Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
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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
+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)
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.
I'm also mostly interested in slightly older games like Rome Remastered, I probably won't be playing many brand new titles.
Might try and get Age of Mythology working as well as I have so much nostalgia for it!
What kind of games are you into?
I love Age of Mythology! It might take a bit of tweaking to get working, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't on a Debian system. I'm on Gentoo, and I just had to swap around the proton version and force the correct resolution and now it works flawlessly.
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.
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.
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.
If you're interested in using Debian directly, @c10l@lemmy.world 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.
Thank you so much for the link, it's just the kind of information I was after. Very clearly written!
Thanks! I’m the author. If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to let me know. :)
No comments except thank you, and please continue to write similar articles!
Apt pinning is such a nice way to pull in some new packages without affecting the whole system. It's interesting in this specific case and also more generally! I have used it before once or twice but this is the best example I've seen for multiple packages.
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-devices package). 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.
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
Nobara is at the top of Linux gaming. I used it for half a year or so. But I want to use the aur and hyprland so I will stay on arch
What AUR packages do you use?
So heres a list of all aur packages I currently have installed. But there are also may packages in the arch repos that arent at all awaylible in fedora ex. spotifyd. Tbh I was supprised how many packages are avalible for fedora nowdays
Oh shit im still running GNOME 2 on Nobara 38, do I need to do a fresh reinstall?
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.
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
I would recommend fedora. It has more recent packages than debian and it's also quite stable and easy to maintain
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.
Manjaro is trash just use Arch
Hard to take the comment seriously when there's no reasoning behind it lol. Working fine for me for a few years now.
Eh nothing too alarming. At the time I installed it arch was still requiring a full build from scratch without a Gui installer. I'd definitely go back when I reinstall next time.
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 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.
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.
One word for you... NOBARA. ✌️
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.
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).
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.
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.
Debian 12 and flatpak everything. I recently made the switch from Ubuntu and I couldn't be happier.
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.