- I understand there's been drama, and someone walked away or was pushed out. I don't quite care enough to understand it all or point at guilty parties.
However, my current understanding is that the project remains active, so titling this article "Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over. It's certainly what I immediately assumed made it newsworthy.
- >"Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over.
is it? outside of autopsies, i think i have only ever seen it used as a synonym for "incident report". i dont think ive ever associated the term specifically with the end of a project.
e.g. cloudflare uses the tag for all of their incident reports (https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/post-mortem/), not as a signal that they are closing shop
- In the incident case, it's a post-mortem on the incident. The incident itself is (hopefully) resolved and can now be dissected to learn about what went wrong and how things can improve in the future.
That's what a post-mortem implies to me in the tech industry. A thing happened, it's over now, here are the lessons we learned to take into the future.
- Yes, but Bazzite is not over.
- > ... as a synonym for "incident report"
People should stop using it as a synonym, then. The Latin effectively means "after death", meaning its a poor synonym for "what happened wrong recently".
- >The Latin effectively means "after death"
language evolves over time
post mortem is even in dictionaries (meriam, oxford, american heritage) as "an analysis or review of a finished event"
- "Finished" being an important word. Seems like this Bazzite project is not finished and so post mortem is in fact a poor choice of words.
- Gamasutra has a famous line of articles where game developers provide retrospectives on how the development of their titles went, maybe I'm influenced by that.
I'm aware about the use in incident reports of course, but then you still don't call it "<project name> Post-Mortem" but use a more specific namespace.
- Antheas was the #1 most active developer, and responsible for almost all low level integrations.
- Just based on this blog post it seems like he wanted the project to be more “professional” in some way that the rest of the developer group didn’t. I wonder if that difference in vision, combined with a (probably justified based on your comment) feeling that he was doing a disproportionate amount of the work lead to an unsustainable situation.
Calling it a post-mortem while others are continuing the project still seems kind of petty, though.
- Software history is rife with projects that outlive a person like that leaving, though. Ulrich Drepper comes to mind immediately. They don't own the project.
- Nope, he was not, and his software will be replaced.
- As a bazzite user who had no idea anything was up until this headline, yes that was very concerning at first glance
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- It’s worth pointing out that the official Bazzite position is that Antheas was removed from the project for breaching Code of Conduct and harassing people in their official Discord server
- Was it real harassment or some micro-micro-micro-aggression that only terminally online people would care about?
- it was clearly bad enough for everyone else to decide that they didn't want to put up with him anymore. which is what happens in the real world.
online, everyone considers themselves a public figure. and because we can't seem to get shot of public figures, whether they be rapists, homophobes, or just arseholes, alleged or proven, they believe, logically, you shouldn't be able to be rid of them.
offline, if you have someone who makes your life a misery, you tell them to fuck off.
- It didn’t impact me as a user, and I let the maintainers deal with their drama.
- was publicly being rude to the point of making other contributors leave (even after being asked to stop) and at least one case of using a slur
they said it themselves in this post
> Yes, I know I am hard to work with. Yes, I know that I pushed certain OSS contributors away.
generally the kind of person that gives open source a bad reputation, you can be critical or anti-social without being an asshole
- what about linus torvalds
- You can be Dr. House MD only when you have the rep and skills of Dr. House MD. I think Linus definitely cleared that threshold.
- Boy i wish that principle held up in real medicine and other parts of life; "rep and skills" may in some ways equal power, but that false equivalency is how problematic behavior is excused in unfit individuals.
- he's the guy that created the linux kernel
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- Pretty much. He said some mean words. The cult of personality around the other maintainer has spun it into something way worse that he someone made other people quit OSS or something. It's hog wash and not backed up by anything.
- >He said some mean words.
I guarantee you I can say some mean words that would upset you at some point. If you have to repeatedly deal with it, you'd likely leave the space we share or ask someone to make me leave. Words have power, we shouldn't pretend otherwise.
- 1. Being called an idiot or told my idea is dumb is not going to upset me. I guess I just have more emotional maturity than some OSS devs.
2. Why would I leave when I can just block you if you are harassing me?
3. Why are you inventing this hypothetical instead of just showing where that occurred?
4. No-one has said words don't have power. But being on the internet you should be able to recognize that you won't be friends with everyone. So you have to develop some basic emotional regulation for silly insults.
