What's so special about this? Aside from the immutable thingy, of course.

It's not so much that people are focused on gaming distros, it's more that gaming distros historically haven't been much of a thing, and gamers generally had to use windows for their gaming, because the linux experience was limited and sub-optimal. Even dedicated linux users would keep a windows partition/machine that they used for gaming.

That's not true anymore, as basically anything without kernel level anti cheat works on linux, which means that a huge amount of folk that would have moved to linux earlier, but couldn't, are now coming over.

Which is to say, it's not so much that there is "so many of them", it's more that, they're coming over in a big wave, because they've been there for years, but haven't been able to move until recently, and now, they know that there are distros out there that look and feel like something they're familiar with.

Most people I know primarily use their desktop computers for games. Bazzite also works great for general purpose computing, although it isn't advertised as such.

Universal Blue is the project which maintains Bazzite and other brilliant immutable images based on Fedora Silverblue (Gnome) and Fedora Kinoite (KDE)

Bazzite has Steam bundled in the image which is a bit better for performance, Bazzite-dx is Bazzite with devtools.

Aurora is another image made for general computing, Steam is installed as a Flatpak with a little worse performance but not much

Bluefin is your typical dev-workstation

If you’re serious about gaming I recommend KDE as your desktop environment, plays nicer with HDR, VRR and fractional scaling than Gnome.

Yeah, I'm the same, but if it's an easy way to get people into the warm embrace of Linux, then hopefully they'll look around and see other (Gen Purpose) distros exist.

A gaming focused distro will do everything else well too, so thats probably why.

AFAIK CachyOS still demands a little involvement in the OS. Like, you have to watch the logs when you update, you need keep context in mind, like knowing you're running KDE and an Nvidia card and so on. But I feel like Bazzite would be more usable to someone who doesn't know (and doesn't need to know) what a filesystem or a discrete GPU are.

But in terms of stability, CachyOS has been rock solid for me. The cadence that Arch + CachyOS devs fix stuff has been utterly perfect.

So I say if your dad is more 'software curious,' give him CachyOS. If he doesn't like messing with computer stuff, give him Bazzite.

I went from Arch to Fedora idk, I think over a decade ago and haven't looked back, not sure how things are nowadays, but I switched again this year from Fedora to Bazzite and I love it. Sure, you've got to learn to do things a little differently, but so far it's been great. And it forced me to use distrobox, which honestly I should have done sooner, it's absolutely great.

could be bazzite users are more/less likely to take the hardware survey or are likely to opt out of countme.

Yeah I struggled with reading my rom library over SMB so also had to install something else.

fedora distros have a thing called countme that pings their servers so they can measure general trends in how many people are using the OS and the various spins, which can be helpful for determining what to focus on. some amount of the userbase opt out of it

iirc it doesnt track ip, it just sends a ping for counting, the unique ID is when you installed your distro. its easy to opt out of. in the past it used IP but they changed it because they didnt like the privacy implications of it. regardless, you should use secureblue if you want a fedora atomic image focused on privacy and security. personally i consider the risk of being included in the count negligible (and on par with pinging timeservers imo, so unless youre making your computer completely silent its kinda nonsensical to worry about) so i keep it running. you still ultimately pull data from fedora/bazzite servers for updates (and thus, show IP) so i dont really understand consternation over this.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/counting/

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/infra/sysadmin_guide/dnf-counting/

Debian has an option to anonymously report packages installed. There's a question about this at install time and at any time you can install or uninstall the popularity-contest package.

What does it do better than SteamOS on the Steam Deck itself?

Genuinely asking as I didn't really see any need to switch even as the compulsive tinkerer that I am...

I found, as an experienced Linux user, that with Bazzite you've got to forget the complicated approaches you're used to, and go for the easy one, it usually works. Lots can be done from KDE's system settings, or from the bundled utilities. Also I disagree with the order they chose for the application installation methods on their wiki, I think distrobox should be right after Flatpak.