Hello everyone - I have been wanting to ditch windows on my gaming pc for a while now, and since I have recently finished a large project, I now have the free time to switch. I am relatively comfortable with Debian having used it for a while on my web server as well as school laptop, but I am concerned about using it on my gaming computer since I have heard stock Debian is not the greatest for gaming. All of my other daily driver programs I know will work, so I am mainly concerned with the gaming aspect.
In the case that you don’t recommend Debian for my gaming computer, do you have an OS that you would recommend?
I appreciate any insight!
Currently running debian with an amd GPU. Using the regular 6.1 kernel
With steam flatpak and bottles (for nonsteam windows games) everything is running just fine.
“not the greatest at gaming” is still perfectly fine – the main argument against Debian stable (at least for gamers) is that, since Debian’s focus is on stability, they’re not riding the bleeding edge of updates and features
Idk how well Debian stable would work, but Debian Sid might be a bit easier to work with in terms of games with it being more on the bleeding edge.
There’s also Linux Mint Debian if you want to stay in the Debian universe, but you’d get more of the ease of use of Mint.
Me personally, I’m using Fedora for gaming and I haven’t really had many issues with it. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could try Fedora or Nobara, which is a more gaming focused spinoff of Fedora
Debian is very manual in like everything. But Linux Mint uses Cinnamon which uses X11 for a loong time and that is pretty bad for anything modern with Graphics Cards
True, but there’s always the option of installing KDE or something else with Wayland support
What does Linux mint have what debian doesnt? I can only think of the deb firefox and the timeshift backups which are both really neat
Just convenience in the form of focusing on a user-friendly out of the box experience, really. That’s enough for me to use it over Debian on desktop, though I like Debian for servers.
But Debian for servers is also a pain.
- no hardened ssh config
- apparmor by default?
- no automatic updates which is bogus
There are some gaming focused OS’s such as Nobara (Fedora) and also that are “couch gaming” OSs that incorporate controller-only UIs such as ChimeraOS (Arch) and Bazzite (Fedora).
At the end of the day, the distribution is not that important for gaming, unless you need those 1-2 extra fps. Debian is a very good choice for workstations nowadays. I was a long time OpenSUSE user, always had joys with Debian, but yesterday switched to Garuda Linux (Arch variant optimized for gaming) and I love it so far very much.
I’ve used Debian before on my gaming laptop (nvidia card), but drivers were enough of a pain that I just switched to Mint. As much as Canonical annoys me, drivers have been much more plug-and-play for me on Ubuntu downstreams than on raw Debian.
Don’t opt for an LTS distro for gaming (or even for regular desktop use), opt of a rolling release one… or at least one that has 2 or 3 regular yearly releases.
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)
Nobara, which is by GloriousEggroll of ProtonGE fame, is the first thing to think of when looking for a gaming distro.
Late to the thread but I would say yeah, Debian is good for gaming. The only place I have issued is with VR, otherwise it’s been smooth sailing for the past 3 years.
Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE 6) might also be a good fit for you.
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.
Last time I tried this myself I could play a lot, but never the ones I wanted and ended up switching back anyway. Ever since I’ve just always been running a linux and a windows PC, each to its best use.
I must stress however this experience of mine was over a decade ago and I have heard there’s been a lot of improvement on the subject, with steamdeck becoming a thing and alike, so I have no up-to-date experience in what runs and what doesn’t anymore. What I cán tell you however is that whichever Windows-only game did play (using Wine back then, dunno how it’s done these days) always played at least 2-5x better than on the actual Windows it was made for. 😅
So good luck and I would love some information as to your eventual result!
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.
You need an up to date systems to utilize newest packages of drivers (etc.) to make full use of recent hardware and to be able to play new games.