- > 1. Being called an idiot or told my idea is dumb is not going to upset me. I guess I just have more emotional maturity than some OSS devs.
Alternatively, other people just have more respect for themselves (and others) than to stand to repeatedly be called an idiot.
- Why? What's the point of getting upset over any minor slight? Seems more disrespectful to yourself to waste time thinking about it. Why not laugh at the silly insults from people who don't know you and move on?
- Been on Bazzite for a while now and had very few issues, though to backup the sentiments of Antheas here, they have managed to upset the maintainer of the Go-XLR Linux Utility with their fast and loose HW changes: https://github.com/GoXLR-on-Linux/goxlr-utility/issues/239
Looking around a couple of adjacent communities, it seems the Bazzite maintainers might have acted in the best community interest on this one, so I'm optimistic things will continue in a positive way. Still, might make me a little less full-throated about recommending Bazzite, knowing there's such drama under the surface.
- Welcome to the comment section Kyle! https://github.com/GoXLR-on-Linux/goxlr-utility/issues/239#i...
- Sometimes I feel like Discord as been nothing but a bane on OSS. A chat is inherently less searchable than a wiki/forum/documentation, and those sources are often readable without needing to authenticate, which meant that you could find an answer through Google and such. Most project now don't bother with publicly readable and archivable (and so offline viewable) information sources and just rely on Discord. This lead to the same newbie question being answered over and over again, and is a clear degradation of the UX. But on top of that, most people see Discord as a hangout. Almost all Discord server I know have an "offtopic"/"random"/"meme"/etc channel, if not several. This almost inevitably lead to drama on a scale that newsgroups and IRC fellows could have only dreamed off. And considering that a lot of devs are able to create drama over even a mailing list, Discord is turbocharging the ability for nuisance.
Maybe it's my "Am I out of touch ? No it's the children who are wrong" moment, but I really think OSS projects would benefit from ditching discord.
- You are not out of touch, I rember in the 90s when people recommended using IRC for Linux questions and I hated it.
I didn't want to ask something and interacting in pseudo-realtime with another human being (that could potentionally laugh at me for asking a n00b question).
News groups were a little better for this, but the real progress was when you could search them or later read the answer in Stack Overflow. And the final step here is a LLM agent that has a web/doc search tool and can answer more difficult questions.
- It is. I'm not a fan of Drew Devault, but I can agree with this article of his:
https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS...
The most salient part:
> Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
- Wouldn't any platform have the same problem though? A forum would partition the community between those willing to make an account and submit private information and those who aren't. It seems like no matter what platform you choose there will always be those who are willing to participate and those who are not.
- Not quite. Discord is a lot more invasive with their info collection than, let's say Github or Matrix servers. Second, the info posted to Github is accessible without account, which is not true of Discord.
- Strongly agreed. I'd like to see users pushing more for this. Return to IRC, try XMPP or Matrix, put up a forum. Lots of options exist that would be more freedom-respecting, stable, and publicly searchable.
- Linking related post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46818467
AFAIK, removing Antheas from Bazzite opened the door to discussions for forming the OGC. Prior to that, Antheas had created such difficult situations that many of the member groups in the OGC did not collaborate with Bazzite because of his presence. Whether or not the OGC actually works (ex: getting patches upstreamed faster), only time will tell.
- Very nice of Bazzite to adopt Drama Tuesday. They are true gamers.
- It's as if everything gaming related attracts immature types. YouTube comment sections, forums, software projects...
- That must've sounded coherent in your head.
- I guess the good thing about Bazzite, CachyOS, Omarchy and what have you, is that it brings new users to Linux.
I would still like to see most users pick established distros, as contributions there have a higher impact on the ecosystem. But self-named gamers are probably harder to reason with.
- I've been using desktop Linux for 20 years in various capacities. I most recently picked Bazzite for my gaming/desktop VM because it's simple to set up and works better than other distros I've tried to game on in the recent past. It's that simple.
- The good part of Bazzite is I can just rebase to fedora kinoite and continue to be happy.
- Been running cachyos for months, drama-free
- Relevant comment from some months ago [1].
