. But they have so many keyboard buttons that are used in normal gameplay that

the only way to play it on that handheld is to have one of the track pads be a touch pad, you know, macro pad. So you touch it and it pops up on the screen all the different actions you could take like switch your guns firing mode or go to the grenade launcher or throw a grenade or whatever other binds that you needed. And that makes the game actually playable. Right, right. Yeah, I don't like my my Steam Deck is primarily a indie machine and Random old RPG that I want to play like it's nice to be able to go and say I want to I want to play Final Fantasy 7 on a handheld

Which you can actually okay to be fair you i think it might have a phone release i don't want to play a game on a phone i'm not going to do that um yeah same with me but i can i can lay down i can sit on the couch and i can just like i can just like play something it's it you know the battery life is not incredible you will have to charge it at some point but you can get get a long USB cable and then just never get up Just stay there all day Yes, especially if you have the OLED model right that's like eight hours of that no problem Mm-hmm. Yeah, especially with older titles. You can very comfortably

Clock down everything and it's still it's still gonna it's still gonna run fine clock down everything and it's still gonna run fine. Like if you wanna go play some like, if you wanna stardew valley right? If you play that, what will stardew valley not run on reasonably? Yeah, anything. Doesn't matter. So let's see... What have we not covered here? Oh, you mentioned earlier the idea of some newer versions of Bazite that were being tossed around.

I don't remember the names you were mentioning. GX or something? Yes. So two things we're working on right now are those like DX, which is developer experience. That one is basically just everything you need as a container or cloud developer on top of Bazite. So you have Docker pre-installed, you have VS code ready to use, you know, it's what I use to do my day job while still running that way. The other one we're working on is Bazite GTX, which is a developer experience. Okay.

I actually got my start working in the game industry. So I'm at least familiar with all the tools that are necessary to, you know, actually make a game. And the idea of GDX is, as a game developer, I have something I can install to my workstation for doing Linux game dev that has everything I need out of the box. I don't need to tweak it. I can just start working on my project. That one is still in development, but DX is available today.

So you're running normal Bazite right now. You can rebase over to a DX image. What's the reason for making this? So like, obviously Bazite is gaming. It seems like a weird thing to include under the same name. What, like, why did you decide to do this as well? under the same name? Why did you decide to do this as well? The name thing, I think, makes sense for the developer perspective. If you have games like Marvel Rivals saying, hey, we fixed Bazzite bugs in our patch notes, then having a Bazzite

game developer means you can now target those users directly. You can run the image on your workstation. And then the other aspect of it is, you know, it doesn't really take much of the team's time to build this stuff. DX is just built on top of Bazite, so that container file, it seems Bazite, it's whatever is necessary to install that extra stuff, and then it gets made and tested. For GDX, there's a little bit more involved, but I think the benefit to what we were talking about earlier about driving developer and studio interest to try to get things like anti-cheat turned on

or get Linux issues more considered by these people, that's ultimately what that's meant to try and solve or at least work on. So it's, I guess, in a sense, a way to get developers to dogfood that Linux experience, that Bazard experience, and address issues and, you know, get things up to scratch in places where, you know, especially Anteat, things like that. Yeah. Or even if you're just an indie, you don't want to spend a ton of time setting up your workstation. You just want something like you can load and blow up or have all the other benefits of being able to roll back

to a given release. That's there, sitting for you, ready to use. Because if you're making your income off of something, the last thing you want to see is you boot your machine. It doesn't work. Sure. So that rollback is by itself for a developer. I think it's huge. So you've been using Linux for a long time.

You were talking about the steam machines and using original steam OS earlier. This is a very, it's a very old topic. And nowadays with Proton doesn't really matter, but I'm sure you're around where people were talking like, you know, no tucks, no bucks. We need to get developers to release native Linux titles and that made sense pre-Proton. But what are your thoughts on the idea of native titles nowadays? They're still nice to see. I will never knock a native title, but Proton is also such a good experience now

that even the native titles that do exist are often a worse experience than running them through Proton. Right. So, you know, I don't fault people for just not bothering and putting out Windows games. Yeah. If anything, at this point, Proton has made Win32 one of the best APIs for developing

for Linux. Yeah, Windows is the most stable API on Linux. Yeah, the reason I bring it up is I've, um... What I've been doing the past couple of years is, uh, I have a local video game convention and after that I'll usually bring on, because they have like an indie games room there, I'll usually bring on some developers from there onto the show, talk to them, and most of them are not Linux people, so they'll always ask me, especially the Steam Deck they're like hey how do we support the Steam Deck should we make a Linux version and as nice as having Linux versions are the problem that you have is if you don't use Linux yourself if you don't have any plans to support it

