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Hi everyone!
We wanted to share an update on the future of Bazzite and where we’re headed next.
Some of you may have noticed that several of our repositories, such as our kernel and handheld input libraries, have recently been archived or sunset. The change reflects a broader effort: we’ve joined forces with other members of the Linux gaming ecosystem to build something more sustainable and more impactful for the entire community.
Introducing the Open Gaming Collective
The Open Gaming Collective (OGC) is a collaborative organization bringing together key projects in Linux gaming, including ChimeraOS, Nobara, Playtron, Fyra Labs, PikaOS, ShadowBlip, ASUS Linux, us here at Bazzite under Universal Blue, and more partners to be announced soon.
The goal of the OGC is to centralize efforts around critical components like kernel patches, input tooling, and essential gaming packages such as gamescope. Instead of each distro maintaining separate patches and fragmented hardware support, improvements can now be shared across the entire ecosystem. In short: a win for one project becomes a win for everyone.
The OGC’s kernel efforts operate on an upstream-first approach, meaning all patches shipped by the OGC will be at least in review for eventual inclusion into the Linux kernel.
This means better hardware compatibility, fewer duplicated efforts, and a more unified Linux gaming experience for everyone.
Upcoming Changes in Bazzite
As part of our joining the OGC:
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HandHeld Daemon (HHD) will receive no further updates and will be phased out in favor of InputPlumber, the same input framework used by SteamOS, ChimeraOS, Nobara, Playtron GameOS, Manjaro Handheld Edition, and CachyOS Handheld Edition.
- Features you rely on (Such as RGB and fan control) will be integrated into the Steam UI, while features not supported by the Steam UI will receive a clean, streamlined overlay similar to the current HHD experience.
- Don’t worry, if your specific hardware needs to stay on older libraries a little longer our rollback and pin system has you covered. We’ll be triaging issues as they appear.
- Features you rely on (Such as RGB and fan control) will be integrated into the Steam UI, while features not supported by the Steam UI will receive a clean, streamlined overlay similar to the current HHD experience.
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Bazzite will adopt the OGC kernel, ensuring continued support for features like secure boot, expanded controller support, steering wheel support, and more; all maintained collaboratively within the shared kernel project.
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We’ll be sharing patches we’ve made to various Valve packages with the OGC and attempting to upstream everything we can.
Lastly and on an unrelated note, we’ve also begun testing Faugus Launcher as a potential replacement for Lutris in our :testing branch. If we move forward with this change, we’ll provide at least six months of advance notice before removing Lutris so you’ll have plenty of time to migrate your prefixes.
We look forward to building a more unified, powerful, and open future for Linux gaming in 2026 together with this incredible community. Thank you for being part of the journey!
Stuff like this is why I love Bazzite and Universal Blue.
it was my first choice when I ditched windows 3 months ago and I’m excited to see how this evolves
keep up the great work 
Oh, I’ve heard about swapping HHD for InputPlumber but didn’t know it’s part of a collection of other changes.
Is there any particular reason why HHD is being dropped, other than how everyone else uses InputPlumber (which seems like an early-mover issue to me - I recall Bazzite was very early coming in with HHD).
Also, Faugus Launcher? I’ve tried using it on my jank NixOS + Jovian + nix-cachyos-kernel setup, and idk if it’s down to my setup or something else, but it wasn’t able to call a desktop portal, unlike Bottles which was able to do so. I’m not too partial to any of them, as I use basically everything, but why not Bottles?
Bazzite is currently the only project in the entire Linux gaming space shipping HHD in any capacity, and it’s maintainer is no longer a part of this project. Moving away from it unifies everyone even without the OGC in place.
Faugus is in testing because it’s been shown to do a much better job than Lutris for things like battle.net and the EA Launcher and offers a much simpler UI. We’re evaluating it only right now and no decision has been made.
Bottles has no UMU support, is still missing needed dependencies, and only ships as a Flatpak meaning our patched Mesa doesn’t work for games launched through Bottles. It’s not something we could consider.
so1ar 5
Last time I tried SteamOS on my ROG Ally I noticed some functionality that HHD have are missing in InputPlumber, such as Swap ROG and Menu/View. I really like this featuer since the left ROG button doesn’t support long press. Can this feature be estabilshed via InputPlumber?
Would you inform us how could a casual linux user contribute? Do you need testers for example?
Drefsab 8
Im happy and sad about this, HHD had a PR thats approved and ready for merge that I’ve been waiting for to fix some input issues on my Win 5… I guess that wont happen now and needs porting to input plumber.
apparle 9
Why consider Faugus, which is relatively new, but not native support for Heroic when it’s already quite feature-rich and convenient for GOG and EGS ?
Awesome news! As someone who’s been daily-driving this OS since last December I’ve preferably ignored using Lutris and opting for Heroic and now Faugus, so it sounds like a welcome change. But does the replacement of HHD to InputPlumber as well as using the OGC kernel mean we can stop using PROTON_PREFER_SDL for certain games?
Deep-Rest 11
This sounds so cool! Thank you all for your efforts!
UniversalBlue is just an amazing conglamorate of distros, love them, since I switched to them.
S1ngl3 13
Really neat idea. I just hope HHD won’t be thrown away before the new system has reasonable feature parity.
But again, thank you for your hard work, isn’t easy to coordinate so many distros like this.
dtw 14
Ought to mention that HHD is “Handheld Daemon” somewhere in the annoucement. I had to find out what it meant to know it wasn’t relevant to me!
well Faugus is so simple, i know it would be easier to use for people using windows games on bazzite for first time (i did it with Lutris and it was so easy) but Heroic is a better choice imho and Lutris is so good to manage roms and emulators.
Vlooi 16
Lutris is not developed anymore and will eventually become incompatible as Linux develops further.
kylegospo 17
Good feedback, done!
kylegospo 18
I don’t believe that’s true, but it’s definitely slowed down.
Really nice to hear! Collaboration definitely makes things move faster.
Now, these news felt like they were mainly focused on gaming, but are there any news regarding stability improvements with NVIDIA in the desktop? Bazzite-DX is my daily driver for work and I feel like it’s fairly stable now, but many things are still buggy and crashy mainly from GPU acceleration.
kylegospo 20
It seems that Nvidia & Valve/VKD3D have resolved the performance issue and we’re just waiting for it to trickle down everywhere it needs to.
I think Heroic also says in their latest release that they prefer Flatpak? And also, it works well enough that it can be left as a Flatpak.
Personally, I think the best middle ground with Heroic is to just put in a stub .desktop file - it installs Heroic, and then removes itself so the new installed Heroic shortcut appears in the menu.
Heroic is great, but no need to pre-install it, just make it easily discoverable by new users who don’t know how you’re supposed to run Epic and EGS games (which is what it mainly is for, even if I usually use it for, uh, my portable Windows games).
Lutris is still regularly getting new commits, PRs, and merges on github.
Judging by the issues page, there seem to have been a hidden beta release of version 0.5.20 and 0.5.19.
I suspect there hasn’t been a full release but there was two hidden beta release is due to the ambitious 0.6.0 milestone (and tech debts probably).
I personally leaned more towards Bottles because of Eagle: Bottles 61 with Eagle
I had been leaning more and more towards Faugus. But issue with my set up back when I was trying out NixOS + Jovian made me went back to Bottles, and Eagle sounds like the coolest thing in Wine-related stuff since, at least, when Zorin OS first made their .exe detector (which automatically tells you how to get the app properly for Linux if it’s in their database - or otherwise sets up Wine, later Bottles, if you still want to run the .exe file).
Edit: oh, uh, sidenote - not a dev, just my opinions as someone who uses all four.