hisao

cross-posted from: https://ani.social/post/16319506

So I've been using it for a week or so, tried some other distros on the side, also tried some very dangerous things like rebasing from KDE to Gnome. I'll present my impressions as lists of good and bad things. Also keep in mind I've been mostly using Gnome in the past, so some of this feedback might be more about KDE / Plasma 6 in general, rather than Bazzite itself.

Bad:

• The most shocking issue I figured only yesterday is that games didn't use my NVIDIA GPU and instead used integrated one, I simply didn't expect NVIDIA edition of gaming-tailored distro could fuck up this, until I tried some heavier games yesterday and checked glxinfo after being unsatisfied by performance - only to find out it was indeed the case, workaround/fix can be found here.
• Transparency and blur work in a rather tricky way and by default blur is set to maximum that makes transparency not visible at all, took me a while to figure this out.
• Aurorae window decoration themes don't support "draw border on maximized and tiled windows" and there are no workaround without doing things that are very unsafe/unstable in context of atomic distro like Bazzite so for the rice I wanted I had to stick with builtin Breeze theme which is old and limited in many ways, I pretty much had to achieve everything with color scheme + panel colorizer alone.
• I don't remember how exactly this happened, but killswitch option in Linux ProtonVPN client somehow got broken in a way that I couldn't connect to internet at all because killswitch was activated and couldn't disable killswitch at the same time, I had to create another user and remove previous one. It also bombarded me with some errors regarding "kdewallet" that I don't understand. Worth noting, I've been using this client with killswitch on many Gnome distros before and never had this issue anywhere else.
• When using external monitor, some apps and games don't perform the same. For example, Blender's viewport feels less smooth/snappy than on internal monitor.
• By default mouse acceleration is on, which makes it feel weird/bad in some games and graphic programs, I believe it makes more sense to have it off by default and I'm not sure why even include that option in gaming-focused distro, I can't imagine anyone wanting to use it. Gaming is all about raw input (imo).
• Builtin terminal is rendered in its own style completely ignoring theming, I didn't like it at all. I was able to install alacritty via rpm-ostree though and it works just fine.

Good:

• All my favorite windows-only games installed from the first try with zero workarounds. And after fixing the issue with wrong GPU, performance in games is awesome, feels like it might actually be slightly better than on Windows.
• After discovering panel colorizer and figuring some quirks of Plasma 6 theming, especially in context of immutable distro, I was able to achieve look and feel I'm very happy about.
• I really like the idea of immutable/atomic distro, and ecosystem for using it here is solid and mature. It feels like system is very safe and bulletproof.
• Even though it's not recommended but rebasing from KDE to Gnome did work well with maybe some minor issues which I'm not even sure weren't just Gnome issues. In the end I didn't like Gnome version more than KDE one and decided to clean up my partitions and reinstalled KDE version again.
• I also briefly checked some alternative distros like Nobara, but nothing impressed me more than Bazzite.
• Volume and brightness controls, bluetooth, network manager, disks utility, and after some tweaking dolphin - everything works smooth, everything supports scenarios I want to use, and most of those feel better and more advanced than Windows or Gnome alternatives.
• Builtin ujust utility is neat and has a lot of optional tools installable in one command, like "ujust bazzite-cli", which installs and intergrates other utilities like atuin, fzf, ripgrep.
• I feel rather happy about it now, and I don't expect it to break anytime soon or have any major issues for me. Time will tell though.

So I've been using it for a week or so, tried some other distros on the side, also tried some very dangerous things like rebasing from KDE to Gnome. I'll present my impressions as lists of good and bad things. Also keep in mind I've been mostly using Gnome in the past, so some of this feedback might be more about KDE / Plasma 6 in general, rather than Bazzite itself.

