I agree with your sentiment, but I disagree with your conclusion of using any major distro. If you’ve ever had to fix a corrupted package manager database caused by an in-place distro upgrade or had to install third-party package repositories to get access to up-to-date software, you’ll understand where I’m coming from.
Beginners should start with something that either has bells and whistles included for out-of-the-box gaming, or comes with an easy way to un-fuck itself when you end up breaking something. It doesn’t need to be Nix, but it probably shouldn’t be Debian (which has a slow release cadence) or Ubuntu (because fuck Canonical and their “my way or the highway” approach to doing desktop OSes).
Debian is totally fine, why do you need a rapid update cycle? Everything you need is packaged with Steam. If for some reason you need something newer, you can always use whatever release is in testing at the time (use that release name, not “testing” itself) and you’ll get newer packages with minimal risk of stability issues (a lot of people run testing).
There’s really nothing special about newer packages for gaming. Once it’s working, Debian will keep it that way.
I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed because I like newer packages for other reasons (I use it for software development) and hate release upgrades because they take forever, but tons of people use stable distros without issue.
If you want some bells and whistles out of the box, I hear Bazzite is good. But any distro will work fine with Steam, and I’d assume Heroic and other launchers should also work fine on any distro they’re packaged for.
Also, kernel upgrades. Unless the user knows about and specifically opts to use Debian backports, they’re going to be on the same kernel version until the next stable Debian release. It’s not the end of the world to leave performance on the table, but some people are picky about getting their money out of their hardware.
Using backports and upgrading to a newer kernel is fine for someone familiar with Linux and confident enough to tinker and make at-your-own-risk changes. Having to do that can be offputting for newcomers, coming across as intimidating or unnecessarily complicated.
A newer kernel does not automatically offer more performance. In fact it could be the opposite if it includes workarounds for Intel’s latest CPU security fuck-ups.
It’s not so much the lack of a rapid update cycle as much as it’s the pinned kernel version alongside the years-long pace of Debian’s stable upgrade cycle.
That would be fine if the kernel didn’t see much improvement over ~2 years of development, but there’s constantly new stuff being added or optimized with every kernel release. It’s just not much of a friendly introduction to Linux gaming for a newcomer to either have to pick between missing out on recent improvements, or diving into the intimidating realm of fiddling with packages and backported kernels—especially if they’re not coming from a tech savvy background.
Most Linux users, including gamers, don’t really benefit from improvements to Linux since most of it is drivers for hardware they don’t have. Most userland software can be installed via flatpak or PPA (or other form of additional repository for your distro) if you really need something newer. But my understanding is that people (esp gamers) get annoyed more by stuff changing than missing out on new stuff.
The whole point of recommending a stable distro is to give the best chance of the person finding the help they need, as well as things not breaking randomly, and you get that with stable release distros. If the user knows enough to disregard that, they know what distro would be a better fit anyway.
I see your point, but i don’t really agree that it doesn’t benefit gamers. In the 10 versions of kernels released since Bullseye released, we’ve seen improvements like the EEVDF allocator, sched_ext, the beginnings of ntsync, and an optimization to MDS mitigations for Intel processors. In a gaming-oriented distro, these would (ideally) be configured out of the box for the best gaming experience. Using a stable LTS distro, in contrast, would require manual tweaking and experimentation to achieve the same result.
But my understanding is that people (esp gamers) get annoyed more by stuff changing than missing out on new stuff.
They get annoyed when stuff visibly changes, like the desktop UI, userspace GUI programs, or noticable performance regressions.
Anecdotally, I have rarely seen the typical gamer complaining about or even noticing when something changes in technical stuff that they aren’t directly interacting with. Nintendo actually does a good job creating situations where you can observe that behavior, funnily enough. When they release a new console with a different UI, non-casual gamers vocally bitch about it being worse than the previous generation. But when it comes to updates, the complaints are pretty much all about how it only changes the bad word list, doesn’t have x in 2024, or how every update is just more “stability.” Meanwhile, they have successfully done major rewrites and changes behind the scenes without anyone but the CFW and modding scene actually noticing it.
The whole point of recommending a stable distro is to give the best chance of the person finding the help they need, as well as things not breaking randomly, and you get that with stable release distros.
I agree that a stable distro will be more stable, but I don’t agree that a stable distro is the best chance to get them help as a gaming newcomer. For newcomers in general, sure. But for gaming, it would be better to direct them towards a distro primarily focused on gaming, where they’ll have a likeminded community. A popular stable distro will have more community resources available overall, but most of that is just going to end up becoming noise that makes it harder for them to find a solution for game-related problems.
I highly recommend not using SteamOS on your PC, unless it’s literally used as a console. Use any major distro instead.
