I couldn't even come up with a take. I guess a conspiracy theory that Microsoft is kidnapping the internet's families to keep them from talking about Linux.
Debian Sid should be fine. I wouldn’t go with Stable − too old.
Personally, I’d go with the Flathub version of Steam and not pollute my main system with 32bit libraries Steam required for backwards compatibility. With the 32bit dependencies as Flatpak Runtimes, the main system stays clean.
“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
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).
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.
IMO it’s not that Debian isn’t good for gaming. It’s that it’s not good for gaming IF you want to just install Debian and start gaming right away. There’s going to be a bit of downloading/installing, & configuring first.
If Debian is too far back of a starting point for you then I’d either go with a gaming distro where many things will already come installed and possibly (idk for sure because I’ve not used any gaming distros) configured for you to where you mostly just need to sign in and download your games.
chances are you already used the external nvidia kernel module prior
the dkms package is just the “catch all” way which works on most setups
(at least on Arch Linux)
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
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.
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.
I switched from arch to Debian bookworm for my work/gaming pc, and I have no regrets. Same amount of time setting up as arch, because of the newer kernel on bookworm you don’t have many prerequisites to install. Was gaming within an hour or two. That was six months ago, and things don’t break all the time like arch, where they would fix graphics drivers, but doing so would bork the sound. I play everything from factorio to cyberpunk, no issues. Only thing I can not get running for the life of me on windows or Linux is forza motorsports.
I don’t think distro matters as much anymore with modern Linux. There are enough tutorials out there on most of them, should be easy to get setup on almost anything.
From Arch to Debian, that’s a 180° on stability. But to be honest, I’m using arch for 2 months now and everything seems very stable. I had no problems, yet.
I never had an issue with system stability with Arch. It was just tiring every day making sure everything was up to date. Updates would break little things, like audio or some wine dependencies and I would just have to deal till I ran updates the next day. Meanwhile with Debian, the only issue I have ran into was with lutris and battle.net, and that turned out to just be a problem with mangohud.
No, this will not increase the amount of kernel panics you see. It just makes them more informational to the average person. Technical folks can disable it, non-technical folks won’t know how to enable it, so on by default it is.
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)
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