Bazzite Linux 44.20261006.1 ships a kernel bump and undoes a ROG Ally fix
Bazzite's latest stable image shipped on the evening of October 6th, and it's the kind of release that rewards reading the changelog end to end. Version 44.20261006.1 rolled out about 15 hours after the morning's base image, bumping the gaming kernel while quietly pulling out a fix for ROG Ally sleep-loop problems.
Bazzite dates its images, so the "44" marks the Fedora 44 base and "20261006" is the build date. A trailing ".1" is a patch on top of that same day's image. The morning 44.20261006 went out at 06:21 UTC. The .1 followed at 21:35 UTC, a few hours before most people in North America were winding down.
The kernel is the only thing that matters
The headline diff is the kernel. It moves from 7.2.8-ogc4.1 to 7.2.8-ogc5.1, and that "ogc" suffix points to the Open Gaming Collective kernel tree behind Bazzite's gaming build. The 4 and 5 are OGC's internal patch revisions; the .1 is just the package release.
Bazzite ships two kernels. The main one handles AMD and Intel hardware plus the Steam Deck and other handhelds, which is why it's the one that got bumped. The Nvidia LTS kernel stayed put at 6.18.52-ogc1.1. If you run the Nvidia image, you got nothing in the kernel department this round.
The OGC kernel bundles gaming-specific patches: the LAVD and BORE CPU schedulers, the Kyber I/O scheduler, SteamOS-style tuning. A bump from ogc4 to ogc5 is the latest of those. Bazzite doesn't publish a per-commit changelog for the OGC tree, so we can't say what's actually new in ogc5 beyond "something changed."
Nothing else moved. Gamescope, Gamescope Session, MangoHUD, InputPlumber, OpenGamepadUI are all unchanged. This isn't a feature release. It's maintenance.
The ROG Ally revert is the interesting part
The most talked-worthy line here is the undo. On September 25th, contributor Nilesh Chakraborty opened PR #5906, which merged on September 30th. The fix targeted issue #5905: on ASUS ROG Ally hardware, which includes the RC71, RC72, and RC73 units, both the ACPI power button and the AMD-ASUS GPIO keys were being tagged as the SteamOS power button.
Because upstream's 70-steamos-power-button.hwdb only special-cases Valve machines, the power-button daemon would open both. On ROG Ally units, redundant KEY_POWER release events after a sleep-wake got misread as a fresh press-to-sleep. Net effect: an infinite sleep loop, roughly a second of wake before the machine suspended again.
The fix added a hwdb file telling the system to ignore the duplicate ACPI button. It shipped in the morning 44.20261006 image. Then .1 pulled it out, with commit a945009 reverting 2bdd1ee and nothing but the usual "This reverts commit" boilerplate.
That's the question I'd put to the maintainers. Reverts usually mean the change caused a regression, clashed with another fix, or got yanked ahead of a better version. Bazzite hasn't said which. As of .1, ROG Ally owners are back to the pre-fix behavior.
It's worth pausing here, because the same power-button logic connects to a separate commit in the 44.20261006 line titled "fix: Add another permutation for the ASUS Ally," showing the platform was still an active area that month. On top of that, Bazzite is adding packages like ayaneo-leds for Ayaneo handheld LED control. This is a distro deliberately expanding well past the Steam Deck, and handheld support is one of the few places it earns its keep over stock Fedora. Worth keeping in mind when a revert like this lands.
The other three commits are housekeeping. Two are CI changes, an increased action limit for stale jobs and a move to a configure-kde script. The third, from Alex Shek, sets Bazzite's bees dedup service to run at "verbose 6" to cut down log spam. That's a quieter journal, not a functional change. beesd still compresses and de-duplicates wine prefix data to free up disk space.
Existing users can roll forward or back. Run bazzite-rollback-helper rebase stable for the latest build, or pin to this exact image with bazzite-rollback-helper rebase 44.20261006.1. The immutable ostree images support rollback to any build within roughly 90 days, so you're not stuck either way.
Head here for the release notes and here to grab an ISO for a fresh installation.
