This week, Valve took another step toward reaching the SteamOS endgame. After Lenovo unveiled the Legion Go S Powered by SteamOS, Valve clearly signaled its intent to officially expand SteamOS to other PC handhelds beyond the Steam Deck and Legion Go. All of this is incredible and welcome news. And all of this leads to an uncomfortable but inevitable question: What happens to Bazzite now?
As you may or may not know, Bazzite is the Linux darling of the handheld gaming space. Because while SteamOS provides that smooth, responsive, and elegant experience on Steam Deck, Bazzite currently brings it to many other devices. From a variety of GPD and OneXPlayer units, to the Legion Go and ROG Ally X.
Calling it a SteamOS clone doesn’t remotely do it justice, but that’s a more approachable way of describing it. In reality, Bazzite incorporates the best of projects like Fedora and GloriousEggroll’s Nobara (various gaming and performance tweaks), Chimera (Gamescope implementation) and other gaming-centric Linux distributions. In turn, Bazzite contributes its own improvements “upstream” to the rest of the Linux ecosystem. That’s the beauty of open source.
I would argue that Bazzite has played a critical role in driving demand for SteamOS to appear on other handhelds. Sure, the Steam Deck makes you imagine what SteamOS might feel like on Windows-based devices. But Bazzite shows you how sublime a device like the Legion Go or ROG Ally becomes when you replace Windows 11 with a user-friendly UI actually optimized for gaming.
Sites like The Verge, Ars Technica, and Eurogamer have all heaped praise onto Bazzite, and popular YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips and Digital Foundry have shown its smooth, console-like experience in action.
The Future Of Bazzite In A Post-SteamOS Future
Despite all the attention Bazzite has attracted recently, there are fears of it going away following Valve and Lenovo’s recent announcements. Bazzite Creator Kyle Gospodnetich has received a lot of questions about the project’s future, and he wants to assure you that Bazzite isn’t going anywhere.
In a PSA this week, Gospodnetich wrote:
“The Bazzite team is extremely excited for the upcoming expanded launch of Steam OS. Obviously, none of us would be here if not for Valve lighting the way. That being said, we strongly believe Bazzite has a continued role to fill in a post-Steam OS future. A desktop release of Steam OS appears to still be a long way away, and handheld support is almost surely going to be focused on partnered devices first and foremost, and not on the breadth of devices we support today.”
This is an excellent point. We all know Valve’s approach to software development can be excruciatingly slow. And it may never officially support the abundance of SKUs from the likes of GPD, OneXPlayer, and Ayaneo. Or more obscure ones like the Ayn Loki. But Bazzite supports many of those today.
The PSA continues:
“Bazzite was born out of supporting users with Steam OS in the Steam Deck Discord, and is designed to make up for some of the shortcomings of Steam OS, such as immutability preventing package installs when needed, lack of printing, lack of secure boot, lack of drive encryption, and so on. We also ship a number of helpers and extra packages to make non-Steam gaming easier and faster to get up and running, and are in a position to more quickly work with the community on improvements — all of which will continue to differentiate us.”
Today I learned SteamOS doesn’t actually have any printer support, meaning one less potential reason to use its desktop side as a daily driver!
Anyway, wading through the fairly technical language above, a simple truth emerges: Bazzite holds a ton of appeal for power users. It might help to picture is as a sort of “modded” version of SteamOS, with more features and functionality. Plus, as Gospodenitich mentions, the Bazzite team is more nimble and can implement these things quickly.
He concluded the PSA by saying “We will continue to build Bazzite out long into the future.”
You can learn more about Bazzite and join its developer and gaming community on their Discord.
