Portal¶

The Bazzite Console Suite's front door: one fullscreen view that installs, opens, updates and removes the suite's apps, for a TV and a controller as much as for a desk, as Steam's Big Picture is for Steam. It works with the keyboard, the mouse or a controller alike. The Portal Tour shows it in a video.

The portal opens with a short animated intro, about three seconds, with its own sound: the suite's icon and its name, BAZZITE CONSOLE SUITE, before the view appears. Press any key, click, or press any button on the controller to skip it.

The header: the suite's icon, as large as a tile's (click it to watch the Portal Tour over the whole screen: A or Space pauses it, B or Esc closes it, and without a connection it opens in the browser), its name (click it to open this wiki) with the version, a small i that says where the apps install from, and a line that says in a few words what the open category is for, with ☰ Settings at the top right and, in the corner beside it, ✕ Exit, which closes the portal. Under them, in a row, eleven big symbols. Four act on the apps: Refresh (two circling arrows: look again at which apps are installed), Sys info (a chip), Install All apps (a grid of apps with an arrow down) and Install All updates (a circular arrow around an arrow down). Seven are shortcuts to what is outside the suite: Files (a folder), Steam, YouTube (a screen with a play triangle), Bluetooth, Network, Volume (a loudspeaker) and Screen (a screen on its foot). Each is described below. Hover a symbol to see what it does. The one with the focus is framed in silver, as a tile is; a symbol that has nothing to do is grayed out. On a screen 1280 pixels wide the symbols are drawn smaller when the row would not fit otherwise. On the right of the symbols, how many apps are installed, and under it the status, a line each: the CPU's and the GPU's load and temperature (CPU 12% 54°C | GPU 3% 61°C), the date and the time (Thursday 11/5/26 | 07:44 PM CEST) and, when you have chosen a place on the Settings page, the weather there (Amsterdam 8°C Partly cloudy, after its symbol). The line at the bottom says what the keys and the controller's buttons do.

Bazzite Test is always installed with the portal; every other app is optional. Below the header is a strip with a name for each category: Sustainable, Gaming and Utilities (Graphics joins them once it has an app), and beside it the notice of updates. Each app is a large tile under its category, left to right in the order of apps.toml and as many to a row as the screen fits; Bazzite Test is always the first tile on Sustainable. The tile with the focus is framed in silver; move it with the arrow keys, the d-pad or the stick, or point at a tile with the mouse:

The icon, its category's, drawn from a 512 px picture so it stays sharp on a 4K screen. It is gray while the app is not installed. Hover over the tile to see what the app does, its state and the release this portal pins.
The name of the app.
Press the tile (click it, Enter, or A on the controller) to open the app. Pressing a tile that is not installed offers to install it. An app that is open already, also one behind the portal or minimized, comes to the front instead, without the board warning again; that needs KDE's desktop (KWin), which Bazzite's desktop is.
Update (a right click, or Y on the controller): installs the tile's update or reinstall at once; an app that changes the board asks first. While a newer portal is out, they update the portal instead (see Updates below). A right click on a tile with nothing to update opens its menu.
The tile's menu (the Menu key or M; on the controller the left button of the four, X on an XBOX controller and Square on a PlayStation one) holds every action: Open, Install (an arrow into a tray; Update, in red, when an update is waiting; Reinstall for an installed app, in red with a circular arrow when its version is unknown) and Uninstall (a bin). What cannot be done now is grayed out. Bazzite Test has no Uninstall: it is removed together with the portal.
A red dot in the icon and Update under the name: an update is available.
A red circular arrow in the icon and Reinstall needed under the name: reinstall the app. It is installed, but not by this portal (by hand, or under an earlier name of the app), so the portal does not know its version. Reinstall in its menu installs the version this portal pins. An app installed from a checkout of the repository without its version recorded shows it too.
changes the board, in orange under the name, for apps that change how the console's system runs. Hover over the tile: the popup says what the app touches, what stays after a reboot or a power off and how the change is undone, the same text that opens the app's chapter of this wiki.
App not available, in red under the name: the release of this app was withdrawn because of a problem (privacy, security or another reason; hover over the tile to read which). It cannot be installed or opened. When it is installed, the portal says so at start and removes it with the app's own uninstaller in a terminal. If that fails, Uninstall stays in its menu, to try again.
Installing…, Removing… or Downloading… in blue under the name while that runs on the app; a download counts its megabytes as it comes in (Downloading… 40 MB).

