Debian for Linux gaming?
Debian for Linux gaming?
I've ordered myself some parts to build a PC for Linux gaming. In the meantime, i'm deciding on which linux distro to use.
For the desktop environment I typically use KDE.
I have used Ubuntu in the past but i'm ruling it out because of snaps and other such annoyances. This also applies to Ubuntu based distros that use the same repos (KDE Neon etc).
I see the wikis recommend Nobara, but I'm reluctant to use a Fedora based distro because I'm so used to Debian/apt (both as a desktop and server distros). I'm not ruling it out completely though.
Any reason why I shouldn't just go with Debian + KDE and install Steam? Will I be missing out on lots of performance improvements or is this easily addressed by using an additional repo for a tweaked kernel and proton version or whatever?
Oh man, you're in for a treat there.
PopOS is what you're looking for friend. Debian is a bit too bare and general use-case. Ubuntu is wrong for the exact reasons you laid out.
Pop is built for the end users, with native integrations for flatpak/deb/whathaveyou. It's built on top of Ubuntu with all the ubuntu annoyances removed.
They even have a distro with pre-baked nvidia drivers should you need it.
I tried it and swapped all of mine over
Fwiw I switched off of Pop onto Debian cause I was annoyed with some of Pop’s bloat and I’ve been loving it. I game pretty heavily on Debian and it works just fine. I do mostly play the same older games rather than buying new releases, however, so mileage may vary if you’re looking at cutting edge games, as driver updates can significantly boost performance in that case.
Make no mistake though, when I say ‘bloat’ I’m mostly nitpicking. Pop is a perfectly valid choice and a good option for gaming.
mileage may vary if you’re looking at cutting edge games, as driver updates can significantly boost performance in that case.
If you're playing games in Steam, Flatpak, or any other tool that provides its own runtime, the graphics driver updates that tend to affect performance (e.g. Mesa) don't come from your base distro.
(Unless maybe you have an Nvidia GPU and a distro that packages its proprietary drivers? I'm not sure in that case, since I quit Nvidia years ago.)
+1 for Pop!_OS
Using it (as my first real use of Linux) a few months now, and I have yet to find a game that doesn't work.
Turned away from mint/Ubuntu because they definitely pre installed more. There are almost no included installs that I don't use on Pop, very clean.
It's also a frequently updated "stable" release- it gets kernel/driver/more updates every 2 weeks or so. They should really add the update# to the iso, because "22.04" alone makes it sound old.
I have 3 running Pop, soon to be 4. ( Try to switch kids over)
Any reason why I shouldn’t just go with Debian + KDE and install Steam?
No reason to avoid Debian unless you have hardware so very new that it requires the very latest kernel to operate.
If you go with Debian Stable, you can enable Backports for a fairly recent kernel, currently 6.5.10. You could go with Testing or even Unstable if you're addicted to upgrading as often as possible, but chances are you won't need to.
I'm gaming on Debian Stable with Steam in a flatpak. It works great, and is blissfully low maintenance.
At some point, you'll probably run into people claiming that Debian is bad for gaming performance because of "outdated" packages. In most cases, those people don't know what they're talking about. I suggest ignoring them unless they identify a specific performance issue that actually affects you.
Technically it is possible that outdated packages can decrease your performance. Some games may not work because of outdated libraries, but in most cases you should be fine.
Debian is usually very stable, which means drivers and kernel versions will be outdated in comparison with other distros, which can make you lose possible performance. To be fair I wouldn't worry too much about this though since I don't expect the performance to be significantly different, but it's something to take into consideration.
Don't be afraid of trying a different distro, RedHat or Arch based for example, just make / and /home different partitions and you should be able to install over your root without affecting your home so it makes it easier to switch system if you want to.
I haven't chosen cutting edge hardware (AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT) so I don't think drivers should be an issue in my particular case.
I think separating /home is a good idea so I can try some different distros and compare.
A separate /home is a good idea in general. Same with /var
Oh yeah, everything will work, but if next week AMD pushes a driver update that improves performance you'll only get it in a few months. Other than that Debian is a really nice distro, I used it for a while and that's the only complaint I had.
From your other comments you seem to have a system simmilar to mine. I use mint, and i'm very happy with it, feature rich and ubuntu based, without the features you dislike like snap.
Only real step requirs for gaming has been installing some overclocking and heat management stuff like corecntrl, as well as some 32 bit archetecture stuff to run steam.
