Bazzite 45.20261105 ships one day after Fedora 45 lands, and quietly starts preparing for Valve's Steam Machine
Bazzite's newest stable image adds Steam Machine detection and returns to feature development a day after a one-line patch.
Bazzite 45.20261105 went live during the night. It arrived after the project's housekeeping patch and two days after its first real Fedora 45 build. No release party, no long writeup. The changelog is terse, but one line in it is worth circling: this is the build that starts recognizing Valve's upcoming Steam Machine.
For anyone who's been following the Universal Blue gaming distro, that's the sound of development velocity coming back online.
A week of housekeeping
The timeline is worth spelling out. Fedora 45 reached general availability just before November 3, and Bazzite's first stable image on the new base landed a few hours later. That was 45.20261103, a genuine rebase that moved GNOME 50 to 51, pushed KDE Plasma from 6.7.5 to 6.8.2, and took the Open Gaming Collective kernel from 7.2.11 to 7.2.15. Everyone was waiting for that jump.
The Fedora 45 change landed relatively cleanly thanks to Bazzite 44, the 700-plus-commit rebase from last August. It swapped the old Handheld Daemon for a SteamOS-compatible stack, so the modular groundwork was already in place before Fedora 45 even shipped. That's what let the new line ride on top without a meltdown.
Then came 45.20261104 roughly an hour and a half later, which Bazzite itself describes as nearly a one-commit build. It added a Secure Boot warning for Steam Deck and Steam Machine owners and bumped bpfrag. The kernel didn't budge. Neither did Gamescope or the drivers.
linuxcompatible.org put it plainly after that build: "the rebase is the win. The patch is housekeeping." If you're keeping score, that first patch was pure housekeeping. 45.20261105 is where the real work resumes.
The commits that move the needle
The headline is the Steam Machine. One commit adds Valve's "Fremont" to Bazzite's hardware detection script, paired with a titanoboa_hook_postrootfs.sh hook. If you're not tracking the codename trail, "Fremont" is the internal name for Valve's revived living-room console, and "titanoboa" is another Valve device, in keeping with its animal-naming habit that stretches back to the Steam Deck.
Valve has spent months hinting it wants anti-cheat working natively on its upcoming hardware. Bazzite is watching that space closely. This build is preparation, not a finished product. The idea is straightforward: when a Steam Machine (or a DIY build modeled on one) eventually shows up, Bazzite should spot it and apply the right profiles out of the box, exactly as it does today for the Steam Deck.
A follow-up commit refines how Bazzite detects Valve hardware and configures it so anti-cheat suites actually behave. Anti-cheat is still the single biggest wall between Linux and competitive multiplayer, so anything that chips away at it is worth following.
Nvidia owners get something too. Two commits pass the GPU through to a cooler-control container, letting users tune fan curves and watch thermals inside a container. The double commit suggests the maintainer tweaked the approach before merging. Nvidia images have trailed AMD and Intel on this for a while, so it lands as a welcome fix.
Keep in mind that the version numbers tell most of the story here. The kernel (7.2.15-ogc1.1), Mesa (26.2.6-2), Gamescope (3.17.0), the Nvidia drivers, GNOME 51 and KDE 6.8.2 are all identical to the previous build. Only SteamOS-Manager actually moved, advancing roughly two weeks' worth of commits. Everything else rides the same pinned foundation, which is exactly what you want from a patch release.
Not the flashiest update of the month, but it's the right kind of modest. The base is locked, the direction is clear, and both the Steam Machine and Nvidia work point somewhere real.
Because this line crosses from Fedora 44 to Fedora 45, Universal Blue recommends pinning your current deployment first. Images stay in the repository for a 90-day retention window, but rolling back across a major version boundary can need manual intervention, so the "reboot into the old image" trick won't always save you.
Existing users can move to the latest stable with:
bazzite-rollback-helper rebase stable
or pin this exact image with:
bazzite-rollback-helper rebase 45.20261105
Deck images update manually through the Steam menu or from the terminal with ujust update, and any image's authenticity checks out with cosign before you boot.
Fresh installs start at the image picker on bazzite.gg. If you want to read the actual commits, the full release lives on the Bazzite GitHub page.
