Installing Bazzite and Initial Setup

This guide is a visual guide for those who are unfamiliar with desktop Linux and want to install Bazzite.

Prerequisites:

Make sure you meet the system requirements for Fedora.
A graphics card that can utilize Vulkan 1.3 or later, but most modern AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPUs should be fine.
A USB flash drive, external drive, or microSD card with at least 3GB of free space on it (keep in mind this will remove existing data on it)
Download an ISO release here.
Software to flash the image to your flash drive or external drive. We recommend using Fedora Media Writer, Balena Etcher, or Rufus.
Manual partitioning is unsupported.
See Fedora Kinoite documentation and Fedora Silverblue documentation for more information.

Bazzite Variants

bazzite is the AMD/Intel GPU general desktop image intended for most personal computers.
bazzite-nvidia is bazzite but for PCs running Nvidia GPUs as they include their proprietary drivers in the image.
bazzite-deck is a special Steam Deck image of Bazzite. More details on that here.
bazzite-gnome is bazzite, but instead of using KDE Plasma as the desktop environment, it uses GNOME.
bazzite-gnome-nvidia is bazzite-gnome but for PCs running Nvidia GPUs as they include their proprietary drivers in the image.
bazzite-deck-gnome is bazzite-deck but instead of using KDE Plasma as the desktop environment, it uses GNOME.

KDE Plasma and GNOME Desktop Environments Differences at a Glance

KDE Plasma:

GNOME:

Wayland and X11

In short, Wayland and X11 (also known as Xorg or the X Window System) are windowing systems for desktop Linux.

Wayland is the default for most of the images and the recommended option for Bazzite. However, the Nvidia images default to X11
X11 is a legacy windowing system. While we recommend to stick with Wayland, there may be scenarios where X11 would have to be used. Nvidia GPUs may have issues with Wayland.

What about Weston?

This is for using Waydroid under X11. You do not need to use this if you use Wayland, and the only intended use case for it is running Android applications if you have to use X11.