bazzite

What Bazzite is and where it runs

Bazzite is a custom Fedora Atomic image built with cloud native technology by the Universal Blue project. It takes the stable base of Fedora Kinoite and Silverblue and adds the hardware drivers, media codecs, and gaming tools that desktop and handheld players need. The project began as an effort to fix recurring problems in SteamOS, specifically its out of date packages and the lack of a working package manager. Bazzite solves that by keeping an image based system where you can still install any Fedora package from the command line and have it persist across updates. The image ships with the latest Linux kernel, SELinux enabled by default, and full secure boot support through a custom enrolled key. It targets desktop PCs, the Steam Deck, other handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs. Because the image is rebuilt several times a week from upstream Fedora, users get current packages on top of a base that stays stable. The result is a system that behaves like a console on handheld hardware yet still works as a general purpose Linux desktop for everyday tasks like browsing, printing, and software development. Documentation lives on the project site, and the README points to install guides and a verification command signed with cosign.

Gaming and handheld features

On the Steam Deck and comparable hardware, Bazzite boots directly into Game mode to match SteamOS behavior. It trims the size of compatdata with an automatic bees service, builds smaller shader caches with the latest Mesa, and can boot even when the drive is full. The image ports most SteamOS packages, including drivers, firmware updaters, and fan controllers, and it ships a patched Mesa for proper framerate control from Gamescope. Color calibrated display profiles are included for both matte and reflective Steam Deck screens. For controllers and peripherals, Bazzite adds the xone driver for Xbox controllers, OpenRazer drivers, OpenTabletDriver udev rules, and DisplayLink support. It also bundles MangoHud, vkBasalt, and OBS VkCapture for performance monitoring and capture. Optional power user features include low risk undervolting on the Steam Deck and AMD Framework laptops, display overclocking through a refresh rate range, and a ZRAM swap using the LZ4 algorithm with a 4 GB default size. These options are off by default and can be enabled with ujust commands, so an ordinary user gets a clean console experience while a tinkerer can open advanced controls without leaving the image. The deck variant also ships a ported copy of SDGyroDSU for gyro support, enabled by default, and it can install Decky Loader, EmuDeck, RetroDECK, and ProtonUp Qt during setup.

Updates, rollback, and security

Bazzite treats updates as a first class feature rather than an afterthought. The desktop and deck variants update the operating system, Flatpaks, and other components automatically through uupd and topgrade, and deck users can trigger updates straight from the Game mode interface. If an update breaks something, the rpm-ostree backend lets you roll back to the previous version, and you can even pick earlier images at boot time. Universal Blue adds multi media codecs out of the box, Flathub enabled by default, and the ability to roll back any build from the last 90 days. Security follows the Fedora model: SELinux is configured out of the box, printing works through a preinstalled CUPS stack, and you can layer extra Fedora packages without losing them between updates. Secure boot is supported with the project's own key, which you enroll by running ujust enroll-secure-boot-key or by importing the secure_boot.der file with mokutil. Images are signed with sigstore's cosign, and the README documents a verification command using the cosign.pub key from the repository. That signing step lets you confirm a downloaded image came from the project before you install it. The build itself runs entirely in GitHub Actions, so forks can produce their own signed images.

Editorial conclusion

Bazzite is published under the Apache 2.0 license and, at the time of writing, the repository recorded about 8,990 stars and was last updated on 2026-08-24.