you either end up with an experience like like you said, that is worse, or the Linux version ends up falling out of date from the Windows version. And in a lot of cases. In a lot of cases, a bad Linux version is. a bad Linux version is... It really doesn't serve that much value besides sort of ticking the box of having the Linux version. If someone wants to do it and they're like, you know, they're committed, there are Linux users themselves or they want to start using Linux and they want to have that Linux build there. Absolutely, go ahead and do it it learn what you need to learn but I do agree that Proton

is just such a good experience now and it's it's so much better just to make sure everything works through that because that's how most people even if you have a a Linux build enabled there anyway most people are probably still going to just play the Proton version, frankly. Yeah. Yeah. It does help a little bit that a lot of these modern game engines have the ability to export a native Linux binary. So Unity will do it, Unreal will do it, and Godot, of course, will very happily do it. And Valve spent some time on this as well. Steam has a Linux runtime that's used for Linux native games, which at least gives them a stable ABI to build upon

that it isn't going to randomly break because some distro updates somewhere. But ultimately, yeah, I think Proton has been a net positive and it gets rid of a lot of the random breakages that can happen from library changes that no developer is going to actually pay attention to unless they're dog-fooding it. Yeah, yeah. Like, you can go back and look at some of those older Linux native titles and it's like,

hey, it will work on Ubuntu 1204. Good luck on anything else. At least Distrobox solves that problem. That's true. That is true. But it's bad UX. You don't want the end user to deal with it. Puggling Proton is easier. Yeah, for sure, for sure. I think the only- one of the real main issues that exists besides anti-cheat with Linux games is

games with very extreme DRM whenever they do have problems. Like I remember when Persona 5 Royal came out and there was some form of issue stopping the game from working. There was some texture load issues, things like that. The game had very strong DRM, and if you change your proton version too many times, it thought that was you changing the computer and doing reinstalls. So five, six times later, it's like, oh, you've booted the game too many times on too

many different systems today. Come back tomorrow. Yay. Yeah, we just had a user deal with that. They bought the early access hundred dollar copy of Doom the Dark Ages, found it was crashing because we hadn't shipped the Mesa patches necessary for it yet. Changed proton version a bunch of times and earned a 24-hour ban from playing the game that they paid a hundred dollars to get 24 hours early.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. At least most games don't have those problems. I don't tend to buy new games, so at least for me, you know, I will let other people deal with those early problems. Typically when I'm playing a game, it'll be a couple of days later. Someone by then probably mentioned it on ProtonDB. ProtonDB is such an incredible resource, and I'm so thankful this thing exists. And as much as I do like the work that valve has done with the steam deck compatibility There are holes there are times they've they get things wrong. I don't know how they get the wrong I've seen plenty of cases where

Games are marked as verified just don't work on the steam deck or you I need to like change some stuff I don't know what magic they were using that caused it to work. I don't know if there was some like, you know, solar flare that shot an electron into my device that caused it to behave weirdly, but for some reason they don't work. But proton DB... If- if there's ever a problem... That is the first place to go. Like, I remember when...

Marvel Rivals, we've talked about this a couple of times. I remember when Season 1 came out. They changed something about how their launcher worked. And the game would just... immediately die with the lor- with the, like, the the like the starting up from the launcher. So you had to switch it over to Steam Deck, Steam Deck mode, which would disable the launcher because that's part of what you need to do to be Steam Deck verified. Then season, yeah, it was I think, season 1.5?

Either 1.5 or season 2, where they made another change to the game, and they changed how shader compilation was done, and you had to make another little change to make the game boot, otherwise it would have a UE5 crash as soon as you start the game. But all of this was mentioned on ProtonDB. Yeah.

I think this circles back to what you were saying earlier about, you know, people being super excited for Steam OS and not really like knowing what it is that they're asking for or not, you know, not having realistic expectations of what that will be when it comes out. I'm the biggest Valve fanboy on the planet. I love everything they do, but they cannot beat a community of hyper-interested nerds. Outsourcing game compatibility to a service like ProtonDB

will always be a better resource for people. And I think this is where, you know, Bazite's allowed to shine too, because having a SteamOS like that's community run and that the community can directly contribute to, gives people a place to take their random fixes or their recent discoveries that will be able to merge that and push it a lot sooner than a, you know,

Valve would with SteamOS. If there's any suggestion I could make to Valve, it would be, I wish they did some sort of collaboration with ProtonDB and somehow brought those resources directly into the Steam interface, directly into the SteamOS interface because they have a review system in Steam. So I could imagine a system where they take the information on ProtonDB, directly show it through their review system, maybe have some way to share information from... Like you could maybe make a review on Steam that is a compatibility review and it gets shared with them.