The categories. The line under the title says what the open category is for, and The apps lists the apps by category. Click a name in the strip, press LB or RB on the controller, or Page Up and Page Down on the keyboard, to change the category. The portal always opens on the first one, Sustainable.

Keyboard	Controller	Mouse	Does
Arrow keys	D-pad or left stick	Point	Move the focus between the tiles, the symbols and the notices
Enter	A	Click	Open the app, press a symbol, open a notice
U	Y	Right click	Update: the portal while a newer one is out, else the tile's app (update or reinstall)
Menu key, M	X (Square on a PlayStation controller)		The tile's menu: Open, Install, Update, Reinstall, Uninstall
Page Up, Page Down (or Q, E)	LB, RB	Click a name	The category before and after
S	☰ (Start)	Click ☰	The Settings page, and back from it
K	R3 (the right stick pressed)		Bazzite's on-screen keyboard (Plasma Keyboard), and away again; R3 works in a question or the file dialog too
Escape	B	Click ✕	Close a menu or a question; on the Settings page, go back to the apps; else exit the portal

Exiting. The ✕ symbol in the top right corner closes the portal, and so do B and Escape with no menu, question or Settings page open. The portal closes at once, without a question. Only while a download or an install runs it asks Do you really want to exit the Portal? first, and says what exiting does to it: the download stops, or the installer finishes in its terminal window without the portal recording it. No has the focus there: move to Yes with the arrow keys, the d-pad or the stick, and press Enter or A; B or Escape answers No.

Questions. In a question (Yes and No, Install and Cancel) the arrow keys, the d-pad and the stick move between the buttons, and Enter or A presses the one with the focus.

The on-screen keyboard. R3 shows Plasma Keyboard, the desktop's virtual keyboard, so you can type with the controller, for example a file name when you choose a wallpaper. Bazzite shows it only after touch or pen input, which a controller is not, so while it shows the portal sets it to show for any input, and R3 again (or closing the portal) hides it and sets your own choice back. When no virtual keyboard is chosen for the desktop, R3 says where to choose it: System Settings, Keyboard, Virtual Keyboard, Plasma Keyboard.

The controller is read with pygame-ce, which the portal's installer adds to the suite's venv; it takes any controller SDL knows (XBOX, PlayStation, Switch Pro and most others). The portal listens to the controller only while its own window has the focus, so a game's input never moves it. Without a controller, the keyboard and the mouse work as always.

The touchpad as the mouse. On a DualShock 4, a DualSense or a DualSense Edge the touchpad moves the mouse pointer, as Steam does for the Steam Controller: slide a finger to move it, press the pad to click, and press it with two fingers on it for a right click. Touchpad on the Settings page sets how fast the pointer goes. Like the rest of the controller it works while the portal has the focus, in its menus and questions too. The portal makes a mouse of its own for it (Wayland lets no program move the pointer), which the desktop lists as Bazzite Console Suite touchpad while the portal runs; Bazzite gives you the access it needs. A controller Steam Input owns has the touchpad of Steam's desktop layout instead.

The Steam Controller, and any controller Steam Input owns. While Steam runs, it takes the controllers it has Steam Input on for (always the Steam Controller and a Steam Deck's own controls): outside a game, its desktop layout turns their buttons into keys and the mouse, and the portal sees only those keys. By default that layout gives the d-pad the arrow keys, A Enter and B Escape, but LB, RB, R3, the back buttons and others have no key, so they do nothing in the portal. There are two ways to get every button:

