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!

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

lemmyvore,

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE 6) might also be a good fit for you.

doctorn,
@doctorn@r.nf avatar

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!

The_Zen_Cow_Says_Mu, (edited )

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.

selokichtli, (edited )

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.

dino,

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.

earmuff,

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.

bruhduh, (edited )
@bruhduh@lemmy.world avatar

I was daily driving arch for 5 years and decided to switch two months ago just like you now and running Debian 12 happily, tried fedora, set subvolumes to timeshift btrfs to work because it was not installed out of the box, and after update from 38 to 39 with official gui update tool, it broke and locked away ssd so i had to recover data, after that i installed Debian 12 and had no problems at all, machine ALWAYS ready to work and stable as fuck, heavenly experience so far actually

Unyieldingly,

I been running Debian with a few Backports like Pipewire, Kernel, and Flatpak it has been good so far.

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)

snekerpimp,

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.

arthur,

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.

snekerpimp,

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.

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.

rem26_art,
@rem26_art@kbin.social avatar

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

Pantherina,

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

rem26_art,
@rem26_art@kbin.social avatar

True, but there's always the option of installing KDE or something else with Wayland support

Pantherina,

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

dragnet,

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.

Pantherina,

But Debian for servers is also a pain.

  • no hardened ssh config
  • apparmor by default?
  • no automatic updates which is bogus
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