Like they've done these things before where they hire open source developers. Like, DXVK was started by just someone who wanted to play Nier. And another part of it, was it D3? No, the DX9 part. Sorry? Or is it VKD3D? Or do you mean the DX9 or DX8 version of VK or DXVK? Yeah, yeah, there was two separate components. You had the person who did the DX10 and 11

and then someone else who did the 8 and 9. Both just got hired by Valve to work on this. So they've like, Valve is, and like also like hire people to work on KDE. Like Valve seems to understand the value in, you know, hiring people to work on open source software. I don't know, I do think there will definitely be something there to highlight the work that's done on ProtonDB as well.

Yeah, I know, I agree. They absolutely should. I think their hiring numbers will kind of be the Canary and the coal mine if they're going to do a desktop release of Steam OS too. Yeah. Because they'll need to hire another 100 people to be able to pull off that kind of hardware compact.

That'll be the evidence that something like that's even coming. Yeah. I was going to mention too, what you're mentioning about Proton, like that's one of the first DeciLoader plugins I install. There's my little marker telling me that Oblivion is platinum rated on ProtonDB. So I make that a part of my standard install, just because yeah, I mean, that's the only metric I really care about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The one in team doesn't really tell me anything. metric I really care about. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The one in team doesn't really tell me anything. Yeah, the Verified or Playable, it's nice to know, like, oh, is the text going to be small, things like that, but like, it's not as granular as I would like it to be. It's a good surface level

hey, here's things to look out for sort of situation, but to really's things to look out for sort of situation. But to really know how to deal with problems. There's there's nothing better than ProtonDB. Yeah, yeah. But I think they deserve all the love that they can get. I really hope Valve, you know, if it doesn't, if they don't pick them up, at least, you know, promote them to an to an official, like, hey, this is the

compatibility checker tool would be phenomenal. Let's see. What? Okay. We've sort of been rattling through topics a lot quicker than I sort of expected to. Let's see, what do we have here? Well actually, that's one thing. Because there is a lot of stuff being pulled in from Youblu, what are some non-gaming things that Bazite benefits from that model? I did see a bunch of cool stuff that was there. I don't know where I saw the list though. Yeah, here we go. We're like random things like the, how do you say it? The Tixus code, the terminal?

I don't know how to say it. I see the terminal. Oh yeah, it's Tixus. That's a good term to get used to as well. Yeah, okay. It's a silent name. I don't know what the old name was, but it was Tixis. That's a good way to get used to it. Yeah, okay. It's a silent name. I don't know what your old name was, but it was a lot better. Hmm. I did see that Ubuntu is adopting that in Gnome as well, which is actually pretty cool. They're replacing Gnome terminal with it. I believe in this version.

Yeah, it's a Gnome project terminal. We ship it on KDE too, though, because it kind of feeds into the whole container native concept. Tixuz has a drop-down that will let you pick any number of Distro Box containers you've made and just enter them immediately. So for our perspective, like, yeah, that's not strictly, you know, a gaming feature, but it makes the actual use of the operating system better,

especially when you need a container. So we have every reason in the world to ship that. That one's actually not pulled from Universal Blue. Bluefin makes the same change, or made it, they don't have to because Fedora defaults to it. But we each individually made that change, just because of the... We each individually made that change just because of the...

Uhh... Did I DC'd? Uhh... Wait, uhh... Can you hear me? Okay, Discord's had this problem before. Give me one second, I'll just leave the call and rejoin. Hello. Hello. Yeah, Discord's had this issue randomly where... I don't disconnect from the call and people can still hear me, but it's like telling me I'm at 5000 ping so I don't know. Nice.

