Switching to Debian on my gaming pc

demoman@lemmy.one to Linux@lemmy.ml – 79 points –

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!

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Debian is great for gaming just takes a little work. I run Debian sid and that has its pros and cons but I do it to have super updated packages and to help report bugs. But running stable with a mix of flatpaks and backports works great as well.

Debian is great since it's just super vanilla packages from upstream for you to make it the way you want it.

Thanks for your comment! I am going to try stable for a while and see how it goes... worst case I can switch to a different distro.

if stable gets too stale (heh) for you, you can always move to sid

this is where im at. installed stable a few weeks ago while its relatively fresh. ready to upgrade to sid if i ever need more than flatpak

Thanks OP for the question and your comment :) I was having the same question and you gave me hope to stay on debian :)

Which DE would you suggest with debian sid?

I use KDE but that is out of habit and preference I have used them all and they all have pros and cons. Debian doesn't customize them at all so there is no Debian specific DE for stable or sid.

It's all about how they make you feel using them. also the nice thing is you can use gnome apps on kde and kde apps on gnome so unless you super care about theme there is no down side.

Like my favorite scanner app is Document Scanner for gnome and when I'm on gnome my favorite text editor is Kate. Yeah you're doubling your needed disk space for libraries but disks space is cheap and your going to use up more space with flatpaks anyway.

Thank you !!

I'm currently looking into xfce vs KDE plasma, something I need to pay attention to is a DE with x11 because nvidia hasn't fully supported wayland ?

Am I right to consider it that way? Or do both support nvidia drivers?

I'm sorry, I only use debian as bare bone on my server and currently considering to switch my main desktop from windaube to linux and alot of informations on the web seem contradictory or incomplete :/

I run AMD now but ran Nvidia for years (RIP Evga). I had no issues with ether DE, other than the occasional update breaking things (only an issue with Sid) but that's what you use timeshift to rollback for when something breaks and apt-listbugs to be aware of issues before you update.

Note you can swap between X11 and Wayland on KDE by just changing the session on login.

Thanks :) good to know I can switch between those two in KDE ! I need to test Plasma and xfce to see wich fits better my needs and has better suppport for my system !

Thanks for the clarification !!