I’m ditching Ubuntu. Thinking of switching to Debian.
Has anyone used this, or something similar to set up their Debian gaming setup?
This got me thinking. Do I need to install anything special to Debian 13 to be able to play games? Or can I play them with a normal Debian out of the box?
I use PikaOS which is a Debian-derived gaming distro with newer drivers and gaming packages, run by some of the same folks involved in Nobara and sharing a lot of the common framework used for other major gaming distros. It is mostly indistinguishable from Debian, and I use it basically interchangeably. The main differences include the installer, the default background image, and some post-install helpers to install the latest drivers for various different graphics cards and many types of typical gaming software. Biggest downside is that support and community is through Discord, blech.
I’m quite concerned that it’s based on Debian sid of all things. Doesn’t it break once in a while?
I have been using PikaOS for over a year. It has broken twice for me. Once the latest wine package stopping launching games (downgraded wine to fix), and one time monitor not detecting correct edid (had to resort to display port for a while), but both of them got resolved eventually.
Not that I’ve noticed, but isn’t that part of the territory? Like do latest Nvidia graphics drivers not sometimes break on Windows? My experience is that they certainly do. If you want perfect tried and tested stability, you have to sacrifice the ability to run the latest games using the latest features. This is a tradeoff you have to make. Which would be better? I’d run stable on servers, and latest on desktop, which is… what we’re doing here, right?
Not all “latest” things are made equal.
There are distributions that are meant to be used in their bleeding edge form: Arch, Tumbleweed, you name it.
And then there are versions of distributions that are meant specifically for development and testing, like Debian sid.
If a new update breaks Arch in some way, everyone rushes to make a fix. If something breaks in sid…well, that’s normal part of its operation.
You should absolutely be expecting critical issues on sid and no one would necessarily rush to fix them. It’s not meant to actually be used like normal.
In my experience PikaOS devs fix any critical issues before they get to me. I have auto-updates on and haven’t seen a serious problem in the year+ I’ve been using it on multiple machines, YMMV.
Oh my god why would anyone base an OS on debian sid 🤢 not even testing?
Honestly, even testing has its issues. For one, security updates are not applied to Debian Testing in a timely manner. They first appear in Stable, and then in Testing.
Maybe people need to accept that sid and testing are made for developers, not end users.
Yes, know. That’s another good reason not to use it as base for your own distro.
Yeah I’ve seen it. Haven’t tried it though. The Gnome Desoto as default is a big turn off for me.
There is also a KDE default ISO, which is what I use, as well as Niri, Hyprland, and Cosmic. Pick whichever you prefer. Also Debian has a package manager that makes switching desktop environments literally a one-liner command of installing a single metapackage. I don’t know why people think this is such an obstacle.