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!
I use Debian Stable for gaming, I use Steam via flatpak which also brings in the latest mesa drivers, and I use the liquorix kernel (custom kernel tuned for desktop performance at expense of power use). The debian-backports kernel is also an option (and a subjectively better one at that, as liquorix isn’t supported by the Debian security team) to get a new kernel for up-to-date drivers for gaming.
If you’re wanting to go with Debian for gaming you’ll have a good experience even if you don’t use a newer kernel and drivers, the performance difference isn’t earth shattering, it’s around 1-5 fps (anecdotal) on average compared to newer distros. You’ll also have to go out of your way to enable flatpak or the non-free repo to get Steam though. It’ll work well after that one time initial setup
If you want just a distro where you just install it, throw Steam or other games on it, and want gaming to be a focus of the distro so it’ll always have the latest-and-greatest for it with little effort required, I’d highly recommend Pop!_OS, it’s Debian based so it’ll be familiar to you while using it.
Edit: If you have an Nvidia GPU, using Pop_OS! over Debian will save you a lot of headache in trying to get up-to-date Nvidia drivers, Debian provides them but generally they’re not the latest ones. If you have an AMD or Intel GPU, it’s all about the Mesa and Kernel versions for providing your drivers.
Pop OS works great for me. I’ve done a lot of testing with my steam (and other ) games. I’ve gotten 95% to work, most without a lot of effort. Proton db helps
Ditto. I swapped to linux this summer and landed on Pop!_OS because my laptop has hybrid Nvidia graphics. Pop supports that really well because the company that makes Pop sells laptops with similar hybrid Nvidia graphics.
So far almost every game I’ve tried on Pop has worked with no issue. Of the games that have had issues, EVERY ONE got working with the help of Proton db. (Note: All Steam games or games with native linux support.)
Anyways, yeah I’m really not the biggest fan of Pop’s desktop environment, but it work really well for gaming so I’m leaving well enough alone.