Bad:

• The most shocking issue I figured only yesterday is that games didn't use my NVIDIA GPU and instead used integrated one, I simply didn't expect NVIDIA edition of gaming-tailored distro could fuck up this, until I tried some heavier games yesterday and checked glxinfo after being unsatisfied by performance - only to find out it was indeed the case, workaround/fix can be found here.
• Transparency and blur work in a rather tricky way and by default blur is set to maximum that makes transparency not visible at all, took me a while to figure this out.
• Aurorae window decoration themes don't support "draw border on maximized and tiled windows" and there are no workaround without doing things that are very unsafe/unstable in context of atomic distro like Bazzite so for the rice I wanted I had to stick with builtin Breeze theme which is old and limited in many ways, I pretty much had to achieve everything with color scheme + panel colorizer alone.
• I don't remember how exactly this happened, but killswitch option in Linux ProtonVPN client somehow got broken in a way that I couldn't connect to internet at all because killswitch was activated and couldn't disable killswitch at the same time, I had to create another user and remove previous one. It also bombarded me with some errors regarding "kdewallet" that I don't understand. Worth noting, I've been using this client with killswitch on many Gnome distros before and never had this issue anywhere else.
• When using external monitor, some apps and games don't perform the same. For example, Blender's viewport feels less smooth/snappy than on internal monitor.
• By default mouse acceleration is on, which makes it feel weird/bad in some games and graphic programs, I believe it makes more sense to have it off by default and I'm not sure why even include that option in gaming-focused distro, I can't imagine anyone wanting to use it. Gaming is all about raw input (imo).
• Builtin terminal is rendered in its own style completely ignoring theming, I didn't like it at all. I was able to install alacritty via rpm-ostree though and it works just fine.

Good:

• All my favorite windows-only games installed from the first try with zero workarounds. And after fixing the issue with wrong GPU, performance in games is awesome, feels like it might actually be slightly better than on Windows.
• After discovering panel colorizer and figuring some quirks of Plasma 6 theming, especially in context of immutable distro, I was able to achieve look and feel I'm very happy about.
• I really like the idea of immutable/atomic distro, and ecosystem for using it here is solid and mature. It feels like system is very safe and bulletproof.
• Even though it's not recommended but rebasing from KDE to Gnome did work well with maybe some minor issues which I'm not even sure weren't just Gnome issues. In the end I didn't like Gnome version more than KDE one and decided to clean up my partitions and reinstalled KDE version again.
• I also briefly checked some alternative distros like Nobara, but nothing impressed me more than Bazzite.
• Volume and brightness controls, bluetooth, network manager, disks utility, and after some tweaking dolphin - everything works smooth, everything supports scenarios I want to use, and most of those feel better and more advanced than Windows or Gnome alternatives.
• Builtin ujust utility is neat and has a lot of optional tools installable in one command, like "ujust bazzite-cli", which installs and intergrates other utilities like atuin, fzf, ripgrep.
• I feel rather happy about it now, and I don't expect it to break anytime soon or have any major issues for me. Time will tell though.

I'm trying to add margins around all maximized windows (so that it matches my custom taskbar which also have small margins all around), any ideas how to achieve this? I tried doing a KWin script, but even though it installs and activates, it doesn't work, not sure what's wrong. Also I have suspicions there might be easier ways to do it. This is my script attempt:

workspace.clientMaximizeSet.connect(function(client, h, v) {
    if (h && v) {
        client.frameGeometry = {
            x: 0,
            y: 4,
            width: workspace.displayWidth - 4,
            height: workspace.displayHeight - 8
        };
    }
});

Found solution: I already have panel colorizer widget for KDE Panel and it turns out, I could simply create extra panels on top/right/bottom edges with panel colorizers that allow to make them fully transparent and have custom height/width. And for windows to not lose borders/rounded corners when maximized I found a flag in "Window Decorations > Breeze" options.

Decided to try some new distros and this time it's Bazzite. I can't figure out any way to make any kind of custom themes work and look as expected. I tried few themes with transparent windows from "Global Themes (Plasma 6)" category but transparency doesn't seem to work in any single one of them. I've seen general KDE suggestions to try forceblur/betterblur plugins but it requires compiling it manually and since it is Bazzite, it's quite complicated and I couldn't figure it out (if I compile it in distrobox for some kind of Fedora, will it even work for my Bazzite? if I don't use distrobox, how do I even compile it? it needs tons of extra dnf dev packages). I installed Kvantum via rpm-ostree, but turns out, it doesn't style taskbar and console (also firefox, but I could live with that since I probably can find a matching firefox theme). Any suggestions?

You will need a bit of patience with this one 😇

I personally find this addon quite innovative. To me it looks like a 2d drawing toolset inside of 3d program that is more powerful and has unique 2d drawing features absent in actual state-of-art 2d drawing programs like CSP and Krita!