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Comment by kentonv

21 hours ago

Debian... mostly just because it's what I'm most familiar with. I don't have strong opinions on distros.

20 comments

kentonv

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argsnd  21 hours ago

I find that Fedora hits the right balance of stability while being up to date for anything desktop and specifically gaming focused, Debian has different priorities and packages can be a bit too old. And it’s less of a faff than Arch.

  • joe200  11 hours ago

    You are comparing Fedora with Debian stable. Everyone who wants to have Debian stability (and ecosystem) with the most new upstream software should go for Debian Testing (and don't be fooled by the name "testing" !). Debian Stable is for servers, Debian Testing is for desktops. Just try Debian Testing (and I used Slack, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian)

    • ahartmetz  11 hours ago

      This is from like 20 years ago, but I remember Debian Testing as the one where updates broke the system most frequently, or maybe the longest without fixes: Stable was stable, Sid / unstable was what most Debian developers were using... and Testing was the weird thing that was neither a release nor tested and fixed "live" by developers.

      What changed?

      3 replies →

    • luke5441  10 hours ago

      Debian testing is pretty much the worst option to choose. It can be as "unstable" as unstable, while being nearly as out-dated as a stable at points.

      If you want to help Debian test the next release and actually report issues choose Debian testing.

      3 replies →

  • eru  20 hours ago

    Archlinux can be a pretty good choice for gaming. Not necessarily because of anything Archlinux does: most distros can do anything, if you configure them.

    No, just because the Steamdeck's distro is built on Arch, and so you can piggyback on what they are doing.

    • OJFord  10 hours ago

      Arch is really in a sense the absence of a distro, but keeping a package manager with up to date packages. No bloat bundled, just install exactly what you want.

      I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too.

      That's nothing against Arch, it's what I use, I'm just saying really the only magic is in doing less.

  • kentonv  21 hours ago

    Eh, aside from GPU drivers -- which I download directly from nvidia anyway -- I don't feel like gaming is much affected by the distro packages being a couple years old. We pretty much just run Steam, Discord, and Chrome on these things, and those all have their own update schedule independent of the distro.

    • sznio  13 hours ago

      I'm hopeful that's been fixed by now, but when I switched to Linux a year ago I started with Debian, and had a lot of issues with input latency for games on Wayland. Switched to Fedora which was two KDE versions ahead and never had that issue again.

      1 reply →

LeoPanthera  21 hours ago

But you use it for games, right? So I figured you'd pick one based on how well it runs Steam. (And maybe for GPU drivers.)

  • kentonv  21 hours ago

    Steam supports Debian well.

    I download the nvidia drivers directly from nvidia. Their installer script is actually pretty decent and then I don't have to worry about whether the distro packages are up-to-date.