Linux

Can I run KDE and Gnome on bazzite?

Both GNOME and KDE Plasma are supported on Bazzite.

How can I install and manage multiple images?

Multiple images can only coexist as follows:

• Dual-boot
• Rebase to second image -> pin second image with sudo ostree admin pin <insert digit> -> rebase back to original image. From now on, you can access this second image from GRUB. It's recommended to designate a different user to the second image; and only access it through that. While what has been just described technically works, and you could even keep the second image up to date with a super cumbersome upgrade path, managing a system like this is not supported and could lead to unforeseen circumstances. Though, it is valid to pin your original image -> test another image through rebasing (and a new designated user) -> rollback to original image. Pinning the original image is not necessary, but I like to play safe. Note that rpm-ostree reset might be needed sometimes for rebasing.

Now I suspect that perhaps the game freeze wouldn’t happen with Gnome either. So I want to have both on bazzite, but can’t figure it out.

So, IIUC, you're just interested to know if this problem persists on GNOME or not. So, consider the following:

• Pin your current deployment with sudo ostree admin pin 0.
• Create a new user, but don't use it yet.
• Rebase to Bazzite's GNOME image.
• Reboot
• Enter through the new user (or create a new one).
• Test out whatever you want.
• Rollback through rpm-ostree rollback
• Reboot
• Continue using your original user.

I wondered this same thing and investigated installing Hyprland on Bazzite but didn't really find anything. I suspect you'd layer the installation into the os with rpm-ostree, but I didn't end up trying it.

Not much info on how to achieve it, but some info why it might be bad can be found on the ublue discourse site. (Search for KDE gnome) Basically it seems to mess up configs to have both DEs installed or rebasing from one to the other.

You should be able to layer the xdg-desktop-portal-gnome package, which will also pull any dependencies.

To answer your general question though, yes I believe you can easily install at least minimal versions of each DE with little impact to rpm-ostree performance. They don't need to be separate images, though that's possible too by rebasing and pinning. I would just layer the necessary packages to load a GNOME environment (start with rpm-ostree install gnome-shell). This way everything stays up to date with the active image. For example, I'm running GDM under Kinoite simply because I was having unresolvable issues with SDDM and LightDM.

Pinning separate images would require you to rebase with each image update and then unpin/pin the old/new images...too much work.

I'm not sure about the bazzite part, but running both kde and gnome is not typically recommended. Kde changes a bunch of theming and miscellaneous settings whenever you launch it, and gnome doesn't change them back automatically. If you only care about running one game rather than daily driving gnome you should be fine though

I am running Bazzite and Stellaris. I have no issues with stability or opening the game. Have you checked your hardware fundamentals and done things like disable steam overlay?

Hahaha yes this is totally possible but not what you need.

Just do rpm-ostree search portal and install the gnome portal on the KDE base.

I've been curious about this myself.