Hasn't happened for a couple of weeks but it's fine. I didn't stop the recording so we're still good to keep going. I wasn't sure where to do that. Um... I heard you saying that the like the change is being made across a bunch of different distros uh a bunch of different um uBlue images and I don't remember what was said after that

Okay, I I could probably just start over and say the Tixis change was done independently. Bluefin and Bazite both independently made it because it's a UX benefit if you are using containers for any reason. That one's not strictly a gaming benefit to us, but it just makes the UX of this model so much nicer that there's no reason not to make that change. The things that we do get from Universal Blue are more, let's say back, but we use the main image, which is meant to be as lean and mean as possible. So that's Fedora with the media encoding and decoding stuff built in with Nvidia drivers available, you know, with all the little fixes that people make to their standard Fedora install, with FlatHub as the default and only Flatpak experience.

Just all the general UX stuff that most end users typically do to their Fedora install anyway. Right, right, right. On the topic of, um, on the topic of drivers, the Nvidia thing, I don't use Nvidia cards, I've never used an Nvidia card, um, why are Nvidia cards so... unproblematic? Why does so many people seem to have issues when it comes here? I'm sure you can't answer specifically with Nvidia stuff, but like, what is the experience of dealing with Nvidia and, but what is the experience of dealing with Nvidia and what are the common issues people seem to run into?

So, Nvidia's problem on Linux is really just their closed source model. Their drivers are as close as it gets, and they have hardware DRM in their cards that prevents changing the clock speed unless you are Nvidia. Right. So open source drivers for the longest time could not exist because they could not get the clocks above their lowest 2D clock speed. There's just no reason to make them. NVIDIA did kind of fix this recently.

So now they have the NVIDIA Open Driver, which does the clock speed change with an open source driver by talking to a close source blog to actually make the DRM calls to the card. The problem there is it only supports the 1660 series and up. So if you are a 900 or 10xx user, sorry, you know, when the proprietary Nvidia driver gets stopped, your card's dead. You'll never game on Linux again. Oops. Outside of that, you know, because everything else is still closed source, the entire, you know, actual driver model outside of kernel reclocking, any bug that happens typically is outside of our control.

Like I can make sure the driver is installed right. I can make sure any bugs from an improper installation are fixed and addressed and everyone's on the same page. But if there's an issue like the Steam UI randomly corrupts when you're on an Nvidia card, all I can do is say, yeah, sorry, I can't fix that. Right. So that part sort of sucks.

But the benefit, I think, for the wider community is now everyone has a set standard like Nvidia driver experience where the install problems are out of the way, and we can focus on reporting the issues that are actually issues and getting Nvidia to care about them. Why do people seem to struggle so much actually installing the drivers? That seems to be the first point I see people struggle on. I think Linux is kind of built to not allow that model to happen, because you're compiling closed source stuff into a kernel module and inserting it at the very start of the system.

You're disabling built-in stuff that's actually open source so we can take over. Everything's fighting against you, and NVID Nvidia puts out one reference install that every other distro has to modify to work for their particular setup. Right, right. Ultimately, the proper fix for all of this is for NVK to get better so that we can just drop Nvidia's drivers entirely. But that's probably still a couple of years away before that's a performance enough to actually do it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It would be nice to... It'll be... It'll be very funny

if NVK gets to a point where it's really good and then... Nvidia's like, hey guys! Uh, we're gonna help out now. Like, they just like wait till everything's ready and then they jump on. I wouldn't put it past them. I would not. I know they...

It's funny too because you have devices like the Nintendo Switch that are running a free BSD like kernel with Nvidia hardware. Yeah, that's We know they can support this sort of model and get something working out there. It just doesn't exist here yet. Yeah, well, hopefully the open source stuff will get to the state it needs to be in. Like my understanding is it's gotten surprise, like, okay, from the point it needs to be in. Like, my understanding is it's gotten surprise-

like, okay, from the point it was at before to where it is now, gotten surprisingly good. But obviously there's still that- that delta there where it's maybe not the thing you would want to put people on without them knowing that that's the experience they're gonna be getting. Yep. Yep. Kind of a, uh, not well-ke kept secret, but a lesser known thing is if you're on an Nvidia card right now and you install the normal non-NVIDIA image, you will get NVK.

So it's not a bad entry jug to try it out. There's some games that right now actually run better on that driver. Mostly indie, like I think A Hat in Time was a good example that was almost a 40% performance boost on NDK versus proprietary driver. Wow. But it's a bad experience for most games. Mm-hmm. Right, right. So with this whole Bazite is not a distro and we're building an image. What is the process of, you know, actually making these images? Yeah, it's very similar to how you make a Docker image. In GitHub, we have a container file which pulls from the latest Fedora image, whatever they've built in their koi.io repository, applies our changes like a giant recipe on top,

and then spits out a signed secure boot-ready Bazite image to the GitHub container repository. That sounds complicated, but if you're someone who would be interested in contributing to this, you hop on GitHub and it's basically a list of bash scripts that run DNF commands. Getting into this and changing it is very easy and it's kind of fun to work with. And then I assume if you want to add a new image, it's like most of the work's already there. Like you're not going to just if you're doing something that is Bazite, it's going to probably share a lot of those similar changes anyway.

