Switching to Debian on my gaming pc

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!

rotopenguin,
@rotopenguin@infosec.pub avatar

Nobara, which is by GloriousEggroll of ProtonGE fame, is the first thing to think of when looking for a gaming distro.

Veraxus,
@Veraxus@kbin.social avatar

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.

Astaroth, (edited )

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)

0x4E4F, (edited )

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.

TrickDacy,
@TrickDacy@lemmy.world avatar

AMD or Nvidia?

xarexyouxmadx,

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.

IrritableOcelot,

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.

helenslunch,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

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).

cerement,
@cerement@slrpnk.net avatar

“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

woelkchen,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

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.

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