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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I'm in a similar boat as you and my current plan is to switch to PopOS. They are Ubuntu/Debian based so you will be familiar with it, and they also are a distro that is more focused on gaming, so you will have an easier time with video card drivers.

The only issue that I have with pop OS is that it seems unnecessarily slow at times.

I'm running a Lenovo legion 5 with a 10750x, 32 gigs of ram, and a 2060 in it and sometimes it would feel a full second between when I click the button and when something happens.

Fedora was a little bit better about that, but I don't use that because of the weird politics surrounding Fedora right now.

Now I'm on a mint cinnamon and it's actually pretty good, although I have yet to try playing any games from steam on it.

The other issues I have is that Fedora would keep my Bluetooth speakers connected between reboots but both pop OS and Linux cinnamon require that I manually reconnect every time.

I was in a similar boat to you, but then I installed pop and just gave it a go. Stuck it on a separate hd for now but with everything setup and working I'm very happy with it.

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 !!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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

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

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

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

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

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.

But Debian for servers is also a pain.

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

Fedora Silverblue and Linux Mint Debian Edition are my goto distros atm. Have not had issues with either, they've been great out of the box. Fedora Silverblue requires relearning a few things however, being very container oriented.

Are there any avantages of LMDE vs pure debian?

I mean LMDE is just plain debian with pre installed packages, GUI?

If LDME uses debian bookworm stable, their is not point in LMDE except for the ease of installation process?

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Mint

also dual boot first before going cold turkey

i went cold turkey when i got that early, free upgrade from win7 to win 10. after a week of win 10 and unable to downgrade back to 7. Bam. i became full time linux at that moment.

I've had stability issues with mint. It's usually a problem with updates bricking my install.

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

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

Debian is fine, but not that great if you wanna game, it's packages are kinda old and that matters a lot of you wanna game on linux, as the scene is rapidly evolving, even as we speak. It will work, you just might have issues with certain packages being to old and games not running as well as they should... If you want a gaming 1st distro, try nobara or something with newer packages, like EndeavorOS.

Another thing that matters a lot when it comes to gaming on linux is the desktop environment and display server. It's a big topic and I'm gonna get hated on, no matter what I recommend here, but my personal recommendation is to use the KDE Plasma desktop with the Wayland session. Again, it's a big topic and you should look up the pros and cons of using Wayland or X11 for gaming, I recommend using Wayland to avoid certain headaches with X11 and to have a generally more usable system while gaming...

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!

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.

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.

I’m using Debian testing + a few packages from experimental (Mesa) and xanmod or liquorix kernel.

It’s been a great experience. Stable as expected, performant as anything else.

You probably have your reason to run Debian testing but I read somewhere that testing is somehow a bad idea as desktop environment !

If somehing is stuck and being updated in sid, and bugs are still happening, you could be stuck for month without the correct update in testing.

Sorry if it's not clear, but I read it somewhere in the official debian documentation.

Hey, I appreciate your warning.

For a bit of context, I have been a Debian user for almost 30 years now. Mostly using testing for desktop / workstation systems, and stable on servers and containers. Debian is comfortable and provides me with stability where I need and cutting-edge where I want. It mostly "just works" with great defaults for everything, and it's easy to customise where I desire.

With that out of the way: you're not wrong. In fact, the testing FAQ describes situations where these kinds of breakages could happen.

That said, this is exceedingly rare if not nearly unheard of, and I can always pull packages from sid or experimental if I need (like I do Mesa).

Edit to add: for anyone interested in trying out Debian testing, please check out the Wiki: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting

Edit 2: I have published a blog post describing my setup if you're interested: https://blog.c10l.cc/09122023-debian-gaming

Thank you for your insights and personal experiences :) I love Debian stable as server, never had any issues on a old Asus laptop ! I have only 2 years of "experience" and started with Ubuntu. Good introduction to linux but switched to Debian (<3)

That's way I'm asking arround I don't wan't to have a too bad experience with Debian as main personal PC !

Thank you for your personal blog post and the wiki link :) will surely read through before making my final choice !

No worries! I also posted the blog on this community (https://lemmy.world/post/9543661) and someone mentioned in the comments they’re running Debian stable for gaming.

That can also be an option if you’d like to avoid testing for the minute, though I’m not sure what pitfalls that setup might have.

Good luck on your journey!

Debian testing is insanely robust. I am currently not running it (testing) because I use it for work, but my past experience has been excellent.

My desktop has been Debian testing since Jessie. I was inconvenienced a total of 2 times where something broke and made an app unuseable. My KDE menu was fixed within a day and my torrenting app took longer to fix, but I was able to apply a one line fix in the meantime with help from our awesome community.

I know it's named "testing", but I'd bet it would be very stable for most people's use cases and trade off is absolutely worth it if people would give it a try.

Do you consider testing a better choice than sid for desktop/gaming environment?

I'm really not sure which one I should use. I only have experience with bare bone debian stable as server, I'm trying to find the best choice when switching from windaube to debian :)

Thanks for your insights and personal experiences !

Sorry for the late reply. Yes, I think it's better for desktop. Stable is truly targetted for servers and desktop users will only be mildy inconvenienced once in a blue moon.

To answer that, you must understand how testing works. Packages first are updated in Sid (unstable), then they go to Testing. At a certain point of the release cycle, Testing stops being updated to become the new Stable version. So basically Testing is not constantly updated. Also, security patches don't follow this route: instead, they arrive in Sid first (thanks to the maintainers themselves) and then they get into Stable first (by the Debian team) because Stable has the priority. Only after that, they arrive in Testing.

Also see this paragraph from the Debian Wiki regarding security:

Security for testing benefits from the security efforts of the entire project for unstable. However, there is a minimum two-day migration delay, and sometimes security fixes can be held up by transitions. The Security Team helps to move along those transitions holding back important security uploads, but this is not always possible and delays may occur. Especially in the months after a new stable release, when many new versions are uploaded to unstable, security fixes for testing may lag behind.

Also:

Compared to stable and unstable, next-stable testing has the worst security update speed. Don't prefer testing if security is a concern.

My advice to everyone who wants Debian to be more current is to just run Sid (unstable). It's always going to be more secure and up-to date than Testing. Also, it works like a rolling-release distro, i.e. the updates are incremental and constant

EDIT: whatever you do, read and follow this guide. apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges especially will save your ass constantly

Thank you for your nice write up and your link ! I think I will follow your guts and personal experiences ! Thank your for pre-saving my ass !! <3

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

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.

Kinda unfair to call Debian stable old when it just got a new release a few months ago. Sure, in a year or two it'll start to feel old, but if one were to use flatpaks as you suggested, then Debian stable is perfectly fine, as at that point you aren't even using the system libs anyway.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)