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.
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.
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.
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.
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) :
<span style="color:#323232;">$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb https://security.debian.org/debian-security/ testing-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb-src https://security.debian.org/debian-security/ testing-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># bullseye-updates, to get updates before a point release is made;
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># see https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch02.en.html#_updates_and_backports
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># add by me
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">*
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:/darktable/Debian_Testing/ /
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">[</span><span style="color:#323232;">signed</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">-</span><span style="color:#323232;">by=/etc/apt/keyrings/lutris.gpg</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">]</span><span style="color:#323232;"> https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/strycore/Debian_Testing/ ./
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># Uncomment these lines to try the beta version of the Steam launcher
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;">#deb [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;">#deb-src [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">[</span><span style="color:#323232;">arch=amd64,i386</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">]</span><span style="color:#323232;"> https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb-src </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">[</span><span style="color:#323232;">arch=amd64,i386</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">]</span><span style="color:#323232;"> https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># Uncomment these lines to try the beta version of the Steam launcher
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># deb [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># deb-src [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">[</span><span style="color:#323232;">arch=amd64,i386 signed</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">-</span><span style="color:#323232;">by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">]</span><span style="color:#323232;"> https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb-src </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">[</span><span style="color:#323232;">arch=amd64,i386 signed</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">-</span><span style="color:#323232;">by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">]</span><span style="color:#323232;"> https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam
</span><span style="color:#323232;">deb </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">[</span><span style="color:#323232;"> signed</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">-</span><span style="color:#323232;">by=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">-</span><span style="color:#323232;">archive</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">-</span><span style="color:#323232;">keyring.gpg </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">]</span><span style="color:#323232;"> https://download.vscodium.com/debs/ vscodium main
</span>
I play a lot, we just played Grounded with friend yesterday.
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.
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.
Luckily every gaming distro is just a bunch of configs already made that have a 50/50 chance to work. If you want rolling release your best bet is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, it’s way more stable than Sid. If youre used to APT id say go to pop os. If you want to stay with Debian your best bet is to use the testing repo, Sid is for devs and people who are trying to find bugs
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.
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
Haven't been around Linux overall for long, with my first proper introduction around early 2021. But from what I hear and read, plus my own observations in those past 2.5 years, even if, most of the time, it's not "ideal" (as in, "plug and play"), Linux as a whole seems to be getting better and better for gaming. And ever since behemoth Valve came with the Linux-powered Steam Deck, I expect it to help increase Linux's naturally-slow-but-constant momentum even more.
I’ve trialed Pop_OS for a month when Valve released proton. I played Sekiro the first week of release and was blown away how well it runs back then. That said, there were a lot of quirks that made games still broken, and there are definitely still some, but the improvement since then is absolutely massive.
As someone who has dabbled in and used Linux since 1995. You are in at a good time. Linux has always been very stable and capable for most things. But it has definitely gotten much better in recent years in terms of gaming and windows compatibility. I still keep a Windows system or two around just in case. But I’m much happier with my daily driver being a system running linux.
It’s gotten really sad with Microsoft not supporting ~5 year old systems under Windows 11. Apple at least still supports roughly 10 year old systems. I had to laugh a bit about the controversy when the subject was broached of removing support for 486 and older 32-bit systems from the Linux kernel. Those being roughly 30 years old by this point.
And besides the discussion that brought the controversy, from what I can gather, Linux benefits the most from KVM, making using a virtual machine with some super old Linux system in it very viable. ^_^
Well yes and no. Some things you absolutely can do that with. But not a lot of people realize just how common it is for industrial devices and applications to still use older chipsets. 486s and pentiums still in use today. Simply because by modern standards they are relatively low power tried and tested basic designs. And when you need a discreet portable device. Virtualization often isn’t really useful. One could argue why don’t they make a wireless dumb terminal of some sort tie back to a central system with a bear minimal system on it just for displaying information. But in noisy industrial environments that really isn’t an option. I do see some vendors Etc starting to use Android based devices. But it’s a slow change over. And only just starting.
I don’t know why so many are talking about Debian with distrobox I’m currently testing with bedrock Linux with a hijacked nobara for gaming and GNOME things. I also fetched a arch strata for anything else like window compositor waybar librewolf etc
linux_gaming
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