I'll second Mint as well. I play mostly small indie games but have played Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 5, and Terminator: Resistance with no problems. The worst I've experienced is having to tell Steam to use a different version of Proton for some games (I recently had trouble launching Cyberpunk on Proton Experimental so I downgraded to the next most recent and it worked fine). I also have an AMD GPU so no driver mess.
I'll second Mint, though I haven't done much gaming on it. Before switching all my stuff over to Mint, I did have xubuntu/steam running pretty well for most games I tried up through Doom 2016 (can't remember if I tried eternal) so I can't imagine mint being much worse. As far as gaming specific stuff goes it's got a pretty decent driver manager and time shift preinstalled for when said driver manager breaks things.
If you're interested in using Debian directly, @[email protected] put out a great post on this! It worked absolutely flawlessly for me, it goes over getting things like a newer version of Mesa, newer (or alternative) kernels if that is your thing, along with some extra firmware for AMD cards that aren't present in Debian's packaging yet.
Even just regular Debian is fine, and you can easily install the Flatpak version of Steam if all you want is a newer version of Mesa.
I'm using the flatpak version of Steam, if you go down the road - I've read that what few VR games that work on Linux will not work with the flatpak version. I'm sure that could be fixed/worked through. Just something to keep in mind.
Interesting, that is good to know! I don't have any VR equipment (maybe one day!), however it sounds like the Flatpak has had some odd issues here and there that cause it to be a bit problematic.
I haven't confirmed it, but I think it has some issues with the controller I use (I'm one of those weird people who prefers the Google Stadia controller...), I was confused at when one day the rumble on it had stopped working, even though it previously worked perfectly (even after installing the
steam-devicespackage). Later on I realized that I had switched to the Flatpak version of Steam to give it a try. I only say that I haven't confirmed it due to the fact that I had made plenty of changes to my system in the time between doing so and realizing what had happened, that perhaps something else I did affected it, but I have my doubts about that.I personally prefer the native version when I can have it, one of the funniest reasons being that I like being able to see my currently playing music through MangoHud, which doesn't work in the Flatpak version of Steam (+ the Flatpak layer of MangoHud) due to the sandboxing (and I'm unsure of how to pinhole it through). It sounds silly, but its those small things that come up (but then also add up) as potential drawbacks between going with everything being sandboxed.
debian is good as is, without flat/snap/fart things. If you are used to it then stick with it and you'll be happy and productive in everything you do, backed by a solid maintained os release process.
debians probably fine, but +1 for Nobara. been using it for a few months, not a single complaint. they're even switching to KDE by default in nobara 39, which just released a few days ago
I doubt you'll miss out on anything from using Debian Linux is Linux but I will shill fedora. Love that distro
The thing with Linux is you shouldn't be afraid of distro hopping. Just try any distro you want for a few days, and if you don't like it, move on to another one. Repeat until you find the distro you like the most. You can grab a new SSD and swap your system partition to try the new distro of you don't want to format your current system partition.
Put your home directory on its own partition, and you can usually even preserve files between distros.
I would recommend fedora. It has more recent packages than debian and it's also quite stable and easy to maintain
Nobara personally is just right for me it's kernel and drivers are alway up to date configured asnd patched for gaming. Even if there is bugs with some package for example they ship with patches applied it is just so convenient. I think learning dnf is well worth it and even if there is some debian only app that you want to install there is alwayd distrobox
DNF as a package manager isn't that hard either, and it's never given me any troubles.
yep with fedora 39/Nobara 39's dnf 5 it is pretty fast too
Honestly, I don't think you are going to take that much time to get used to fedora based distros since in my experience the only thing that ended up changing was the name of the package manager and the faster updates.
I would recommend that you use more up to date distros since gaming in Linux has been having fast-paced performance updates and with the new proton stuff which is relatively new and is only to get more patches because valve is investing on it. So picking up fedora might be a good choice since its more up to date and it isn't that different to debian compared to more minimal/advanced distros such as arch and void (but being more advanced as a lot of percs that simpler distros don't have).
I would second up to date distros for the same reasons. I think the WINE guys suggested as much. I'd personally go OpenSuse as it's rolling, up to date, solid and great for KDE.
I've been happiest with arch, then later manjaro since I didn't have to build it but it's still arch.
There's a lot more software for it with access to AUR. Personally I find it works well for me and I've been using arch and arch-based since 2015.
In case it wasn't clear, I use arch btw.
I use Debian, KDE and steam and it works fine. My only limitation was the hardware itself , the os stays out of the way and proton does its thing.
I mainly play on the deck nowadays as I can lounge around with it.
