Bazzite's latest update delivers a massive upgrade

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Just now, Bazzite’s Kyle Gospodnetich posted the July update for their project and it has debuted some exciting changes!

From updates to the kernel to the Fedora 32-bit “controversy,” and new updates to the apps that ship with Bazzite—this Bazzite upgrade is huge!

Addressing the Fedora 32-bit Hubbub

So the first thing they addressed in this project update is the whole drama that hit a few weeks ago about Fedora proposing to drop 32-bit support from their distro.

They have valid reasons for wanting to drop 32-bit support, but when Kyle voices his concerns and how it would negatively impact Bazzite they worked together as a team towards a solution that benefitted the entire community.

As Kyle said in this post:

This is the beauty of Fedora’s proposal system and why we did not make a lot of noise about this in the early days. What it did allow for is us and our team to make our needs clear and present use cases that otherwise may not have been accounted for.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Kyle a few days ago about this (and more). Check it out here!

Bazaar

I think the biggest thing with this release has to be Bazaar. It’s now the default Flathub store. Not just for Bazzite, but for all of Universal Blue.

According to their post:

This is a brand new store that eliminates many of the problems we’ve faced with other Linux app stores, mainly thanks to Bazaar being flathubfirst and not dealing with traditional packages that aren’t in use here anyway.

Right away you can expect a more fluid update/install/ uninstall process with a queue and global progress bar, and a curated app experience that shows both applications we feel you should try out, and new or rising apps within the greater Flathub ecosystem.

The best part of Bazaar, though, is that it provides donation links for individual flatpak packages. These donation links are the same links you can find on Flathub and this is a big deal as it allows you to directly support your favorite desktop Linux apps. And as Bazaar rolls out on other distributions, it’s going to solve a major pain point for Linux desktop app development.

Bazzite Portal

As I pointed out in one of my recent posts, the Bazzite Portal is back. This is a web portal that gives you an excellent means of configuring your Bazzite install remotely.

Read my post about setting up Media Apps on Bazzite for more info.

Contributors

Univeral Blue’s Discord server now has 18,000 members while the Bazzite subreddit now has over 15,000 members. They’ve also delivered 763 terabytes of ISO downloads in just the last 30 days.

Bazzite is a community-driven project that wouldn’t be possible without their contributors. It’s great to see all their success.

Please check out their official post for more information about this update.

If you don’t have Bazzite installed yet, you can follow my guide here. If you’ve already got Bazzite installed on your machine, Bazzite should automatically update itself. Or you can check out their documentation to learn how to automatically update your system depending on the image you’re running!