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.

I get that the distribution is geared towards steam+proton usage, but I was disoriented to see that one creates "an operating system for gamers", which will most certainly run a lot of windows executables, and then won't include wine in it. There is lutris preinstalled and the documentation also hints towards installing winezgui from their appstore (which is what I did), but I wonder why wasn't that obvious for the developers of bazzite that after installing the system, user would just want to download a game, double click the executable and play.

On the other hand, wine tends to be quite heavy package (503MB installed size according to arch repo), perhaps that's the reason for not including it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46092225

Guess I gotta go back to cachy and try again. Bummer

might need to hold off on that, as much as it pains me, with all the weird & sloppy updates windows is pushing out.

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).

Sounds like good news to me.

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