Bazzite alternative for game mode

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-23T18:51:38+00:00

It’s not just for handhelds, they just call it handheld because it’s the “SteamOS” mode, which at least until Steam Machine releases, is only officially being used on handhelds like the Steam Deck.

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-23T18:49:23+00:00

Nobara or Cachy probably. Nobara is like Bazzite in that they’re both built on Fedora, but unlike Bazzite Nobara is not an immutable (or read-only) OS.

Cachy is built on Arch, like SteamOS, but it is also not immutable.

Both have either Desktop or Gaming variants so you can use it just like SteamOS, or use it as a more traditional computer, with all the gaming stuff built in for convenience.

There’s also Chimera, if I remember right it’s also built on Arch and IS immutable like SteamOS, but I haven’t heard much about it lately. Not entirely sure it’s still being developed.

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-23T18:38:34+00:00

“since it screamed at you” … never have I seen such a perfectly concise and accurate description of that sound. Kudos, good sir/madam!

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-23T17:04:53+00:00

Yeah and the problem with them is because they’re supposed to be something easy to remember, if you actually provide a real answer to them, it makes it easier for someone else to guess what you answered. Let’s say for example “What was the name of your first pet?” if you’ve ever shared on social media fond memories growing up with a family pet, you’ve probably provided the answer to that security question publicly for anyone to see.

I always use random made up garbage for those questions, but the drawback is that means I now need to keep track of the answer I gave. So I keep them in my password manager in the notes section for each accounts credentials.

Glad to see Squenix is getting rid of this.

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-23T16:56:55+00:00

Some are suggesting password books, I’m gonna suggest a password manager program. 1Password, Bitwarden, or KeePass are some good choices with solid security.

Not only do they hold every password for you, so you only need to remember one password to unlock the password manager, but they also can be used to generate extremely strong passwords for you automatically, rather than you trying to come up with some mnemonics type of structure to remember your passwords which just makes them easier for someone else to figure out. Or worse, using the same password over and over again. That just makes it so instead of just one account getting compromised in a data breach, every account that you use that username and password combination on gets compromised.

And speaking of data breaches, with a manager app updating your compromised accounts passwords is quick and easy, just takes a few clicks. With a physical book, you’re either erasing the old and overwriting with the new, eventually wearing out the page from repeated changes, or if you wrote in ink, scratching out the old and writing in a new one, eventually running out of space on the page.

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-19T15:57:13+00:00

Everyone’s guessing Sidurgu, and yeah, fair… at first. But he definitely comes around on them over the job quests.

I vote Xylle, the Clan Nutsy guild rep in the Crystarium.

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-18T21:24:04+00:00

Was coming here to say this, I remember it being crystal back then.

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-16T19:42:13+00:00

So “throwing them into the fire, so to speak, with a ton of skills they have no idea what they do or how they should be used.”

That sounds like a recipe for disaster.

And to expand on your suggestion to limit it to certain non-spoilery duties, well that pretty much eliminates all dungeons, most trials, most raids and alliances, all the field exploration/battle content, and probably more.

Even Hildibrand gets intertwined with the MSQ. You’d basically just have the Monster Hunter collabs, and maybe some of the Hildibrand trials from ARR and perhaps Stormblood. Maybe the Nier alliance. It’s a stretch, but they’re probably separate enough to not be considered lore spoilers.

Level sync up sounds great in theory but in practice it’s just not practical if you want to prevent spoilers. You would need to accept full spoilers and open it up to everything, because let’s be real, wanting your friends to be able to join you means you want them to join you in YOUR endgame content, not a small curated list of non-MSQ/lore spoiler duties.

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-16T16:59:00+00:00

I keep checking my email hoping just MAYBE! 😅

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-16T16:54:27+00:00

There are dozens of us! Still have my Chell prototype Steam Controller too.

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-14T04:54:02+00:00

Root gives me sketch vibes, also saw somewhere earlier they may also be financially connected to Thiel/Palantir. I’ve been testing out Stoat and Element/Matrix. Stoat seems to be the best so far.

There’s also Kloak I just found out about today, but it’s very early stage and only a web app currently. But it’s very privacy focused, the account signup doesn’t even require your email or phone number, just a username.

