Bazzite 3.0 has been released with the internals upgraded to Fedora 40, which brings with it numerous improvements for gamers looking to get Linux on their PC or handheld gaming device like a Steam Deck or ROG Ally.

For Steam Deck OLED support they said it’s ready to the point that “it should be mostly functional”, however there’s at least one major issue left which “has to do with audio crashing when switching to Desktop Mode” and some other issues related to HDR support.

  • Telorand@reddthat.com
    5·
    7 months ago

    Note that as of this comment, I’m on bazzite-deck-gnome:40-20240427 via the stable branch.

    Audio crashes don’t seem to be happening on my OLED Deck anymore when switching between Desktop Mode and Game Mode (YMMV), but there’s outstanding issues with Bluetooth (upstream bug from BlueZ).

    Connecting a BT controller causes the BT service to crash, and you have to cycle it off/on again to restart it. Audio BT devices seem to work fine.

    I haven’t had any issues with playing games, though. Been running Bazzite since 2.4.0.

    • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzOPMEnglish
      5·
      7 months ago

      I take it you’re on the gnome version? I wonder if that might have anything to do with it.

      I’m very tempted to switch to Bazzite, but knowing it lacked full support for the OLED Deck has kept the temptation reasonably low. Hearing that it’s almost fully ready for OLED now though is going to bring back those distro-hopping intrusive thoughts again.

      • Telorand@reddthat.com
        3·
        7 months ago

        I can’t say for sure if Gnome has anything to do with it, since the DE should be separate from the drivers, but it’s a point worth mentioning just in case. Obviously, there’s differences between both versions, but the devs have tried to make the experience as interchangeable as possible. For example, they include GSConnect by default, so you don’t lose out on KDEConnect functionality.

        The controller issue, though, is upstream and affects anyone using the BlueZ package to run Bluetooth.

        If anyone was thinking of switching on an OLED Deck, I would wait a bit longer. The recent changes have been great, but just before the update, I was about ready to reimage back to SteamOS due to the frustrating bugs. Still undecided if I will do that, ultimately, and wait for full support.

        Fortunately, to its credit, rolling back to a previous working image is trivially easy, so you don’t have to live with specific bugs that get introduced. Benefits of atomic distros.

        ETA: if you’re into tinkering and learning a new paradigm for how to work with an immutable OS and layered packages, it works on Desktops as well!