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 really don’t want to use an Arch based system.
I’m worried about stability and security issues. I don’t mind using a distro with slightly older packages if it means I won’t have to troubleshoot anything or risk any vulnerabilities. That’s why I stuck with Ubuntu for so long.
Then just use Bazzite
Bazzite is immutable, though. I don’t have anything super weird and I’ve had to ostree half a dozen times on the first day.
I think Bazzite and other immutable ones like it are never a good “just use this” recommendation if you don’t have a good picture of their setup and its uses.
I’m sure the fact that it is immutable has a lot of stability and probably even performance benefits, but I don’t find them appropriate for much other than very static workstations or single-purpose rigs that are not expected to ever support random hardware or special purpose software.
They never mentioned no immutability. They wanted stable.
I’ve had zero issues, never had to ostree a single thing, its absolutely fine for daily use
If they’re asking about this script, they don’t know to even ask that question. The fact is that immutable distros pair best with fixed and very mainstream hardware, which we don’t know this guy has or not.
I think these types of discussion as are always a mess because it is difficult to gauge the user’s knowledge and needs based just on a single, often limited post, but I also think that many Linux distros are for a specific use case or set of use cases, such as the immutable ones.
I think it best serves the OPs of questions like this to ask them follow-up questions before recommending something like that, because they can be quite restricting. It is awesome you’ve never had to ostree, so you must be exactly the type of user that immutable distros are for, but please do understand that what they mean by immutable is “you can’t mess with the kernel at all without a performance impacting ostree”, so asking whether that is a dealbreaker is a good move.
I’m a long time Linux user since 2000 or 2001. Started on Mandrake lol. Used RedHat Linux in school too. Then moved to Ubuntu in 2004 and stuck around with them ever since.
I compiled my own Linux kernel to include specific modules for special features on my graphics card back then, like the RCA video input and output. Or for connecting to the internet on DSL. Man, I had a lot of free time back then.
I also worked at Xandros where I build the Linux OS for the Asus Eee PC. Those little 7in and 9in netbook laptops back in 2008.
So, I’m a little bit experienced lol.
I stand corrected!
I’m glad you’re famliliar with it. I am pretty new to Linux on the desktop (used it on work servers a lot but all shells), and I found a chorus of people hyping Bazzite then too. I tried it out and immediately crashed into the immutability thing.
Once I realized what the ostree was actually doing, I realized it was not ideal for my purposes. To my thinking, if you need to ostree at all, you may want to question your choice of distro. I guess a ton of people just never hook up or install anything at all weird!
If you keep it simple, it will not be an issue. I think cachyOS does it really good. That being said. Go with bazzite. It will give you the best Out of the Box experience. For me Debian based systems lack far too behind in feature updates for it be a viable Desktop OS (Don’t at me. It is my personal opinion lol). I remember waiting for a year for KeepassXC’s passkey update which made me switch to Fedora on my office laptop from pure Debian. Of course I could have used flatpak but it then didn’t integrate well with the browsers. Fedora and its derivatives are the perfect middle ground for your use.
Use Fedora KDE. It’s general purpose distro. Bazzite is more gaming oriented but IMO you should stay with conservative setup if you want hassle free experience.
Go with Bazzite. Stable or LTS distros are more insecure than rolling release, and Debian has a history of leaving vulnerable packages not updated (eg. Chromium).
Debian/Ubuntu use AppArmor for very minimal mandatory access control policies. Fedora (which Bazzite is based on) uses SELinux, which is better.
Bazzite is based on Fedora and is fairly stable.
In that case definitely would recommend PikaOS. I myself run Bazzite for my main gaming machine, but when I was considering making a gaming PC server I looked into it because it’s built on Debian and that has more stability and security for a server, and it seemed really great. It’s likely only improved more since then.