Well I’m hopping around… again. I thought I had a good stable setup going but then something happens upstream that goes against what I want/believe in (looking at you RedHat) and I’m back on the hunt again.

I thought about trying out a Debian based distro but then I thought “why don’t I just use Debian itself (Sid, not stable/Bookworm)”.

Most if not all gaming software have a way to be installed on Debian so I don’t think that could be an issue.

Is anyone else using Sid? Am I missing something by not going with a gaming focused distro??

    • UristEnglish
      5•2 years ago

      Excellent write up. I just wanted to add I am also using Debian stable (bookworm) and it’s going great. I use steam and I’m playing Baldur’s gate with no issues. I have a nvidia 1070.

      (my home server is arch btw)

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      3•2 years ago

      This looks like a detailed write up. I need to sit down and digest this information (currently out and about). I’ll come back to you with questions I’m sure.

        • @[email protected]OPEnglish
          3•2 years ago

          Very valid points. Since the RedHat announcement, I’ve migrated all my home servers to Debian so I thought “why not switch over my gaming rig as well”. As I thought about which district to use I came to the realization that I don’t want another situation where I’m using a distro based on another distro and that other distro decides to do something that affects the distro I’m using and blah blah. So then that leaves me with using the base (Debian, Arch, etc.) to avoid what I just mentioned.

          I’ve been using Linux for quite some time so I can usually handle some break/fix. I haven’t tried Linux Mint yet but again, I rather just go straight to the base and go from there.

          Still want to read your post tho. I’ve got Sid setup and ready to go and I do want to see how much breakage it introduces as I continue to use it. If it’s a bit too much, I’ll give stable a try.

            • @[email protected]OPEnglish
              1•2 years ago

              Out of curiosity, are you running Steam/Proton/etc on Flatpaks because the normal packages are too outdated in stable or because the dependencies for them are too outdated?

              Also are you not running into issues where the flatpaks can’t talk to each other? For example, installing a proton version on the steam path. Since flatpaks are isolated and have limited access to the system, wouldn’t I run into issues there?

                • @[email protected]OPEnglish
                  1•2 years ago

                  Okay, on this thread alone a lot of people are suggesting to go stable (including yourself) so now I’m thinking you guys must know something I don’t. Truthfully, I only really need a few things for the games that I run like a recent kernel (XanMod maybe?) Wine staging, steam, nvidia drivers, lutris, bottles and proton (through ProtonUp-Qt). As long as I can run those things on recent versions, I think going stable would be fine too.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•2 years ago

          How do you manage kernel updates when running a custom kernel? Do you have to regularly check for security patches that you need to apply? It seems like something you could easily forget about without the benefit of an auto-update checker reminding you.

            • @[email protected]English
              2•2 years ago

              I see what you mean, thanks. I had assumed you would be compiling it from source yourself and for some reason it didn’t occur to me that there are separate repos for alternate kernels.