Personally I find that sticking to distros backed by companies or very large communities is just easier in the long term (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch).
- On desktops and servers yeah. Bazzite was a bit of a special case as it was catered to handheld devices. So it did have that going for it. A one stop install that just supported everything on these devices from the start.
- I've been thinking we could eliminate a lot of niche specialized distros by replacing them with system configs for Guix System or NixOS. Maybe if you got Ansible involved it could work for Debian and Arch also. Set your default packages, custom kernel, whatever else in there. Everything needing a big brand, name, logo, website, and so on seems a bit excessive at times.
- Now it’s your responsibility to explain what any of these words mean to an average user who just wants to play their Steam games. Like it or not, brands have power. It’s been hard enough to convince people already willing to try Linux gaming to use one of the dedicated gaming distros, instead of waiting for when SteamOS is going to support their hardware.
- Bazzite is sortof in that category, though. Fedora atomic is a podman container image, and Bazzite is using that as FROM in their Containerfile. It's niche and specialized only to the extent that they're providing gaming specific setup (like Nvidia drivers). It's mostly a Fedora system.
- Maybe SteamOS will help with this!
- What do you mean? SteamOS is backed by a large company.
- As it slowly starts working on another platforms, it can fill in Bazzite's role (a bit ironic I guess, given Bazzite is inspired on SteamOS)
- This is pure dramaposting- "post-mortem" is so misleading and mischaracterizes the situation. I don't use bazzite, I don't know Kyle or anybody here, but I am tired of the drama.
All of the things listed in the blog are personal and technical disagreements, nothing morally reprehensible, no disrespect, nothing that would make anyone want to burn bridges like this.
It's fine to leave a project and to publicize disagreements but this comes across as spiteful.
- Glad I decided not to stick with Bazzite. I gave it a try a few months ago and had issues with Bazaar crashing (not at all low end hardware btw). If the primary method to install software was that broken on a fresh install, there was no way I was going to trust the OS at all, no matter how many people on YouTube and HN talked about how amazing it is.
- What alternative did you switch to?
- I went with CachyOS. It's based off of Arch and compiles packages with flags for more modern CPUs. They also build extra packages that aren't normally provided by Arch (always nice to rely a little less on the AUR). And their default scheduler is supposed to provide a smoother gaming experience, though they have a selection of schedulers if you don't like that one.
- I tried it but couldn't get it stable on my system. Ended up with EndeavorOS which is arch-based with a much better-install process.
- I never tried Bazzite, but have been using Jovian, which is a NixOS-based gaming setup.
I have heard that CachyOS (Arch) and Nobara (Fedora) are two other decent options.
- Bazzite made it so easy to switch from windows. I first tried cachyos but bazzite’s gamemode worked perfectly from the start, hdr and vrr included, on nvidia. Turned an expensive PC into an expensive console and made me so happy. Just the fact I can sleep the system mid-game and resume is magic!
Guess I gotta go back to cachy and try again. Bummer
- Why? Because some guy was pushed out of the friend group?
- Well, yes, but that’s an over simplification. My main concern is the instability. I don’t want to deal with a project that’s in turmoil and Cachy feels like a more stable project, even before reading any of this. It’s a larger user base and therefore more likely to stick around (or so I tell myself).
- i'd be surprised if there are more users of cachy than bazzite.
what gets missed is that bazzite is, to borrow video game parlance, a mod of fedora's atomic desktops. every piece created to build and maintain the system is on github. it's not rocket science, it's a collection of dockerfiles, rpm specs, config files and github actions workflows. and fedora is not going away any time soon.
- It's silly to reduce all issues like this to just pointless drama between people. It affects the product, especially if key people are pushed out. From the sounds of it, the person left running the show has already made a bunch of bad decisions (as I already commented on I ran into one of the issues caused by those bad decisions).
- The guy that did the bulk of the hardware integration work...
- man, i was JUST thinking about switching out windows for bazzite, because the only thing i use my windows machine for is video games...
might need to hold off on that, as much as it pains me, with all the weird & sloppy updates windows is pushing out.
- I would still recommend trying Bazzite today.
If we take the post as truth (it's not clear to me whether we can), then Bazzite will get iffy kernel updates that will particularly break handhelds. But desktop will be more stable and you could even turn off automatic updates for 6months and see how things look after.
