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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg
Graphs can be found here on their github. Since around mid November the active user count for Bazzite has gone up by around 16k active users.
Personally, my only wish for Bazzite is a Cosmic version 👼 I tried it out recently and it seems fairly impressive
im in that chart! i just built my wife a gaming PC, she is not a PC person and knows exactly nothing about linux as a whole, but she loves her steamdeck and bazzite means she never has to worry about opening a terminal (or even the desktop if she doesnt want to)
Excuse my ignorance. I know nothing about this stuff. Aren't Steamdeck and Bazzite completely unrelated things? Or is Bazzite something that you install on Steamdeck? Your comment confused me.
Bonus question: what would be a good piece of used hardware to install Bazzite on? Could I install it on an older MS Surface for example?
not at all! SteamOS and Bazzite are pretty fundamentally different on the back end (one is arch, one is fedora) but on the front end, they both launch into steam big picture mode, and offer a KDE desktop you can switch to.
steamOS is available for download as a beta, but it is still a very handheld focused distro and does not include simple QOL things like print drivers, it struggles with things like wake from sleep, but it's fairly stable and pretty usable
bazzite is a little more refined and a little more fully fleshed out, it includes more packages and drivers and is better suited as a 'daily driver' os
both are immutable distros, meaning you can't really install stuff outside of the official app store/repository and a lot of terminal commands wont work out of the box. this means there are 'nannies' to make sure you don't effectively softlock your os by running random terminal commands that chatbot told you were a good idea while troubleshooting.
the primary focus of these distros is gaming, so they are optimized for speed, performance, and compatibility with steam/lutris, and putting up safety rails to make sure you dont nuke yourself.
distros like cachyOS and nobara have the same focus, but do not have the nannies, so you can sudo whatever you want (but remember, #3 with great power comes great responsibility). its gaming focused, but meant for more confident power users.
in terms of what to install it on..... linux loves team red, and redder the better! everything AMD is always going to work best, an intel cpu is going to work as poorly (hot and slow) on linux as it does on windows, but amd GPU is always preferred for any linux builds. ive never had a microsoft surface to mess around with, but youtube suggests there are lots of options for installing linux on a surface (although i dont know what hoops you have to jump trough.... but if youre interested in linux, then jumping through hoops should be second nature to you lol)