As someone who put OpenSUSE on their Deck, the advantage is that when you've got a problem it should be easier to find other people with the same problem. Especially when you go through official support.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2026
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Yes, two primary advantages.
- you don’t have to install anything
- You can Game on first startup
Bazzite launches in Gaming Mode on startup btw, just like SteamOS
It comes pre installed, the question should be the other way around: why change the system? And I don't think those two are sufficiently different to justify it unless you want to use the deck mainly as a PC.
Nah, I want to keep using it as a gaming device. I changed the original OS to Bazzite because I absolutely need to flash alternate OSes on everything I can, the voices in my head tell me to. But joking aside, your question remains pertinent: why change the system? I honestly never gave SteamOS a fair shake and I probably should.
Yes, it's already installed on my steam dexk
Maybe it's arch based? Tested bazzite and found it overhyped, I don't think a immutable flatpak solution is the best for gaming. I use CachyOS on steam deck and love it's easy setup (easy for an arch user).
Also happily settled on Cachy after trying stock/bazz.. Was hardship to tinker around, sometimes I like the components to be able to talk to each other, why is that weird? 😆
Bazzite uses the Steam rpm, not flatpak.
Though I think other launchers like Heroic may be flatpaks. But that's no different to SteamOS.
True, actual steam flatpak is a mess. Opensuse Kappa/Aeon actually use it and it took an afternoon of debugging and 3, barely - documented fixes to get proton games to launch at all.
I don't believe the Steam flatpak is responsible for those issues
openSUSE recently added some more security policies. By default, Wine cannot run normally. There's a package you can install that sets SELinux security policies to allow it to work. If you install the openSUSE Steam rpm, that security policy automatically gets installed too.
This is a downside of flatpak's approach to sandboxing. It aims to work everywhere on every distro, using bubblewrap instead of something like SELinux or AppArmor. But it also does not interact with AppArmor or SELinux, so if they block something, flatpak can't override that.
Meanwhile, snap uses AppArmor for sandboxing. So even if there was a policy like openSUSE's that prevented Wine from working by default, since snap speaks AppArmor, it can give itself the necessary permissions to make Wine work.
SELinux and Bubblewrap are two very different technologies. They could get out of each other’s way better, but you cannot “sandbox with SELinux”.
You absolutely can sandbox using SELinux. Red Hat even has a tool called "sandbox" for just that: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/selinux_users_and_administrators_guide/chap-security-enhanced_linux-securing_programs_using_sandbox
Edit: and Android sandboxing is built heavily around SELinux: https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/selinux
Fair enough, you can do some sandboxing this way. But SELinux is not a sandboxing tool in the same way bubblewrap or landlock are. It’s a tool that can put gates around your tools until it’s a sandbox, but SELinux as sandboxing is not in the spirit of “tools doing one thing and doing it well”
So I'll answer the other way, and explain Bazzite's advantages. Mainly it comes down to the fact that installing system packages is easier, and Bazzite comes with most of the useful ones pre-installed. For example:
- podman installed by default, so you can easily bring up containers for automation tasks or background services
- Sunshine can be easily installed, so you can stream games to another device like a tablet
- you can add more packages using rpm-ostree, or brew, or distrobox
- other various tools like support for joysticks and controllers and custom key mappings, installed by default
Basically, Bazzite gives you the reliability of SteamOS, because it's also immutable, and well tested on the Deck. But Bazzite gives you the power and customizability of a full desktop PC, letting you mod it more heavily and use it for more than just gaming.
I use both. SteamOS on my SD OLED, and Bazzite on a gaming PC. I don’t notice a difference because all I use the machines for is gaming.
I eventually moved to Kubuntu from Bazzite because it was easier to manage my media servers. I’m not a huge fan of Bazzite’s quadlet system.
But for 99% of my use case the two systems were identical.
Cool, thanks for the feedback! Once I got my deck, I immediately flashed Bazzite on it, for no good reason, honestly. Mostly because it was the hot new thing and wanted to try it out, but in doing so I never even tried SteamOS. Because of this, I was left wondering what was wrong with the original OS, hence this post. I'll probably give SteamOS a whirl later this month just to see.
I'm also not a fan of quadlets, I use docker compose instead. What do you use for managing your media servers?
It's already installed? It's a weird question because why would I even try bazzite?
I tried Bazzite for a while, personally I found only negatives. None of the features Bazzite provides were of any interest to me. I found it also downloaded a lot more updates, every time I picked the Deck up to play I had to wait for ages. Also, it did the shader caching thing EVERY TIME I started a game, instead of only sometimes. Went back to stock and I'm much more happy.
I use bazzite on my gaming PC and few months ago I wanted to set up steam deck without using steam account using bazzite.
I can't quite remember what happened but I think it was too buggy, and I went back. Might have been the requirement for steam to run to register any input from the controller.
Maybe ram usage? Bazzite is one of the bulkiest distros on that front, sitting at ~4GB usage at idle. I have no idea where SteamOS sits in comparison though