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??
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
Out of curiosity, are you running Steam/Proton/etc on Flatpaks because the normal packages are too outdated in stable or because the dependencies for them are too outdated?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?
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
I’m going to give stable a try and see how far I get with gaming and go from there. I’ve never run straight Debian as a desktop it’s always been on servers so my experience there is limited.
I’m curious as to the update script you are talking about. Care to point me to an example? Wouldn’t flatpak update do the trick for everything running in flatpaks? And apt update/upgrade for the rest?
Also a very valid point!
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.
deleted by creator
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.