Bazzite 45 moves to Fedora 45, brings ROG Ally X20 support to stable and adds an anti-cheat readiness check

The Linux gaming distro's November release adds initial Acer Predator Atlas 8 support, a command that checks your system against Epic's Easy Anti-Cheat Linux v2 requirements, and faster builds.

AI-drafted from 2 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Bazzite 45 went out on 3 November. The Linux distro, which a lot of people run on the Steam Deck and other PC handhelds, is now based on Fedora 45 and ships GNOME 51.1, KDE 6.8.2 and Mesa 26.2.6, with kernel 7.2.15 on most images and 6.18.60 on the NVIDIA LTS ones.

New hardware

Support for the ROG Ally X20 has moved from testing to the stable branch. The team thanks the people who tried it before launch, and says a fix for a reported custom TDP problem is still on the testing branch and will reach stable soon. The Acer Predator Atlas 8 gets initial support too: InputPlumber handles its controls, a tap action opens the Quick Access Menu, and the M1 and M2 rear buttons are mapped. More Logitech TrueForce racing wheels now work out of the box.

A few smaller changes that handheld owners may notice:

• extest, the library Bazzite relies on for Steam Input under Wayland, now works with the 64-bit beta Steam client
• XWaylandVideoBridge has been removed, which the team says fixes a whole class of bugs on the KDE images
• an optional gaming network tweak through the bpftune and bpfrag services
• a fix for some users who could not switch from Gaming Mode to Desktop Mode, caused by an old Plasma Setup file left behind after an upgrade

Checking for Epic's new anti-cheat

Epic is bringing Fortnite to Linux and rebuilding its anti-cheat as Easy Anti-Cheat Linux v2, with Fortnite as the first game. The Bazzite post lists what v2 will ask for: a signed kernel and modules, TPM 2.0, Secure Boot and measured boot, IOMMU, kernel lockdown in integrity mode, kexec turned off and BPF LSM. The team says Epic has made Bazzite's signing key one of the accepted well-known keys.

The new ujust check-anticheat command runs through that list and prints a pass or fail for each item, with a hint on how to fix it. It only reports and changes nothing on your system. There are two warnings in the post: handheld users should not turn on kernel lockdown yet while the team works on a solution, and Steam Deck owners must not enable Secure Boot.

Smaller updates, faster builds

Much of this release is behind the scenes. The build files were split up, and a run of every image now takes about 30 minutes in CI, down from about 50. Image chunks are now ZSTD-compressed, and the team says some updates are now as small as 100MB. One contributor gives a count of 103,000 weekly active devices.

Next up is kernel 7.3.1 on the unstable branch, with HDMI 2.1 and VRR the main focus, and a new Bazzite Portal app with full controller support and a Decky plugin that will land on the testing branch first.

Sources

• Bazzite 45 is here! (Universal Blue forum)
• Discussion: Bazzite 45 is here! (Reddit)

Image: Image: Bazzite