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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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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