Start the portal from Steam. In Steam, choose Games, Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library, and pick Bazzite Console Suite (or browse to ~/.local/bin/bazzite-console-suite). Started from Steam, the portal reads the controller as an XBOX controller, with the buttons in the table above. Steam's controller settings for that entry can give the back buttons, the touchpads and the other extras any button or key you like.
Give the buttons keys in the desktop layout. In Steam, open Settings, Controller, Desktop Layout (Edit), and set LB to Page Up, RB to Page Down, Y to U, X to M, ☰ to S and R3 to K (the keyboard column of the table). The back buttons can take any of these keys too. The layout is Steam's and applies to every program outside a game.
Install, update and uninstall run the app's own installer in a terminal window, which opens over the portal, because installers may ask for the sudo password and print what they do. The portal watches for the result and refreshes. A terminal whose installer ended well closes by itself; one that failed stays open with what happened until you press Enter.
Apps that change how the console's system runs (Fan Control's thermal guard, Webcam's camera rule, the SSH server of SFTP Tools) are marked changes the board. The portal warns before installing or opening them, and the tile's popup says what each one changes and how that is undone.
Each portal release pins one tested release of every app in apps.toml. The portal downloads exactly those tarballs from the suite's GitHub releases and checks each against the SHA-256 pinned there, or against the release's SHA256SUMS until one is pinned. Then it unpacks the tarball without ever writing outside its folder.
Updates: a red dot marks every app whose installed version differs from the one this portal pins; Update in its menu installs the pinned version. An app installed from a checkout of the repository counts as well: the portal records the checkout's version of it and compares that with the one it pins. A portal that runs from a checkout shows what it installed from there as installed, whatever it pins. The red notice beside the category strip counts them and the apps that need a reinstall, for example ● 2 updates, 1 reinstall. Press it to list each one with its category and versions, and choose one to go to its tile. A category with such an app shows their number in red after its name, so none goes unseen on a category that is not open. Press Y or right-click a tile with an update to install it.
Portal updates: newer app versions come with a newer portal release. At start the portal looks for one on GitHub; when there is one, an orange PORTAL UPDATE AVAILABLE shows under the name on the intro, and an orange UPDATE AVAILABLE, PRESS Y TO UPDATE beside the category strip. Its tooltip says what the release brings, for example Portal 1.0.1: updates Fan Control and Remote Play, with each app's old and new version. Press Y, right-click a tile, or click the banner (Enter or A with the focus on it) to update: the portal downloads the release, checks it against the release's SHA256SUMS, and runs its install.sh in a terminal, as your own user. The banner says DOWNLOADING THE UPDATE… and then INSTALLING THE UPDATE…. When the installer has ended well, the portal starts again as the new version, and the installed apps it updates show the red dot. When it fails, the terminal stays open with what happened, and Y tries again. While an app installs, the portal update waits for it. A release built again under the portal's own version is offered too (the tooltip says a new build of this version): the installer keeps the checksum of the tarball it installed from (build.sha256 beside the program, when the tarball is next to the unpacked folder, as the install steps and the portal's own update leave it), and the portal compares it with the newest release's. A portal installed from a checkout is not offered the release of its own version (it would replace the checkout's portal); a newer version still is. The download is kept in ~/.local/share/bazzite-console-suite/state/portal-update/ until the next one.
Restart: portal x.y.z is installed: a portal window that is open while you install a newer portal by hand (its install.sh in a terminal) keeps running the old one, with its old app versions, and starting the portal again only brings that window to the front. When you come back to the window, it sees the newer portal and shows this red button: click it to restart into the new portal, which then shows the red dot on the apps it updates. While an app installs or uninstalls, the button waits for it to end.
Installed apps, on the right of the symbols: how many of the portal's apps are installed, for example 12/19 installed. An app that is not available any more is not counted.
The status, under it, in three lines. The first: the CPU's load and temperature and the GPU's load and temperature, read every two seconds. The second: the day, the date (month/day/year) and the time with its time zone, read every second; Clock on the Settings page sets how the time reads. The third, with a place chosen under Weather on the Settings page: the weather's symbol, the place, the temperature and the sky; without a place there are two lines. Nothing is read while the portal is minimized. The load is the share of the last two seconds. What the system does not report is left out of the line.
Install All updates, a symbol at the top, enabled when the notice names any app; a red badge on it says how many, and its tooltip what it does. Click it to install them all, updates and reinstalls, one after the other. The portal asks once, with the list, and warns when one of them changes the system. Each app's installer runs in its own terminal, as a single install does. When one asks for your password, type it in that terminal: the next one waits until it has ended. While it runs, its badge shows which one of how many it is at, for example 2/5. An install that fails does not stop the others; at the end the portal names those that failed, and Install in their tiles' menus tries again. Refresh, while it waits for a terminal that was closed, can stop waiting, and then stops the rest too.
Install All apps, a symbol at the top, enabled when the open category has apps that are not installed yet (its tooltip says how many). Click it to install them, one after the other, the same way as Install all updates: one question with the list and the board warning, each installer in its own terminal, its badge showing which one of how many. It is disabled once every app of the category is installed. A portal installed for the first time fills a category with one click.
Files, a symbol at the top: opens the desktop's file manager (Dolphin on Bazzite's KDE Plasma) on your home folder.
Steam, a symbol at the top: opens Steam, or brings its window to the front when it runs already.
YouTube, a symbol at the top: opens YouTube fullscreen in Brave Browser's kiosk mode; Alt+F4 closes it. Brave Browser must be installed as a Flatpak (com.brave.Browser, from Bazzite's software store or with flatpak install flathub com.brave.Browser); without it the portal says so and opens nothing.