I think Bazzite has a very smooth experience for Windows gaming and even if you decide that you don't like it or that the distro really is falling apart, you'll have gotten the best Linux-gaming experience and can evaluate other distros more clearly.
- Just install another distribution—Bazzite has some conveniences in setup, but doesn’t fundamentally provide anything that you can’t get elsewhere, and a lot of those customizations you probably won’t need.
I decided to try Fedora Kinoite for my gaming machine (to have something with less “maybe not maintained one day stuff” out of the box and a long term community of maintenance), and have been happy.
- I’d recommend trying Linux Mint with Steam.
- Mint needs to die. It's the most ancient, archaic distro ever.
Replacing something that's SOTA with something that still uses X11 and years old software isn't it (it makes Debian Stable look modern).
- The latest version (with support through 2029) was released last month. It installed and runs flawlessly.
- It's literally based on a 2 year old Ubuntu LTS... This is what I mean. It's very outdated.
- So what’s your alternative?
- Fedora Workstation, Fedora Silverblue, regular (non-LTS) Ubuntu are in my experience best for newbs. After that Debian. After that Arch.
For gaming specifically, I've heard good things about Nobara (dev is a RedHatter, though it's his personal project) and CachyOS.
- I tried Linux desktop for the first time in like a decade. Didn't know Xorg was deprecated for real, as in most distros moved to Wayland. Was surprised that the one hold out was Mint. And learned the hard way that Mint didn't work on my fairly normal PC, due to an Xorg issue.
This is the thing so many people recommend?! No wonder Linux is unpopular.
Also there like 20 competing ways to install packages now. Used to just be apt.
- > Also there like 20 competing ways to install packages now. Used to just be apt
This is very incorrect. There's been far more for 35+ years
* apt/.deb
* yum(dnf)/.rpm
* Tarballs
* Ports trees
* Flatpak
* Snap
* Etc, etc, etc
- Flatpak and Snap are new to me, and that's the annoyance. Like I get if there's some technical advantage to a snap, but apt can install snaps too. Also idk what .appimage is.
rpm was a thing that existed but wasn't a Mint way of installing. Tar, yes. I can see why you'd consider a tar a package, but I was thinking of things actually designed for packages, and tar isn't really an extra thing to learn and deal with. Port tree, idk never heard of that.
- > Flatpak and Snap are new to me and that's the annoyance.
These were designed to solve different problems.
PS - Just avoid snap. Fuck snap. All my homies hate snap.
Flatpak otoh is software basically delivered in a container with some security restrictions. It works great, but you may want a GUI problem called "flatseal" to enable access to certain parts of the host filesystem, device access, etc depending on specifics of what the particular application is supposed to do. That's a bit of a security boundary (good).
Flatpak does solve several big issues with the minor and only occasional need to use flatseal to enable access to say something in /proc /dev etc
Snap happened in 2014
Flatpak in 2015
So you've got about 10 years of catch-up ;)
- I'm not really obligated to catch up on that. I'll try Linux again if they ever sort these things out, until then Mac is a fine dev/personal machine.
- Are you sure that's okay? It has App Store, .pkg, drag-to-install, homebrew, MacPorts, and who knows what else!
- MacPorts vs Homebrew is actually my biggest gripe with Mac dev, but at least it doesn't get in the way of installing basic software. Regular stuff is always intuitive and ends up with a .app. Even lots of dev stuff is just a .pkg you download, macports/homebrew is for niches.
- > I'll try Linux again if they ever sort these things out
You don't understand. This won't be "sorted out", this is a feature.
Maybe it's just not for you, and that's ok.
- You said it yourself, "fuck snap." But Snap is the default for a bunch of things. There's probably someone else saying "fuck flatpak." The user doesn't win this way, it's not a feature.
- Snaps are a Canonical thing and is only used by default on Ubuntu and distro's based on Ubuntu. No other distro uses or recommends them.
- Those are the popular distros though. Switch to something else and you trade 1 problem for 10.
- If you want to base it on popularity then you should use Debian. Debian and its child distros (of which Ubuntu is one) make up the majority of Linux distros and the child distros are still 99% Debian.
- Flatpak is available on every distro.