So it's sort of a matter of just adding more stuff on top of that. Yeah, our main container file does, you know, Bazite from U-Blue main. And then right after it does Bazite deck from Bazite from UBlueMain, and then right after it does BaziteDeck from Bazite, and then BaziteNvidia from Bazite, and then lastly BaziteDX from Bazite. So they all share the same origin, just have a slightly different recipe applied to them. For end users, there's something called the universal blue image template. That is a nearly empty container file

that has a basic from pass. So you as an end user can fork the image template repository, change the from to be like from Bazite deck, add a bunch of packages you want and make your own thing. So if you want to look at this in a in a programming way, it's basically it's basically like OO inheritance. You've got your UBLU and then Bazite inherits a lot of stuff from that. And then Bazite deck inherit stuff from that.

And then another one inherits stuff from that. And you keep going down the chain, becoming more and more specific to the use case you have. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And we're infinitely customizable. An end user can make a custom image from all that. And then another one can come make a custom image

from their custom image. We make sure all of this stuff is set up to auto build and auto update in GitHub. So it's not like these images are going to kind of wither on the vine. They will stay in lockstep with updates from us, who in turn stay in lockstep with updates from Fedora. So you talked about the developer experience and the game developer experience. Has there been any other ideas you sort of maybe floated around that didn't really Has there been any other ideas you sort of maybe floated around that didn't really like materialize into something that you actually want to have?

Um, not not major concepts like what DX and GDX are, but there is a Nintendo Switch Basite image I've been playing with on the side. Not anything I've ever actually released for people to play with, but I wanted to see what it would take to get a Switch enabled ARN Fedora kernel running with all the Basite stuff going. So we'll see what that turns into. Maybe next April, Fools, I'll put it out. That would be fun. I have no idea what the switch hacking scenes even like. Is that a, is that a, I didn't know the thing that was even remotely possible.

Yeah, there's there's builds of Android for it. And then there's Linux for Tegra, which is Nvidia's own distro for that exact hardware. Uh huh. So you can do a lot. Okay. Well, whether Nintendo is a fan of it or not, you know. Yeah, well, at least I'm not modifying their stuff. That's true. Just the hardware.

That's true. Um, let's see here. Um, let's see here. Uh... Honestly, I think we've hit on most of the things I wanted to talk about. Um... Well, actually, you know what? Here's something that is probably important. The project isn't just you.

Like, obviously, there is you, Blue, as well. But like, Bazite itself is not just you. Like, there are other people involved here and I think it is important to highlight that like a project does take in most cases the work of a lot of individuals trying to solve in a lot of cases problems they personally have, maybe problems that they feel like other people have as well, but either way, it's a group of people coming together to solve a, a collective problem.

Yep. Yeah, well, we have all of Universal Blue backing us, of course. That's a huge group, but Basite itself, we just passed 100 contributors on GitHub. Wow. Which is amazing to see. And then you have the core team. So it's myself. There's Anthias, who does all of our kernel hacking and all of our handheld hardware support. You have I Can't See You, which was actually he's our first contributor. He's part of the reason why I continued the project after the, you know, experimentation phase. Hikari, who came to us relatively recently and is now the head of all VM efforts. So the fact that you can load up Bazite, set up a Windows VM, and get something like GPU pass-through working in two commands is entirely thanks to them.

And they dog food it. They use it every day. You have the UBlue team like George Castro, Benjamin Sherman, Noel Miller, and Frank Kettleson, who are instrumental in the model and making sure things are safe and secure and that auto updates happen. You have S-bombs to make sure that your packages are all

from valid sources, like absolutely huge. And then we get random commits from all over the place. We've had contributors from Chimera OS bring us handheld or controller support patches. Matt Schwartz, who's done a lot of testing for Valve, I don't think in an official capacity, but he brings us patches all the time. Gloria's egg roll helps us out every now and then. It takes a village and there's a huge core team utilizing different parts of this entire project to make sure that everything flows smoothly. different parts of this entire project to make sure that everything flows smoothly.