Bluetooth, Network, Volume and Screen, four symbols at the top: open the desktop's Bluetooth settings (pair or remove a controller, a headset), its network settings (the connections, Wi-Fi), its sound settings (the volume, the output and the input) and its display settings (the resolution, the refresh rate, the scaling). On KDE Plasma that is System Settings on that page, on GNOME its Settings.
✕ Exit, the symbol in the top right corner: closes the portal, as B and Escape do. See Exiting above.
☰ Settings, the symbol at the top right, or the ☰ button on the controller (Start, Options on a PlayStation controller): the Settings page, in place of the category strip and the tiles, under the same header. It holds the seven settings below, each a pill with a short line beside it; on a small screen the page scrolls, following the focus. Move between them with the arrow keys, the d-pad or the stick, and press A or Enter to change one. B, Escape or ☰ again goes back to the apps.
Icons on Desktop, on the Settings page (Yes or No; click it to switch): on, every installed app has an icon on the Desktop; off, only the portal's icon is there and you start the apps from the portal. The apps stay in the app menu either way, so KDE's search and Steam's Add a Non-Steam Game still find them. The first time the portal starts with app icons on the Desktop, it asks whether to keep them. While the switch is off, the portal removes the icons the apps' installers put there, at start and after each install. It only touches the icons of the suite's apps, never its own or anything else on the Desktop.
Sound, on the Settings page (Yes or No; click it to switch): the intro plays its sound when the portal opens, and every action gives a short sound: each move and button on a controller, each key that acts (the arrow keys, Enter, Space, Escape, Tab, Page Up and Page Down, Q, E, U, S, K, M and the Menu key) and each click on a tile, a symbol, a pill, a button, a category or a menu entry. Any controller works, also one Steam turns into keys. A key held down sounds once, and typing in a text field stays silent. No switches both off. The portal remembers the choice. When the console has no audio output, the pill says No and is disabled, and the portal stays silent.
Music, on the Settings page (Yes or No; click it to switch): a track plays quietly, over and over, while the portal is in front. It has its own switch, apart from Sound: with Sound off the music plays on, and with Music off the intro and the actions keep their sound. The music waits while the intro or the Portal Tour plays, while the portal is minimized and while another window has the focus (a game, an app), and plays on from where it was when you are back. The portal remembers the choice. When the console has no audio output, the pill says No and is disabled.
Music track, on the Settings page: which track the music plays. Built-in is the portal's own. Click the pill, then Choose a track… for one of your own (Custom): an Ogg, Opus, MP3, FLAC, WAV or M4A sound file, which plays at once, from its start; the portal refuses another file and says why. The portal's track brings the portal's own back. The portal keeps a copy of your track in ~/.local/share/bazzite-console-suite/state/, so the original may be moved or deleted; the portal's --purge removes it.
Theme switcher, on the Settings page, showing the theme; click it for the next one: the look of every app in the suite. Gunmetal (dark, cool blue-gray, the default), Silver (light) or Warm (dark warm gray with a bronze accent). It is one choice for all the apps, kept in ~/.config/bazzite-console/theme: the portal shows it at once and stays open, and each app takes it the next time it starts.
Wallpaper, on the Settings page: a picture behind the portal, seen through the pills that are not active. The portal starts with the picture that comes with it (Example). Click the pill, then Choose a picture… for your own (Custom), Example wallpaper for the portal's own again, or No wallpaper for none; the portal remembers that choice. Your picture must be a PNG, JPEG or WebP of at least 1920 x 1080 pixels, in 16:9 (1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1440, 3840 x 2160); the portal refuses another and says why. It fills the window, under a veil of the theme's color so the text stays readable. Transparency, a slider in the same menu, sets that veil from 0 to 90 % (60 % at first): move it up for a dark or busy picture, so the icons stand out, down to see more of the picture. The window changes while you move it, and the portal remembers it. The portal keeps a copy in ~/.local/share/bazzite-console-suite/state/, so the original may be moved or deleted; the portal's --purge removes it. The menu also lists the last 10 wallpapers you chose, newest first, under Used before: click one to use it again. The portal remembers only where each picture was (in wallpapers.json in the same folder), so one moved or deleted since shows as not found until it is back.
Clock, on the Settings page, showing 12 h or 24 h: how the time in the status reads. Click it for its menu: 12-hour clock (AM/PM) or 24-hour clock, Seconds on or off, and the time zone: the system's own (the system's, as at first), CET (Central European Time, CEST in summer) or UTC. The date follows the zone too. The portal remembers the choice.
Weather, on the Settings page, showing the place or None: the weather in the status at the top, from Open-Meteo, free and without an account. Click it, then Choose a place…: type a city or town (R3 brings the on-screen keyboard), Search, pick the right one from the list and Use this place. Its symbol (sun or moon, clouds, fog, rain, snow or thunder), its name, the temperature and the sky then show as the status' third line, under the date and the time; hover over it for the wind and the humidity too. The weather comes again every 30 minutes while the portal is not minimized, and Update the weather now asks at once. When Open-Meteo cannot be reached, the last weather stays and its tooltip says why. No weather removes it, and nothing goes to Open-Meteo any more. Until you choose a place nothing is sent; see Privacy.
Touchpad, on the Settings page, showing the speed: how fast the touchpad of a DualShock 4 or a DualSense moves the mouse pointer. Click it for the next speed: 50, 75, 100 (the normal speed, at first), 125 and 150 %, then 50 again. The new speed applies at once, and the portal remembers it.
Sys info, a symbol at the top: a small window with what the system reports about the console: the mainboard, the BIOS (with UEFI and Secure Boot), the CPU (model, cores and threads online, top clock, microcode), each GPU (name, driver, VRAM, shared memory, clock levels, VBIOS, PCIe link), the memory, the drives with the free space in your home folder, the displays (each output, the monitor's name and its preferred mode), the sound cards, the network adapters and Bluetooth controllers (driver and link), the USB devices, the input devices (keyboards, mice and controllers, each with the bus it is on: USB, Bluetooth, PS/2), the sensors (temperatures, fan speeds and the GPU's power at that moment) and the OS (version, Bazzite image, kernel, desktop). It is read each time the window opens; what a system does not report is left out. Copy puts it all on the clipboard as text, for an issue or a forum post. It holds nothing personal: no host or user name, no serial numbers, no MAC or IP addresses.

