I’ve ordered myself some parts to build a PC for Linux gaming. In the meantime, i’m deciding on which linux distro to use.
For the desktop environment I typically use KDE.
I have used Ubuntu in the past but i’m ruling it out because of snaps and other such annoyances. This also applies to Ubuntu based distros that use the same repos (KDE Neon etc).
I see the wikis recommend Nobara, but I’m reluctant to use a Fedora based distro because I’m so used to Debian/apt (both as a desktop and server distros). I’m not ruling it out completely though.
Any reason why I shouldn’t just go with Debian + KDE and install Steam? Will I be missing out on lots of performance improvements or is this easily addressed by using an additional repo for a tweaked kernel and proton version or whatever?
Oh man, you’re in for a treat there.
PopOS is what you’re looking for friend. Debian is a bit too bare and general use-case. Ubuntu is wrong for the exact reasons you laid out.
Pop is built for the end users, with native integrations for flatpak/deb/whathaveyou. It’s built on top of Ubuntu with all the ubuntu annoyances removed.
They even have a distro with pre-baked nvidia drivers should you need it.
I tried it and swapped all of mine over
Fwiw I switched off of Pop onto Debian cause I was annoyed with some of Pop’s bloat and I’ve been loving it. I game pretty heavily on Debian and it works just fine. I do mostly play the same older games rather than buying new releases, however, so mileage may vary if you’re looking at cutting edge games, as driver updates can significantly boost performance in that case.
Make no mistake though, when I say ‘bloat’ I’m mostly nitpicking. Pop is a perfectly valid choice and a good option for gaming.
I’m also mostly interested in slightly older games like Rome Remastered, I probably won’t be playing many brand new titles.
Might try and get Age of Mythology working as well as I have so much nostalgia for it!
What kind of games are you into?
I love Age of Mythology! It might take a bit of tweaking to get working, but I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t on a Debian system. I’m on Gentoo, and I just had to swap around the proton version and force the correct resolution and now it works flawlessly.
mileage may vary if you’re looking at cutting edge games, as driver updates can significantly boost performance in that case.
If you’re playing games in Steam, Flatpak, or any other tool that provides its own runtime, the graphics driver updates that tend to affect performance (e.g. Mesa) don’t come from your base distro.
(Unless maybe you have an Nvidia GPU and a distro that packages its proprietary drivers? I’m not sure in that case, since I quit Nvidia years ago.)
+1 for Pop!_OS
Using it (as my first real use of Linux) a few months now, and I have yet to find a game that doesn’t work.
Turned away from mint/Ubuntu because they definitely pre installed more. There are almost no included installs that I don’t use on Pop, very clean.
It’s also a frequently updated “stable” release- it gets kernel/driver/more updates every 2 weeks or so. They should really add the update# to the iso, because “22.04” alone makes it sound old.
I have 3 running Pop, soon to be 4. ( Try to switch kids over)
Any reason why I shouldn’t just go with Debian + KDE and install Steam?
No reason to avoid Debian unless you have hardware so very new that it requires the very latest kernel to operate.
If you go with Debian Stable, you can enable Backports for a fairly recent kernel, currently 6.5.10. You could go with Testing or even Unstable if you’re addicted to upgrading as often as possible, but chances are you won’t need to.
I’m gaming on Debian Stable with Steam in a flatpak. It works great, and is blissfully low maintenance.
At some point, you’ll probably run into people claiming that Debian is bad for gaming performance because of “outdated” packages. In most cases, those people don’t know what they’re talking about. I suggest ignoring them unless they identify a specific performance issue that actually affects you.
Debian is usually very stable, which means drivers and kernel versions will be outdated in comparison with other distros, which can make you lose possible performance. To be fair I wouldn’t worry too much about this though since I don’t expect the performance to be significantly different, but it’s something to take into consideration.
Don’t be afraid of trying a different distro, RedHat or Arch based for example, just make / and /home different partitions and you should be able to install over your root without affecting your home so it makes it easier to switch system if you want to.
I haven’t chosen cutting edge hardware (AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT) so I don’t think drivers should be an issue in my particular case.
I think separating /home is a good idea so I can try some different distros and compare.
From your other comments you seem to have a system simmilar to mine. I use mint, and i’m very happy with it, feature rich and ubuntu based, without the features you dislike like snap.
Only real step requirs for gaming has been installing some overclocking and heat management stuff like corecntrl, as well as some 32 bit archetecture stuff to run steam.
I’ll second Mint, though I haven’t done much gaming on it. Before switching all my stuff over to Mint, I did have xubuntu/steam running pretty well for most games I tried up through Doom 2016 (can’t remember if I tried eternal) so I can’t imagine mint being much worse. As far as gaming specific stuff goes it’s got a pretty decent driver manager and time shift preinstalled for when said driver manager breaks things.
I’ll second Mint as well. I play mostly small indie games but have played Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 5, and Terminator: Resistance with no problems. The worst I’ve experienced is having to tell Steam to use a different version of Proton for some games (I recently had trouble launching Cyberpunk on Proton Experimental so I downgraded to the next most recent and it worked fine). I also have an AMD GPU so no driver mess.
debian is good as is, without flat/snap/fart things. If you are used to it then stick with it and you’ll be happy and productive in everything you do, backed by a solid maintained os release process.
