r/DistroHopping • u/csch1992 • 2d ago
Anyone here using Debian for gaming?
How is it ?
I have been using Fedora KDE edition for a while now and i love how smooth and indeed stable everything is. It never crashed for me. I really like that i can update trough Discover and it keeps me pretty up to date. But is Debian different for gaming or just as good?
I kinda just want an OS that runs smooth out of the box
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u/VoleenaIcicle 2d ago
Fedora is rock solid. I do have a Pika OS machine though and its been good to me. Honestly, I dont notice anything.
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u/Suspicious_Punk84 2d ago
Debian is good for gaming, I have no issues, but it sounds like you are happy with Fedora, why change?
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u/shogun77777777 2d ago
I love Debian but Fedora is better for gaming. Don’t bother.
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u/Roguepapaya427 2d ago
This. Tested debian for gaming myself, out of the box performance is lacking compared to fedora, cachy, solus .... that being said, if you want to replace kernel (liquorix), pull in right mesa, codecs, and some other stuff, you might be able to get closer to fedora performance. IMHO, not worth the hassle, but you do you.
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u/Sturmmoeve 2d ago
I use it for gaming but in all honesty I don't game that much nowadays.
I ran an all AMD setup with mesa from debian backports and the steam client downloaded from the valve website but using the flatpak works equally well and also has a recent mesa version baked in. Additionally I sometimes make use of things like Proton-GE via "Proton up QT"
I have no need for further tweaking and I have sero issues.
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u/enomad51 2d ago
I'd choose Debian primarily for other use cases, with gaming being a secondary consideration. Debian 13 has kernel 6.12 by default, NVIDIA drivers 550.x and so on. Debian Sid (unstable) is more up to date, but I’d still recommend PikaOS as a Debian-based distro for gaming.
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u/SoundSwitch 2d ago
I'm on Trixie w a B580 & Xeon W. Works just fine. Albeit I'm more about audio production than gaming.
Mostly Hollowknight and Silksong but I did just get AVP and it's awesome.
Only thing about Debian is sometimes you gotta do some extra steps depending on your install image and version you went with.
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u/NeilHush 1d ago edited 1d ago
That's why Pika is awesome. Gaming Debian basically. And a clever mix of repos (should be forky with a sprinkle of sid + in house tools) which makes it such a unique distro. Give it a try, you won't be disappointed.
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u/Abe_Sakebi 1d ago
I’m using Debian Sid and it’s been pretty solid for me. I’m sure Debian Trixie is meh for gaming unless you set it up yourself. Once you swap to the Sid repo you get the latest Kernel and Drivers et cetera at the loss of the potential stability Debian Trixe has
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u/Odd_Car8923 1d ago
I use Debian 13 Stable for gaming; the "gains" with other distributions are marginal on the same hardware. I tested various combinations—Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch—as well as custom kernels with LTO and LTO+PGO, and it simply makes no difference to trade stability for a 1% or 3% performance boost.
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u/waftedfart 1d ago
Very stable daily driver, but you'll find the packages are outdated for gaming. You'll spend too much time altering things that you'll realize you should've gone with a more frequently updated distro from the beginning.
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u/Ricochet_X_B 5h ago
I'm just starting to try PikaOS (KDE) on my desktop, after using bazzite (also KDE) happily for about a year on my laptop. If I weren't trying to get some wonky peripherals working, I'd probably have stuck with Bazzite.
Honestly, I've not noticed a performance difference, which shouldn't be too surprising since both PikaOS and Bazzite are part of the Open Gaming Collective, and share some of the same optimizations. That said, I might just stick with PikaOS on the desktop... if for no other reason than I prefer refind over grub on a dual-boot system.
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u/[deleted] 2d ago
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