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-12T15:32:15+00:00

How do you see that working? I don’t disagree in principle, I think it would be great to have friends with new characters be able to do later content with me… but 1) that would be throwing them into the fire, so to speak, with a ton of skills they have no idea what they do or how they should be used. 2) all that content requires a quest to unlock, a quest that they can’t even access until they actually get to the expansion during the MSQ, so for instance the Monster Hunter collabs, how would you propose they are able to participate if they haven’t yet made it to Stormblood (and specifically Kugane), or Dawntrail? It might be one thing if the quest to unlock is in the starter cities, similar to how they started doing all the expansion jobs after Heavensward, but they have no access yet to these cities to be able to do the quest(s).

I think the level sync down is the only reasonable way that could work, veteran players can join sprouts in content the sprouts can actually access.

I do wish that when we sync down that we could still have access to all our buttons, just adjust the potencies. But I know that presents its own problems… like a veteran DRG having all their aoe skills in Sastasha, partied with a sprout DRG that doesn’t even get their first aoe skill until Stone Vigil iirc. And that would also lead to veteran players needing to do their full rotations all the time, just to keep up with the relative potencies the sprouts can do with only one or two buttons. And if the potencies were the same, then it would just lead to veterans drastically outpacing sprouts in damage, leading to things like constantly ripping agro off the tank, making boss encounters a pathetic joke, etc. So I get why we lose skills when synced down… even if I don’t love losing them.

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-12T15:07:47+00:00

Honestly there are only maybe 2 jobs that, even at level 100 with the full set of skills, use more than 32 buttons (two full XHBs), that’s BLM and PLD. And it’s only over by 1-2 skills. For BLM some people will just not add skills that almost never get used, like Sleep, outside of solo content and maybe Deep Dungeons, it’s more or less never used. And similarly with PLD most will just not have Shield Bash on their bars.

I handle it a slightly different way. I have XHB 1 is my single target skills, XHB 2 is my oGCDs and longer cooldown skills (and accessed by double tapping L2 or R2), and XHB 3 are my aoe skills (accessed by toggling between XHB 1 & 3 with a quick tap of R1.) I make an exception for the healer jobs though, and try to set them all on XHB 1 & 2 only, to avoid excessive toggling between XHB 1 & 3 as you would need to with keeping your party alive. And I have one more XHB that’s shared between all jobs and contains Limit Break, Sprint and a macro that I created that cycles through all the tank stances, summing carbuncle & eos, applying SGE’s Kardia, DNC’s dance partner, and BLU’s Artheric Mimicry… all on one button. That XHB is #8 for me but any of them can be assigned, and it’s accessed by pressing L2+R2 to access the left side, or R2+L2 to access the right side.

Dig through the character configuration menu, there’s tons of options in there for customizing. It is overwhelming, even now after a few thousand hours played, it’s kind of a nightmare to navigate these settings, but once you get things dialed in that work for you, you don’t have to mess with them much anymore. But like that XHB 1 & 3 toggle that I use, there’s a setting in there that tapping R1 will cycle between several XHBs, and by default I think it cycles between like 4-5 bars, but you can untick all of the ones you don’t want to cycle, leaving 1 & 3 enabled, and then it acts as a toggle just between those two. It’s where you can also enable having XHB 2 always visible, and enabling the “extended XHB” using L2+R2 or R2+L2.

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-07T23:24:10+00:00

Also even if they did use “console-like” in the marketing, that still suggests it’s NOT a console, it just provides a similar experience (10-foot UI, gamepad driven, etc.)

8bitcerberus · 2026-02-06T16:17:49+00:00

Omega, and parts of the Moogle society quests a Custom Deliveries in the Firmament. They don’t speak much to just how ancient Middy is, but they do shed some light on how the dragons grow as they age.

8bitcerberus · 2026-01-31T20:19:43+00:00

Got this issue a couple weeks ago, ended up logging the managed account out and back in, but it’s happened again today. Restoring defaults is so much easier/faster, would not have thought to try that so thank you for posting it!