I agree with your sentiment, but I disagree with your conclusion of using any major distro. If you’ve ever had to fix a corrupted package manager database caused by an in-place distro upgrade or had to install third-party package repositories to get access to up-to-date software, you’ll understand where I’m coming from.
Beginners should start with something that either has bells and whistles included for out-of-the-box gaming, or comes with an easy way to un-fuck itself when you end up breaking something. It doesn’t need to be Nix, but it probably shouldn’t be Debian (which has a slow release cadence) or Ubuntu (because fuck Canonical and their “my way or the highway” approach to doing desktop OSes).
Debian is totally fine, why do you need a rapid update cycle? Everything you need is packaged with Steam. If for some reason you need something newer, you can always use whatever release is in testing at the time (use that release name, not “testing” itself) and you’ll get newer packages with minimal risk of stability issues (a lot of people run testing).
There’s really nothing special about newer packages for gaming. Once it’s working, Debian will keep it that way.
I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed because I like newer packages for other reasons (I use it for software development) and hate release upgrades because they take forever, but tons of people use stable distros without issue.
If you want some bells and whistles out of the box, I hear Bazzite is good. But any distro will work fine with Steam, and I’d assume Heroic and other launchers should also work fine on any distro they’re packaged for.
Drivers can be an issue with recent hardware on Debian due to said slow release cadence. May not work as well on recent hardware.
In that specific case, yeah, maybe try a different distro. SteamOS will still be a worse option since Valve doesn’t have any published update cadence.
But still stick to a major distro, like Fedora or Linux Mint. It’s unlikely you’ll actually run into issues on Debian though…
Also, kernel upgrades. Unless the user knows about and specifically opts to use Debian backports, they’re going to be on the same kernel version until the next stable Debian release. It’s not the end of the world to leave performance on the table, but some people are picky about getting their money out of their hardware.
Using backports and upgrading to a newer kernel is fine for someone familiar with Linux and confident enough to tinker and make at-your-own-risk changes. Having to do that can be offputting for newcomers, coming across as intimidating or unnecessarily complicated.
A newer kernel does not automatically offer more performance. In fact it could be the opposite if it includes workarounds for Intel’s latest CPU security fuck-ups.
It’s not so much the lack of a rapid update cycle as much as it’s the pinned kernel version alongside the years-long pace of Debian’s stable upgrade cycle.
That would be fine if the kernel didn’t see much improvement over ~2 years of development, but there’s constantly new stuff being added or optimized with every kernel release. It’s just not much of a friendly introduction to Linux gaming for a newcomer to either have to pick between missing out on recent improvements, or diving into the intimidating realm of fiddling with packages and backported kernels—especially if they’re not coming from a tech savvy background.
Most Linux users, including gamers, don’t really benefit from improvements to Linux since most of it is drivers for hardware they don’t have. Most userland software can be installed via flatpak or PPA (or other form of additional repository for your distro) if you really need something newer. But my understanding is that people (esp gamers) get annoyed more by stuff changing than missing out on new stuff.
The whole point of recommending a stable distro is to give the best chance of the person finding the help they need, as well as things not breaking randomly, and you get that with stable release distros. If the user knows enough to disregard that, they know what distro would be a better fit anyway.
I see your point, but i don’t really agree that it doesn’t benefit gamers. In the 10 versions of kernels released since Bullseye released, we’ve seen improvements like the EEVDF allocator, sched_ext, the beginnings of ntsync, and an optimization to MDS mitigations for Intel processors. In a gaming-oriented distro, these would (ideally) be configured out of the box for the best gaming experience. Using a stable LTS distro, in contrast, would require manual tweaking and experimentation to achieve the same result.
They get annoyed when stuff visibly changes, like the desktop UI, userspace GUI programs, or noticable performance regressions.
Anecdotally, I have rarely seen the typical gamer complaining about or even noticing when something changes in technical stuff that they aren’t directly interacting with. Nintendo actually does a good job creating situations where you can observe that behavior, funnily enough. When they release a new console with a different UI, non-casual gamers vocally bitch about it being worse than the previous generation. But when it comes to updates, the complaints are pretty much all about how it only changes the bad word list, doesn’t have x in 2024, or how every update is just more “stability.” Meanwhile, they have successfully done major rewrites and changes behind the scenes without anyone but the CFW and modding scene actually noticing it.
I agree that a stable distro will be more stable, but I don’t agree that a stable distro is the best chance to get them help as a gaming newcomer. For newcomers in general, sure. But for gaming, it would be better to direct them towards a distro primarily focused on gaming, where they’ll have a likeminded community. A popular stable distro will have more community resources available overall, but most of that is just going to end up becoming noise that makes it harder for them to find a solution for game-related problems.