Install¶

Install has the lines to paste into a terminal: they download the portal's release, check it and run its install.sh, as your own user. Later versions install from the portal itself: press Y when it says UPDATE AVAILABLE (see Portal updates above).

What it installs:

What	Where	Why there
The portal, its `apps.toml` and the shared code it was tested with	`~/.local/share/bazzite-console-suite/portal`	In your home folder: the portal needs no root
What the portal remembers: the apps it installed and their releases, the wallpaper, a downloaded portal update	`~/.local/share/bazzite-console-suite/state`	Apart from the program, so an update of the portal keeps it
Bazzite Test (bundled in the portal release)	`/opt/bazzite-test`, through its own installer, which asks for the sudo password	Its tests run as root, so its test files are root-owned
The suite's shared venv with PyQt6	`~/.local/share/bazzite-console-suite/venv`	One copy of the ~100 MB of Qt for all suite apps
Launcher, menu entry, Desktop icon	`~/.local/bin/bazzite-console-suite`, `~/.local/share/applications/`, the Desktop	The portal's icon is the one way in; the apps' own icons are optional (Icons on Desktop)

Uninstall: remove the apps first, each from its tile's menu, then ~/.local/share/bazzite-console-suite/portal/install.sh --uninstall. This removes the portal and keeps its settings and what it remembers; add --purge to remove those too. Bazzite Test stays until you remove it with its own installer: ~/.local/share/bazzite-test/app/install.sh --uninstall.

What stays after an uninstall¶

Uninstalling an app removes the app. Two things can stay: changes it made to the system, which you undo in the app before you uninstall it, and your settings and results, which --purge removes.

App	Still active after its uninstall	Undo it with
SFTP Tools	An SSH server you started: `sshd` enabled at boot, and the firewall's rule for SSH	Stop the server in the app; review the firewall's rule yourself

Fan Control's uninstall removes its thermal guard, and Webcam's removes its camera rule.

Settings live in ~/.config/<app>, data and logs in ~/.local/share/<app>. Each app's install.sh --uninstall --purge removes them.