From Windows To Bazzite
This is my 50th post, half of the way to the 100 posts project. I happen to change the main OS of my GPD Win Max 2.
Windows 11 becomes more bloated day by day. I feel like I can't stand it anymore. The OS eats up the memory and it makes playing video games unenjoyable. I did a little research and asked Gemini, it says the Bazzite OS is (almost) perfect for my use cases. I did more research, made some backups, burned the ISO to my thumb drive and started working on installing the new Bazzite OS.
I cleaned up my SSD, left approximately 300GB of unused space. Thumb drive in, booted up, installed and started up the new system. Everything went smoothly by far. Then issues came.
First, I ran into network issue. I had to use a VPN to connect to my Steam account. Did some research, connected hotspot network to my other computer with VPN on, fixed.
Then I had to install a VPN software. I failed to install .AppImage version of Clash or other software. Finally I installed the .rpm version and layered it into the OS. Subscribed and fixed. This took me about 2 hours.
The next was input method for Fcitx5. This was not difficult and I fixed it quickly. I also made the input method work in any software because of the logic of Bazzite. It was fun and I learned a lot.
Updated the whole system, I saw about 5GB of package. The most difficult part was the difference between logging in KDE desktop and Gaming Mode. I expected to be able to choose which environment to log in to. I did some research and found out that there were issues. I asked Gemini and it delivered a quite solid solution. Now I am able to choose which to log in everytime.
Then I installed Obsidian, Epic and some games on Steam and Epic. I haven't play any of them yet but I'm sure they will be better than on Windows 11. I even tried to install some .exe with the help of bottles and Steam and they surprisingly worked well. It reminded me of the days when I was using Wine for .exe a decade ago.
But the most important thing to me is, there are already plenty of better OSes besides Windows 11. I was thinking about Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora, turns out there are people who love gaming have made such a wonderful one.
Bazzite OS looks beautiful, elegant and seems easy to use. The KDE Plasma is similar to Windows 11 but even better. I can customize whatever I want without running into serious bugs. The window, fonts and UX look smoother compared to Windows 11. The controller, bluetooth and touchscreen work well out of the box. I feel so great using Bazzite for now.
I really appreciated those developers for their great work. This is a brilliant way out of the blackhole of Windows.
Day 50. I will edit this essay later.