So if people wanted to get involved in the project, is there any area where you feel like there is maybe not as much attention given to it as you would like to see? Yeah, right now it's the installer. We're unfortunately married to Anaconda. I'm sure you've used it and had bad experiences with it, most people have. So we're trying to replace it with a modern standard. There's been some work done to get a live ISO environment functioning, and then some additional work to make a GTK installer that's Bootsy aware to be able to actually install it from that environment. So anyone that feels comfortable with installer work that wants to help.

We're open arms, please come and help us out. Outside of that, we have a first run tool that we're working on replacing. So if you know Linux UI and want to help out with that, that's huge. But even if none of that speaks to you, just, you know, go to our GitHub, check out our issues, answer people's questions if you know how to fix their problems, or, you know, help us do whole requests. Very importantly, if you know how to fix their problems. Yes. Otherwise, it's just more work for us to undo that. But anything you think you can do in GitHub is huge.

We'll take any random contribution. And even if we don't merge it, we're going to say thank you for even trying to join. That's kind of the beauty of being a community effort. Absolutely. So all the work is just done through the GitHub then? Entirely, yes. What do you guys use to handle project communication?

Like a matrix, Discord? Primarily we use Discord. I did a whole talk on this at scale, but a lot of Linux projects are kind of allergic to these massive closed source chat applications, and I get it. You have your belief system and you want to adhere to it. It makes sense. But if you're trying to push a gaming Linux environment and 100% of your audience is already there,

there's no reason not to use it. We make very good use of it. A lot of our contributors came from it. It's kind of our home for now. Right. And even if you're apprehensive to every other bit of like proprietary software, if you play games, you're playing proprietary software. Like the majority of people using BASI are not like... Yeah, you have to. Yeah. The majority of people here are not playing like super Tux cart and things like that. Like.

Yeah. And you know, sure, devil's advocate. Yeah, it's not GPL. You know, you're not following the whole open source mantra, but you even if you aren't, the fact that you can capture that audience means you're opening them up to that possibility in other avenues. You're still hoping to benefit that model. Absolutely, yeah.

Well, I think we've pretty much covered everything then. So you mentioned you can get involved in the project on GitHub. Is there anything else you would like to direct people to? Well, if you're interested in the project, I'd love it if you joined the Universal Blue Discord. That's where we do all of our communication. Help us out on GitHub any way you can. And I guess the last thing is just spread the word. You know, the more people we get gaming on Linux, the better the chance we get of anti-cheat being fixed, the better support we get. You know, it's a snowball effect get of anti-cheat being fixed, the better support

we get. You know, it's a snowball effect and if we all contribute to it, it will get there. Do you feel like there's any topic we may have missed that I maybe didn't jot down? Even if it's something that's not even that important, just some little side thing? I think we covered most of it. I could talk a little bit more about like Universal Blue sharing the load, but we covered the things not being a distro and taking a village so much that I'm not sure anything I could say would make much of a difference.

Right, right, right. And nothing else involved in the project that you would like to direct people to? No like resources they should go check out? And we pretty much got all that? Um, I mean the only other thing is just please read the docs, you know? We spent a lot of time on it making them good. But that's really it. You know, we try to keep things up up front.

Like all of this is linked from our website. As long as you're looking at one of our things you'll find everything we have. Okay. Um Sweet this was a very fun episode. I did enjoy this and I'd be more than happy to do another one in the future Anything you're up for is nice meeting you and thank you for this. Yeah, absolute pleasure. Um Yeah, okay. So my as for my stuff my main channel is Brody Robertson I do Linux videos there six each days a week. Sometimes I stream as well I will do a near your stream at some point. I promise I will get around to it

And when the cosmic way that comes out, we're gonna do some more bug testing, which is always fun. I like the I Maybe shouldn't do that on metal because I've had crashes of my stream bad idea do not do not stream from Alpha software when you're in specifically the goal of making it break yeah it's less crashy now which is good the gaming channel is Brody on games I stream there twice a week right now I'm playing through Ori and the Blind Forest and Kazan the first Berserker If you are watching the video version this you find the audio version on

Pretty much every podcast platform. There is an RSS feed it is on Spotify with video as well Which I don't watch Spotify video, but it is a thing you can do If you would like to find the other video version of this, it is on YouTube at tech over T. So I will give you the final word. What do you want to say? How do you want to sign us off? I just want to say, you know,

thank you all for the interest. Thanks for helping make Linux gaming better. And well, I'll see you in deadlock.