Outside of console or handheld like experiences, I am not sure what this distro gives that Mint, proprietary nvidia drivers and Steam dont give me? I basically just download windows games as external applicationd through steam and use proton. Though I suppose a one click like “run this as proton” and “run this in this proton environment” could be useful. But once you learn how to change targets its not super complicated.
The entire point of Bazzite and other immutables is that you get a rock solid system that you never ever have to worry about breaking.
Atomic updates means updates either apply or don't: there's no partial/fail state that can stop your PC from working. And in the rare event that an update has issues, you can instantly boot the previous two images, without typing any commands or using any fancy restore tools. And if you're a bit tech savvy (ie you know how to type a single command), you can even go back upto the last 90 days worth of images (via github).
The best part of atomic updates is OS upgrades, they work flawlessly. In fact since updates are delivered as images, an OS upgrade is no different to any other regular update, unlike regular distros like Mint where you have to cross your fingers and hope that your system still works after a dist-upgrade (and I believe Mint's official stance was that they didn't support dist-upgrades, they recommend you to backup, format, clean-install and restore with every OS release. Not sure if that policy has changed now, but that used to be their stance for a very long time).
Mint does support upgrading the OS, both to minor and major versions.
I personally installed Mint in 2014 and used the upgrade path until a month ago, when my distro finally started showing bad signs of being experimented on (by me, for 11 years) and it was easier to do a fresh install instead.
I know the OS itself does, I meant it wasn't recommended by the team. See these instructions written by the founder Clement himself, especially under section E where they say "We do not even recommend this on the command line, so to have it triggered from the click of a button is just not acceptable to us. It's easy alright, but it's not the right solution."
I know, which is why my original comment stated "and I believe Mint's official stance *was* that they didn't support dist-upgrade" and furthermore, I went on to state "Not sure if that policy has changed now, but that used to be their stance for a very long time".
Would have been better if instead of "that used to be their stance for a very long time" you would have written "that used to be their stance a very long time ago, not sure about currently". Additionally, it would have been nice for you to spend a couple of minutes and check the current official stance.
Like I said, I have been using Mint since 2014 and the upgrade was an official stance at least since then.
I think 3-5 years (let alone 10 years) is a long enough time to pass after which one should check before posting old information. Imagine someone talking about how few games Linux has (pre-Steam) or how impossible installation of Linux is (because one needs to order physical CDs).
Atomic OSs are such a massive improvement. My experience with traditional Linux disros is the major upgrades failed as often as they worked. And always prompted me to merge config files or other insane stuff.
Bazzite just works like I’d expect an iPhone update or a Nintendo switch update to work.
For things like appliances (home theater pcs, gaming consoles etc..) you'd want an immutable rootfs that's resistant to random reboots, power cuts etc..
You'd also want stable, atomic, updates that can go from "one version of system software to the next" without breaking the system.
Recently, i had to reinstall my 7 year old arch install because a system upgrade after a year or so broke it... It's not like i can't sit down and fix what went wrong manually, it's just that i wouldn't want to ever worry about these things on my home theater/"gaming console" pc...
There's nothing any UniversalBlue image tweaks that you couldn't tweak yourself. It's just adding/removing packages, adding/removing drivers, a few configuration scripts, and a bunch of tweaks to fix well-known gaming-related issues.
But the point is that, if you want to game on Linux, you probably want to perform exactly or almost exactly the same tweaks that Bazzite already does. So why bother doing them yourself?
It's not even a linux-from-scratch situation where you'd do it for the sake of learning. Googling "my controller doesn't work right", finding some discussion threads, and copy-pasting a bunch of fixes isn't particularly interesting.
The gamepadui mode that allows you to use the system with only a game controller connected, effectively turning it into a console-style experience, is the main draw.
I don’t really care any desktop environment. I use i3. Otherwise I don’t really have much preference between how Firefox, terminal, and Steam are displayed.
