I tried something very similar, but if I set my Nvidia Prime profile to on-demand (use the Nvidia GPU for games, use the Intel GPU for everything else), whenever I start a game where Proton uses DXVK, after a few minutes of playing the whole system freezes. Can’t even get to the console anymore and even shortly pressing the power button does nothing. I have to reset the whole laptop.
If I set it to use the Nvidia GPU always it works, but then battery life is nothing.
I spent ~10h so far trying to debug that issue, but it seems to be a bug that was reported in 2017 that floods the syslog with assembler stack traces so hard that the whole system has no resources left to do anything else than logging. All the bug log entries I found said there is no workaround.
So it can go either way, especially if your device uses Nvidia.
But I didn’t specifically buy my laptop for Linux, 5 years ago. And the purpose that would really urge me over to Linux is that this laptop has a 7th gen Intel CPU which just about doesn’t qualify for Win11.
So buying a new device to use Linux kinda defeats the point.
If Debian Stable supports your hardware, go for it. If not, try Debian Sid, but it won’t be as stable. You can install up-to-date applications, like Steam, using flatpaks in any case.
Even if you opt for stable and there’s an update that you may take advantage from, you can always update your kernel in several ways or change to Debian Sid (unstable), but you can’t go back unless you change to Debian Testing and then wait the freeze of Testing which then becomes Debian Stable.
My desktop has been Debian testing since Jessie. I was inconvenienced a total of 2 times where something broke and made an app unuseable. My KDE menu was fixed within a day and my torrenting app took longer to fix, but I was able to apply a one line fix in the meantime with help from our awesome community.
I know it’s named “testing”, but I’d bet it would be very stable for most people’s use cases and trade off is absolutely worth it if people would give it a try.
Do you consider testing a better choice than sid for desktop/gaming environment?
I’m really not sure which one I should use. I only have experience with bare bone debian stable as server, I’m trying to find the best choice when switching from windaube to debian :)
Thanks for your insights and personal experiences !
To answer that, you must understand how testing works. Packages first are updated in Sid (unstable), then they go to Testing. At a certain point of the release cycle, Testing stops being updated to become the new Stable version. So basically Testing is not constantly updated. Also, security patches don’t follow this route: instead, they arrive in Sid first (thanks to the maintainers themselves) and then they get into Stable first (by the Debian team) because Stable has the priority. Only after that, they arrive in Testing.
Also see this paragraph from the Debian Wiki regarding security:
Security for testing benefits from the security efforts of the entire project for unstable. However, there is a minimum two-day migration delay, and sometimes security fixes can be held up by transitions. The Security Team helps to move along those transitions holding back important security uploads, but this is not always possible and delays may occur. Especially in the months after a new stable release, when many new versions are uploaded to unstable, security fixes for testing may lag behind.
Also:
Compared to stable and unstable, next-stable testing has the worst security update speed. Don’t prefer testing if security is a concern.
My advice to everyone who wants Debian to be more current is to just run Sid (unstable). It’s always going to be more secure and up-to date than Testing. Also, it works like a rolling-release distro, i.e. the updates are incremental and constant
EDIT: whatever you do, read and follow this guide. apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges especially will save your ass constantly
Sorry for the late reply. Yes, I think it’s better for desktop. Stable is truly targetted for servers and desktop users will only be mildy inconvenienced once in a blue moon.
For a bit of context, I have been a Debian user for almost 30 years now. Mostly using testing for desktop / workstation systems, and stable on servers and containers. Debian is comfortable and provides me with stability where I need and cutting-edge where I want. It mostly “just works” with great defaults for everything, and it’s easy to customise where I desire.
With that out of the way: you’re not wrong. In fact, the https://www.debian.org/devel/testing#faq describes situations where these kinds of breakages could happen.
That said, this is exceedingly rare if not nearly unheard of, and I can always pull packages from sid or experimental if I need (like I do Mesa).
Edit to add: for anyone interested in trying out Debian testing, please check out the Wiki: wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting
Thank you for your insights and personal experiences :) I love Debian stable as server, never had any issues on a old Asus laptop ! I have only 2 years of “experience” and started with Ubuntu. Good introduction to linux but switched to Debian (<3)
That’s way I’m asking arround I don’t wan’t to have a too bad experience with Debian as main personal PC !
Thank you for your personal blog post and the wiki link :) will surely read through before making my final choice !
No worries! I also posted the blog on this community (lemmy.world/post/9543661) and someone mentioned in the comments they’re running Debian stable for gaming.
That can also be an option if you’d like to avoid testing for the minute, though I’m not sure what pitfalls that setup might have.
Started dual booting Pop a few weeks ago, kept Windows for gaming for the same concern, but if you’ve got the major of your games in stream, Proton really is amazing. Had 0 issues with any game so far.
Check out Protondb and see if your current games are supported or not.
Once I’m 100% comfortable with Linux again I’ll probably bin of windows forever.
I already had a Windows install so letting Windows manage the bootloader seemed easier as I know it can cause issues if it thinks it’s not the OS as others have said.
All my games are off steam currently lol. I'm hearing the collective message of how feasible Linux is for gaming, tho
Keeping windows is also an "in case" measure because I'm ignorant with both OS, at this point: in case some use case comes up where having Windows is easiest to get something done. My goal is to keep to Linux as much as possible. Purely because I want to become familiar with it
Debian is my go-to. So long as you’re already comfortable with Linux, you can get gaming working with a tiny bit of elbow grease… and unlike some other distros, Debian is rock-solid.
All I know is wine-mono and wine-gecko doesn’t come in any default package lists on apt that you get on Linux Mint (which should include Debian and Ubuntu packages), not sure if they exist on some other mirror list somewhere but it didn’t seem like it, while on Arch I got them directly from Extra (not even AUR).
Well you technically don’t need mono or gecko, especially not if you’re just going to use Steam Proton to play, but I use pure WINE a lot and it was a pain having to install them manually. Eventually I gave up on using mono and just downloaded the .net runtimes I needed through winetricks.
There were also some lib32 package I got from AUR on Arch that didn’t exist on apt. One of those gst plugins (ugly/good/bad/nice/whatever)
I appreciate it, I was more so wondering whether or not I could keep my existing build as is aside from the GUI. I’ve done it the headless/CLI via ssh route previously but thought I’d check out using the GUI during the setup stages and being able to enable/disable the GUI at will and how that would affect performance vs installing only CLI at the start of the build.
The support for RAID56 is in development and will eventually fix the problems with the current implementation. This is a backward incompatible feature and has to be enabled at mkfs time.
linux
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.