For all its ubiquity, Windows OS is a less-than-perfect choice if you’re a gamer. It’s bloated, overly contrived, and has nothing in the way of a gaming-oriented UI for use in a living room setting. Valve showed us a potential alternative with SteamOS, but would it work?

SteamOS is not out yet. Further, it looks like Valve isn’t interested in pushing it out for this particular use case anytime soon: instead, the focus as of SteamOS 3.7 is to get it to work on , and even that might take a while. As I’ve been looking for an off-ramp for Windows for some time now, I decided the right time for experimentation was yesterday, and chose Bazzite OS as my primary consideration.

is, more or less, a third-party attempt at emulating SteamOS, built from the ground up to em𓃲ulate the experience on a wide array of devices. If you can install Linux on it, you can install Bazzite (which is built on Fedora), and the process is surprisingly foo🐓lproof.

In a general sense, Windows is fine, and it’s what the vast majority of us have gotten used to over the years. It is the de facto go-to option for any modern PC builder. It’s big, however. Big, bloated, and expensive if you’re actually buying first-party licensing. Sure, it supports virtually everything under the sun, but this quickly turns into a detriment for specific use cases.

For an office PC and workstation, then, a Windows PC is the obvious option. If you’re building a living room PC to use as a console or a media station, though, you will want to drive the thing using a controller or a remote, and that’s not good at all on Windows. Enter SteamOS, which has been designed from the ground up as a media-focused OS. Bazzite functions almost exactly the same, being an unofficial take on SteamOS, and it should support virtually every reasonably modern hardware combo under the suඣn.

My goal for experimentation with Bazzite has been to reduce m🔜y reliance on Windows as a whole and turn my old gaming laptop into a Linux-based media powerhouse. For the longest time, the problem was that my laptop used an Nvidia GPU, but modern Bazzite also supports Team Green, which is excellent news across the board.

I’m testing Bazzite on an old-gen Lenovo Legion machine. Equipped with 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, a reasonably fast i5-9300H CPU, and the RTX 2060, it serves as a solid baseline for virtually all media reproduction and casual gaming. Most things run fine on this machine, even though the tech running it is getting long in the tooth on top of being laptop hardware to begin with.

Installing Bazzite OS is quick, easy, and painless

I’m happy to report that there’s hardly anything to complain about installing Bazzite. All you need is an appropriately tweaked installation file (drivers, etc.), which is available , and to prepare bootable media. Using the default settings worked for me, and it took about 20 minutes for Bazzite OS to install on the laptop.

I’m writing this out specifically to assuage any concerns you might have about installing a Linux distro: setting up Bazzite was the first time I’ve ever installed Linux on my own, and if I didn’t mess anything up, I reckon you won’t either.

Post-installat⛎ion, one issue I encountered was that the Steam Game Mode UI was laggy, but this was resolved simply by allowing the GPU to render Web View interfaces in Desktop Mode. Easy-peasy.

The whole thing functions exactly the same as SteamOS does on the Deck if you set it up that way. Bazzite lets you choose whether your PC boots into Game Mode or Desktop Mode during the installation process, and I’ve set up my laptop to emulate the Deck in this sense.

Crucially, SteamOS’s Quick Settings menu also works, allowing you to quickly tune your upscaling options, refresh rate, and a bevy of other things while playing. In my testing (playing Witchfire, 2K Drive, and Sulfur for the most part), there have been no problems, and the performance seems about on-par with what I saw on Windows. I’ve not conducted truly hardcore benchmarking on this system, however. For that information, I’d recommend checking out Larkin Cunningham’s testing from early March 2025, which suggests Nvidia systems may lose some performance on Linux versus Windows 11. In my case, any potential performance dips I might’ve experienced have been minuscule enough not to notice them, and I do usually notice these things.

The one thing that is missing is the TDP limiter, which could be an issue depending on what you want to do with your device. In my case, the laptop’s battery is particularly crummy to begin with, and though Bazzite did help me eke out 20-odd minutes of extra battery life (3:10 at full charge versus 2:50ish on Windows 11 at full charge), it’s plugged in when in use, anyway.

What do I get for my troubles, then? A capable semi-mobile media driver with reasonable workstation capabilities. Since Bazzite OS has a full-fledged Desktop Mode, I can do some light work on it. Everything web-based works by default, and for everything else, there’s OpenOffice. A particularly handy app I’ve grown to love on Linux is , which allows me to control all attached LEDs and fans in a single interface. It, too, worked flawlessly out of the box, and I’m frankly astonished with how easy setting it all up has been.

This applies to Bazzite OS in general. I’ve yet to find something that’s outright broken on the OS or doesn’t work. Sure, all the usual caveats of SteamOS apply here as well: if a game doesn’t support Linux, you won’t be able to play it natively on the device you’ve got Bazzite on.

To be perfectly fair, you could get Bazzite OS’s biggest boon by simply setting up your PC to boot directly into Steam Game Mode UI on Windows. That is an option, and it will be the preferred way of doing things for those who wish to stick with Windows no matter what. If you’re like me, though, and wish to see if things could be done outside of Microsoft’s purview, I can happily recommend Bazzite OS.

I’ve had Bazzite installed on my laptop, using it as a media PC hooked up to a TV, for about two weeks now. One bug I’ve had a few times is that the leftmost Game Mode feature menu will glitch out. Thankfully, it’s rare enough that I don’t feel too pressed about it. Everything else has been trucking along just fine to the point that I have to go out of my way to look for reasons to use Desktop Mode.

In summary, Bazzite OS is, in my experience, good enough for most casual users and those interested in building media PCs. If you’d like to avoid the usual Windows bloat, insistence on constant updates, and the god-awful new AI Copilot feature, this may well be the ticket. You could also dual-boot if you’re into that sort of thing!