Pick what you're comfortable with. In the end, you can get anything running in any distro. Linux is Linux. Worst case you may need to enable unstable repos or cherry pick packages from there.
Some of the "gaming" distros do include patches so if you want an out of the box experience it might make sense to pick one of those. But if you know your way around Linux, it stops mattering because your skills on your preferred distro outweighs the convenience of having it all readily available out of the box.
If you use Flatpaks, some include updated mesa/GPU drivers so the Debian base won't even matter all that much as long as the kernel is new enough. Installing a bleeding edge kernel on Debian is usually fine if you have to as the kernel tries its best to never break userspace.
One word for you... NOBARA. ✌️
Here's the thing: some distros are aimed at gamers and have some useful gaming stuff in their default setup. But at the end of the day, if you're comfortable installing stuff on your own, you can game on any Linux distro. It frankly doesn't matter.
So, yes, if you want to game on Debian because you can avoid bloat, by all means do it.
It'll probably be fine, although I'd personally pick some rolling-release distro for better performance.
In any case, besides the release model I'm pretty sure a distribution you use doesn't matter that much. Usually every somewhat popular distro has the same few packages you need for games to work (32-bit libs, wine, steam, whatever).
If you're going to be gaming a lot, I can vouch that Nobara is indeed really good. Debian is a solid option but it like the other commenter says, it gets packages a bit later than other distros. This can be annoying since you'll have to go out of your way to install the newest drivers or app that you need.
The bigger reason to use Nobara though is that it comes pre-installed with many patches (some kernel patches too) that would be a total pain to do yourself on Debian. You can see a list of patches on the official site and scroll down.
Debian 12 and flatpak everything. I recently made the switch from Ubuntu and I couldn't be happier.
I have been running Debian sid for 23 years and I play all the games I want with minimal issues I couldn't work around. it may not be for everyone but works great for me. the debian wiki is great and using timeshift there is nothing so far I couldn't recover on.
I have used Nvidia in the past (RIP Evga) and now use AMD both worked great but AMD is easier since I don't have to do anything. also great tip the arch wiki is great for help as well.
Just need to rember it's not cut and paste there which you shouldn't do anyway but points you to the fix and just need to find the file or program equivalent for debian.
Depending on the games you wanna play it's probably safer to be somewhat closer to the bleeding edge than Debian would allow you to be. Nobara gets recommended so often because you get a good tradeoff between the newest updates and stability. Also KDE is their standard DE. PopOS is good if you wanna stay with apt, but comes with Gnome out of the box.
I think WINE recommend an up to date distro due to rapidly changing stuff needing up to date software and kernel. I think Debian wouldn't be great for that. I'd personally recommend OpenSuse. Rolling, up to date and great with KDE. Good luck.
How does zypper compare to apt?
I have no idea. It's quite subjective.
You can install packages and remove them and it resolves dependencies, just using different commands...
I haven't tried it, but I suppose you'll do just fine with debian sid. i.e edit /etc/apt/sources.list, swap $distro_nickname for sid, sudo apt update, sudo apt full-upgrade.
For Gaming Debian SID if you want Debian.
No, don't use Sid. No one should run it on a system they expect to work.
Debian has 3 phases stable, testing & unstable.
Debian Unstable is the initial gate for pulling in new code, applications need to not break everything in that environment before they can be moved to testing. A freeze is periodically applied to testing and RC/Major bugs are identified/fixed and Stable is released
Sid is the naughty child in Toy Story who destroys things. Debian uses Toy Story characters to name things and so Unstable got the nickname Sid.
If you have newly released hardware you might need an updated kernel. This can be found via backports.
Similarly Mesa covers the graphics drivers, you can pull the latest from backports, again you only need to do this if your graphics card is too new.
As someone who runs Debian Stable with KDE, it works great for gaming
You're talking about Debian experimental, Debian experimental > Sid > Testing > Stable, Sid is about the Same as Arch, or Fedora around new release's a lot of people only use Sid and testing they're only a few days apart, it is a common used OS for Desktops/Gaming, OP was asking about Debian and a Fedora based OS.
Also DD's don't backport Mesa anymore the Dev who did stopped years ago.
I used to run Debian Testing and it's fine, most of the time. I recommend using the named next release so you don't get a ton of new packages when the testing freeze lifts (and thus a lot of potential breakage), and to only go to testing if you actually need something from it.
I'm on a rolling release now (Tumbleweed), but I'm familiar enough with Debian to whole-heartedly recommend it.