Bazzite 44.20260802 lands today with Linux kernel 7.1.5-ogc5.1 and Mesa 26.1.6, two updates that directly affect frame delivery on both AMD and Intel GPUs. The kernel bump from 7.1.3 carries two rounds of patches from the Bazzite team (ogc5.1 and ogc5.2 intermediate builds both folded in), while Mesa's point release follows the usual cadence of driver bug fixes across Radeon and Intel Arc hardware. Gamescope, the Valve-developed compositor that underpins Steam Deck's gaming mode, also picks up a new build.
Nvidia users on this release are running open kernel module driver 610.43.03 alongside LTS driver 580.173.02. The image ships GNOME 50.3 and KDE 6.7.3 as its two desktop options, and systemd moves to 259.8. A Surface device fix corrects vendor ID matching so that hardware-specific quirks apply more reliably across Microsoft's lineup. The Bazzite Portal's ujust helper also fixes default filenames when downloading Decky plugins, a small paper cut for handheld users who install plugins outside of the built-in store.
Under the hood, the package list is dense. Cryptsetup jumps from 2.8.4 to 2.8.7, NSS reaches 3.126.0, and Tailscale ticks to 1.98.10. A new OpenCL-ICD-Loader package replaces the removed ocl-icd, and a kmod-sc0710 driver for StarTech capture cards appears for the first time. The kmod-kvmfr module (used for Looking Glass GPU passthrough) has been dropped from this image. Existing Bazzite users can rebase with bazzite-rollback-helper rebase 44.20260802 or simply pull the latest stable channel.
