Bazzite ships its first Fedora 45 image the day Fedora 45 launches
Bazzite, the gaming-focused Linux distro from Universal Blue, just posted its first stable build on Fedora 45. The 45.20261103 image went out at 23:01 UTC on November 3, mere hours after Fedora 45 itself reached general availability. A day later, a follow-up patch arrived with a single one-line change.
Fedora 45 wasn't an easy arrival. The release slipped twice from its original October target, held back by blocker bugs like LVM auto-activation failing on encrypted installs and KDE Discover pulling packages from the Fedora 44 repository. Bazzite has a habit of rebasing onto a new Fedora only after those blockers clear, so this timing isn't surprising to anyone tracking the project.
The numbers that actually move
Under the hood, this is a big jump. GNOME moves from 50 to 51, and KDE Plasma goes from 6.7.5 to 6.8.2. The OGC gaming kernel climbs from 7.2.11-ogc4.1 to 7.2.15-ogc1.1.
Notice the version scheme flipped. You're used to the ogc4 suffix. It's now ogc1. Kernel tools were synced to 7.2.15 to match.
On top of that, PowerStation 0.8.4 becomes 0.9.0, Mesa 26.2.4 climbs to 26.2.6, and Nvidia's LTS drivers move from 580.178 to 580.196. Hundreds of smaller package bumps are buried in there too, along with new handheld HID drivers for Ayaneo devices and force-feedback Logitech wheels.
Bazzite 45 is really a rebuilt foundation running on a fresh Fedora base. The OGC kernel, built against Greg Kroah-Hartman's stable tree with an upstream-first philosophy, now powers everything. That Open Gaming Collective launched back in January 2026 as a collaboration spanning Bazzite/Universal Blue, ASUS Linux, ShadowBlip, PikaOS, and Fyra Labs, with ChimeraOS and Nobara as partners. The idea being that a win for one project becomes a win for everyone.
Bazzite 44 had already torn down the old Handheld Daemon after 700-plus commits and swapped in that SteamOS-compatible lineup: InputPlumber, SteamOS-Manager, PowerStation, and OpenGamepadUI. So this jump can be relatively clean because the handheld layer was modularized before the rebase.
A one-fix patch
The 45.20261104 build showed up at 00:50 UTC on November 4, about an hour and a half after the first stable image. Its changelog frames it plainly, calling for changes "from previous stable version 45.20261103."
And it's almost literally one change. Commit e1e1f97 carries the message "fix: warn about secure boot on steam deck/machine," filed by contributor Ted O'Hayer and merged by Kyle Gospodnetich. Two minor package bumps rounded it out, but everything else is identical to the previous build.
Why does the Secure Boot note matter at all? It's tied to the ongoing anti-cheat situation on Linux. A lot of competitive multiplayer titles still won't run their anti-cheat under certain boot configs, and Bazzite does support full Secure Boot if you enroll the key with the password universalblue. The new note just helps Deck and Steam Machine owners understand what they're signing up for.
Not exactly a night of innovation, and that's fine for Bazzite. The rebase is the win. The patch is housekeeping.
How to actually apply this
Bazzite is ostree-based, meaning updates aren't a mid-running-system package soup. The system preps a new bootable image and boots into it. Desktop images check daily and download in the background, applying on your next reboot once the system goes idle.
On Deck images, automatic updates are off by default. You check manually through the Steam Menu: Settings => System => Check for Updates => Apply, then reboot. For the terminal crowd, ujust update does the trick.
Keep in mind that this crosses a Fedora major-version boundary, so Universal Blue's own advice is to pin your current deployment first. Images stay in the repo for 90 days, but rolling back to a build like Bazzite 43 once required manual intervention because session management changed. The "just reboot into the old image" trick doesn't always work across big jumps.
You can rebase onto this exact image with bazzite-rollback-helper rebase 45.20261104, or hit the latest stable branch with rebase stable. The default stable branch rolls out roughly every two weeks, with testing and unstable branches for the more paranoid.
bazzite-rollback-helper rebase stable
As of right now, the container registry shows both stable-45.20261103 and stable-45.20261104 published hours apart, confirming both are current. And the project is reportedly adding support for the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X20 and Acer Predator Atlas 8 along the way.
Head here to the Bazzite ISO picker to download an ISO image for a fresh installation.
