The last time I was in Banff (2018) I didn't get to visit Moraine Lake, so when I had the opportunity to go again last week, I made sure to visit Reddit Lake and take the pre-requisite picture.
Gear: Sony A6700 + Tamron 18-300mm.
When: Saturday, 20 June 2026, 10:19am.
I've complained a few times on this subreddit about the lack of user notification of a pending Bazzite update. I decided to do something about and created this tool: doxxx/bazzite-update-notifier
Full disclosure: this was 90% written by Claude Opus/Sonnet, initially using the Kilo Code harness and then later switching to Claude Code. Primarily for reasons of speed of development.
I am a professional developer and fairly fluent in Rust (see #1 below). I've reviewed all the code generated by the agent and I've tested this on my own system running Bazzite for the last three weeks or so (see #2 below). That said, this is the first time I've created a system-level utility like this for Linux, so I would appreciate more eyes on this project to ensure that I haven't missed anything. I suspect the README needs more detail to make it easier for non-power-users but it's hard for me to judge. I would appreciate feedback on the documentation.
The basic gist of it is that this is a systemd user-session daemon that periodically checks for a pending Bazzite update and then either emits a toast notification or updates a system tray icon (or both) depending on configuration. The toast and the system tray icon have buttons / menu items that will open the update's release notes on GitHub or the Bazzite Discourse topic in your default browser. The logic on finding the Discourse topic is a bit fuzzy so it may not find the right one or only the topic for the last major update. The update check should handle systems tracking testing/unstable instead of stable but I haven't tested this because I only use stable Bazzite releases. It should handle pending updates in both states: not downloaded yet or downloaded and staged for deployment but awaiting reboot. The tooltip and menu will indicate the state.
I've been testing this on the KDE version of Bazzite, but provisions were made where necessary for correct operation on Gnome desktops. However, I have not been able to test it myself. I would appreciate feedback on how well it works.
In my testing, one update was released (May 15th's update) and the application handled it correctly, but there hasn't been another update since then.
If the maintainers of Bazzite are amenable, I would be glad to contribute this back to the project so that it could be included in the system image by default. Bazzite is the primary desktop OS for my home gaming PC and I would love to be able to give something back to the project.
The tarball in the release includes all the files needed to install it. It will install into your home directory and automatically register the systemd service. By default it uses tray mode.
Okay... That's everything I can think of.
- Gordon (doxxx)
Notes: