Well I’m hopping around… again. I thought I had a good stable setup going but then something happens upstream that goes against what I want/believe in (looking at you RedHat) and I’m back on the hunt again.
I thought about trying out a Debian based distro but then I thought “why don’t I just use Debian itself (Sid, not stable/Bookworm)”.
Most if not all gaming software have a way to be installed on Debian so I don’t think that could be an issue.
Is anyone else using Sid? Am I missing something by not going with a gaming focused distro??
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I use regular bookworm with steam/Mesa/proton installed as flatpak
Works great, 10/10
Are you running into system access limitations? For example, mesa or proton needing to access system files, services or whatever.
You can give flatpaks permissions for those. Flatseal is a great GUI for that if that’s your thing.
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Yup, I use Tumbleweed and it seems to get updates as fast or faster than Arch most of the time, and it seems more stable to me. I used Arch for ~5 years and Tumbleweed for 3-4 now, and I’ve had to fix Tumbleweed much less (and each time was a simple snapper rollback and try upgrading again in 2-3 days).
When I used Debian, I would stick on the next stable (i.e. testing, but with a named release) until a few months after the release. For example, if I was on Debian right now, I’d probably be on bookworm (old testing, current stable) for another month or so, then upgrade to trixie and stay on that until a few months after trixie releases. Debian testing tends to get pretty unstable right after a release as a ton of things get merged from sid after the freeze, so I give it some time to stabilize.
Both are great. I just found I’m not a fan of how Debian does certain things and I generally prefer Arch and openSUSE.
I do my gaming on Bookworm with a handful of extras, and it works very well.
There is a certain group of people who insist that only the distros with the latest packages are good for gaming. Those people are wrong in most cases.
Unless you have a very new GPU (released less than a year ago), your games are not likely to get any benefit from the latest kernel.
Unless your games require the very latest Vulkan features and you run them without Steam, Flatpak, or any other platform that provides its own Mesa, you’re not likely to get any benefit from a distro providing the latest version of it.
Practically everything else that games need is comparable across all the major distros, so choose one that makes you happy, not one that some shill claims is best for gaming. Even Debian Stable, contrary to the undeserved bashing it often gets by a certain kind of gamer, is generally excellent for gaming.
This is encouraging. I do have somewhat older hardware but you are right. Even updating the kernel for update sake in other distros don’t seem to bring me visible value other than just updating to the lasers available.
@ono bookworm?
Bookworm is the name of the current Debian Stable release. The next one will be called Trixie.
I use sid as my daily driver with official debiam steam packages etc, everything is really smooth since long time so if you want to try you should :)
Excellent! This is my current setup as well.
You could use distrobox for gaming, make an arch one and game from there without worrying about dependencies
I use Sid for gaming and it has always worked perfectly. I am very happy with it.
What does your /etc/is-release say for code name? I installed bookworm and then pointed apt to unstable as instructed in the Debian Wiki but when I did the full-upgrade (also as instructed in the wiki) now it says code name= trixie. Not a big deal, it’s just kinda strange. Maybe it’s supposed to as technically Trixie is the “unstable” at the moment. Idk. Just curious.
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I also have
VERSION_CODENAME=trixie. Never been an issue so far.Okay I was just curious
ive gamed on just about every distro i’ve tried but i currently run debian sid its fine, linux is linux for the most part. kernel is recent enough so youre not gonna have to do any workarounds or anything.
Most of the time it isn’t about the kernel what is causing gaming problems it is most of the time other packages. I had problems with a few games on KDE neon what uses a ubuntu lts system as its base
I really wish they would switch to arch it would probably be my favorite distro if they did that.
I don’t use Sid, but testing, it’s working almost flawlessly. Each release (once every 2 years, I guess), I take few hours to check everything work; remove shader cache, etc.
My setup, right now (dirty, for authenticity) :
$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free non-free-firmware deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free non-free-firmware deb https://security.debian.org/debian-security/ testing-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware deb-src https://security.debian.org/debian-security/ testing-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware # bullseye-updates, to get updates before a point release is made; # see https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch02.en.html#_updates_and_backports deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware # add by me deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/* deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:/darktable/Debian_Testing/ / deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/lutris.gpg] https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/strycore/Debian_Testing/ ./ # Uncomment these lines to try the beta version of the Steam launcher #deb [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam #deb-src [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam deb [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam deb-src [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam # Uncomment these lines to try the beta version of the Steam launcher # deb [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam # deb-src [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam deb [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam deb-src [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam deb [ signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium-archive-keyring.gpg ] https://download.vscodium.com/debs/ vscodium mainI play a lot, we just played Grounded with friend yesterday.
Hope this helps.
Instead of relying on testing directly, consider using named releases (in this case, trixie for testing). Then stay on the official release for a couple months as testing stabilizes and then go to the next testing release.
I did that in the past and it worked really well. Testing gets a lot of churn right after a release as packages get rapidly upgraded, so I find it’s usually better to wait a bit.
When you say “check everything works” what do you mean?
Testing goes stabler and stabler with time. Then testing move to release and the previous untesting (sid) move to testing. It’s a that moment that you can have surprise. This is the moment where I often wait one month or two, apply the updates and check my os is working as before, meaning running my day to day applications and game and see if things work. The only problem I had once was shader cache. I removed few things in .cache and I was good.
Ah okay got ya
No idea if it works, but debian stable as base and distrobox for the games?
You should definitely just use what you like. If you’re going with Debian, maybe go with stable instead of sid. Your games will work. Distros that are being labeled as “gaming” just have some things added for convenience, saving steps after installation. Hopping around is not necessarily a bad thing, either. I’ve used different ones over the years from different branches. It’s good to know how they work. I can pacman. I can apt. I can dnf. I even used to apt-get and yum.
I’m on the same boat. I’ve hopped around a lot (for servers and for desktop). My original post was really to gauge how many people actually use straight Debian for a gaming use case. Apparently, quite a few! So that’s great news.
For what it’s worth, Mint has a Debian-based version that I’ve heard great things about. It would probably have lots of the legwork done for you (getting flatpak, etc).
Very true! But I’ll stick with base for now. As I mentioned to someone else, I just don’t want to keep running into the endless loop of a distro doing something that affects downstream and then I’m affected by it too and blah blah.
Yes? ;)
Lxc arch with glx /devs passthrough, runs steam and steam games beautifully.
This is my workflow though, I have an lxc for work/development, an lxc for everything really, once you fit it in its just second nature.
The debian host is there for wm more than anything.
I’ve been using Trixie (Current testing, next stable) for gaming for a couple weeks. Everything (gaming wise) works the same as it did when I was on Arch.
The only Trixie relate software I have was Wine staging as I couldn’t find “Sid” specific instructions. The documentation said unstable so I just assumed the Trixie instructions were also applicable to Sid.
Probably not what you’re looking for but Nobara is great.
That’s what I was running before switching away due to RH changes. Solid setup, would certainly recommend. It’s just a matter of principles for me but otherwise I’ve would’ve run Nobara until it died.
I am on a laptop, and it works fine.
I’m using debian because it’s the distro I work with, so I’m the most comfortable with it.