- Snap is Ubuntu and derivatives only which is a respectable but smaller segment of the options.
It's also a fucking system daemon that runs in the background. Avoid.
Flatpak is available on every distro.
- Look I have no love for snap in particular, but it exists as a default in serious places. If you can bury it then great, the less confusion the better. I'm not going to install some alt distro just to avoid it though.
Send Xorg to a nice farm too. Or Wayland. Whichever the bad one is. Competing window servers is a way bigger deal.
- (Even if they're all true) Do any of those things matter to a user? If the goal is to ditch Windows and have something else that can run Steam and a web browser and maybe some other applications, being "ancient" sounds just as likely to mean "stable and actually works"
- The stability is why I prefer Linux Mint for gaming. Everything just works, even on my modern hardware.
dismalaf: I definitely don’t care about gestures on my desktop computer.
- One immediately noticeable thing is the lack of gestures on X11. Touchpad and touchscreen gestures just work in Wayland, most DEs implement them OOTB, even Hyprland has them.
Imagine going from a modern OS to one that doesn't have touchpad gestures in 2026. Yeah there's workarounds but having to config that isn't a good user experience.
- what exactly happened to bazzite? I've seen so much hype around the distro and buzz among normal people, that it almost became THE normal gamer distro, so much so it completely overshadowed nobara and whatever other gamer gimmick distros are out there
- Its fine and did not die. In fact its growing as always, even with "drama". https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_bazzite...
- As a happy Bazzite user, I had no idea things were so bumpy. At least the migration to other os-tree distros is trivial (Fedora Kinoite -> Bazzite was one or two shell commands). My main reason for using the distro was the built-in nvidia drivers for my old graphics card.
- For everyone who thinks this is the death of Bazzite or whatever, keep in mind Bazzite, all the UBlue projects, are all based on Fedora Atomic which makes it super easy to make an immutable spin.
There's also Silverblue which is ready to go out of the box (unless you have Nvidia), Nobara which adds some gaming things. And on a different vein CachyOS is making waves with some gamers (but it's Arch based instead of Fedora and not atomic/immutable).
- Also Jovian Nix, which is great if someone is already invested in that ecosystem.
- >Bazzite's fate is sealed as a non-commercial hobbyist-like OS.
Sounds like good news to me.
- This blog post is the only exposure I have to this whole thing, and from it, all I can say for sure is that this post is incredibly immature.
- Community member is problematic, makes themselves the victim
- God damn it Kyle.
- You like me for my (always right) conspiratorial takes
I got another one:
Look, follow the money, Microsoft knows Windows 11 on handhelds is a dumpster fire right now, and they are not ready to drop their own "Xbox Portable" yet
So how do they keep the market from moving to the alternative SteamOS/Valve?
They trojan horse the "alternative"
Think about it: Bazzite pops up, gains massive community "trust", every traditionally pro-MSFT media talk about it, and then coincidentally becomes the loudest voice trashing GPD's HW support, why would they do that?
It's a classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish play
FUD: Use Bazzite as an "undercover" $MSFT project to make GPD look like a risky, unoptimized mess
Damage: GPD takes the hit because they are actually trying to innovate, while the "community" devs (who are definitely on a $MSFT gang) tell everyone to just buy an Rog Ally ($MSFT Partner) or wait for the next Microsoft Xbox handheld
Pivot: Once GPD is sidelined as a "niche hobbyist risk", Microsoft drops a polished Handheld UX for Windows, Bazzite magically "loses funding" or support, and everyone gets funneled back into the Game Pass ecosystem on "approved" hardware
Bazzite isn't a "community project", it's a trojan hose
GPD bet on the wrong horse thinking that community was neutral
- not undercover, kyle is microsoft employee based on his github bio.
also if you wanna support linux on gaming, just buy hardware that support steamos like steamdeck, steam machine, steam frame, legion go s, rog ally.
- Convoluted, but hypothetically possible. We have no reason to think that right now, though…
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- [dead]
- I don't care enough about the drama to deep-dive, but as far as I can tell both parties are at fault. At least Bazzite did not make a "post mortem" blog post on a project that is still active. Bit petty if you ask me
- Leftism and OSS share a similar problem, being that good ideas, intentions, and works are squandered by petty drama and insecure egos.