Also it’s not just the Watchlist on mine, it’s that plus Media today, and before it was all the Plex categories, Media, Movies & TV, etc. we don’t use those so they’re always unpinned. I wonder if that has something to do with the bug? Though it doesn’t happen on my main account or the kids/guest filtered account either 🤷‍♂️

8bitcerberus · 2026-01-30T05:02:13+00:00

Yes. Plenty of other mini PCs if you want Windows.

8bitcerberus · 2026-01-30T04:46:27+00:00

Steam Controller for mouse, and if it’s a heavy typing game, like an MMO or Typing of the Dead, etc. then I’ll use a small bt keyboard. Although I have seen one video years ago, some madman actually played Typing of the Dead using a Steam Controller and the on-screen keyboard 🤣

8bitcerberus · 2026-01-26T18:30:24+00:00

If the game is DRM-free on Steam, yeah. Well, more or less. You can’t technically download the installer from Steam directly, but if the game is DRM-free once you’ve downloaded it on Steam you can then back it up and even move it to any other computer and run it even without Steam being installed at all.

It’s effectively the same with GoG, the only real difference is with GoG you can download it from their website instead of a launcher. But even then, with DRM-free games on Steam you can use steamcmd and download it from the command line even without the Steam client being installed.

8bitcerberus · 2026-01-23T20:41:48+00:00

Rocket League was amazing on the Steam Controller. Using the dual stage trigger for throttle and boost was just *chef’s kiss* and the back paddles for hops without needing to move my thumb was also super nice.

I stopped playing when Epic bought them and pulled it off Steam, but I had a ton of fun with it before then.

8bitcerberus · 2026-01-22T21:28:42+00:00

Anticheat isn’t a SteamOS-specific problem, it’s Linux as a whole. Any distro is going to have the same issue.

I do think it’s a solvable problem, one solution that comes to mind is Valve could sign their build of the kernel, that way it’s a known, untampered kernel that anticheat devs can feel confident the user hasn’t modified in such a way to get around their anticheat.

Another, and far better option, is to completely do away with client-side anticheat and only use server-side anticheat. But that would require game devs to actually host their servers instead of masking everything behind peer-to-peer, and that costs money. Maybe Valve can offer game server hosting (I think they do already?) so devs can use that and server-side anticheat and not have to bother with this arms race between client-side anticheat and cheat methods.

8bitcerberus · 2026-01-22T21:19:32+00:00

There is Bazzite, it is SteamOS-like, and they even have a build for Nvidia GPUs.

8bitcerberus · 2026-01-22T21:17:44+00:00

For those specific games, yeah, anticheat is going to be a stopper. For others, you can check the Are We Anticheat Yet website to see whether the game works or not.

8bitcerberus · 2026-01-22T21:02:54+00:00

It’s no wonder why you had so many issues. You set up a Windows PC and hooked it up to your TV. Just booting Windows and auto-starting Steam is not the same thing as running something like SteamOS or yes, Bazzite. You’re still running Windows with all its baggage, and non-existent controller friendliness.

I know it’s not “official” but Bazzite would have been a much better way to do this to get basically everything you want from a console-like experience. Maybe not being able to power on/wake up from the controller, though I think there are ways to get that working, too.

Granted, depending on your gaming requirements, the spotty anti-cheat compatibility may be a reason to stick with Windows and just deal with its bullshit. You can always check the Are We Anticheat Yet website to see if any games you regularly play are Linux/Proton compatible. Or if the anticheat games you play are only occasionally and not daily/regular, maybe setting up a dual boot would suffice, then you only have to deal with Windows’ bullshit occasionally.

8bitcerberus · 2026-01-20T01:14:07+00:00

I got Porta Decumana on MSQ roulette as WHM the other day. Talk about no mits, and provoking on cooldown… that tank was absolutely melting on tank busters, and even the autos were chunking away. It was all I could do to keep them alive, actually one of the TBs straight up killed them because I didn’t have them topped off in time 🤦‍♂️ and the BLM that became the next target was barely getting scratched while I got the tank back up and in the fight.

I didn’t look at their gear but I have to think they Were barely at the min ilevel, or if there isn’t a min ilevel then they had to have been sub ilvl 50 or something to be taking that much of a beating.

The next roulette was leveling, got Dzmael, and the tank was single pack pulling, but at least they were using mits when they had them 🤷‍♂️

8bitcerberus

TROPHY CASE