Well I’m hopping around… again. I thought I had a good stable setup going but then something happens upstream that goes against what I want/believe in (looking at you RedHat) and I’m back on the hunt again.
I thought about trying out a Debian based distro but then I thought “why don’t I just use Debian itself (Sid, not stable/Bookworm)”.
Most if not all gaming software have a way to be installed on Debian so I don’t think that could be an issue.
Is anyone else using Sid? Am I missing something by not going with a gaming focused distro??
Okay, on this thread alone a lot of people are suggesting to go stable (including yourself) so now I’m thinking you guys must know something I don’t. Truthfully, I only really need a few things for the games that I run like a recent kernel (XanMod maybe?) Wine staging, steam, nvidia drivers, lutris, bottles and proton (through ProtonUp-Qt). As long as I can run those things on recent versions, I think going stable would be fine too.
The advent of Flatpaks have really made Debian Stable into a serious contender for desktop Linux, and Debian 12 is a remarkably good release even by Debian’s standards. Bookworm has received a lot of praise since its release, and I think people (like myself) are starting to reconsider what a desktop Linux can look like.
It does take a little bit of extra setup to get more cutting-edge stuff for the applications you use most often, but after sourcing everything and stuffing all the individual updating mechanisms into an update script, you’ll get the best of both worlds - stable base and rolling user applications. If nothing else you should try Stable first before resorting to Sid - you may be inheriting Sid’s volatility without a proper usecase. If you don’t run Debian Stable or Debian Sid/Arch Linux, you’ll probably want to go somewhere in the middle like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which is cutting-edge with extensive testing baked-in.
I’m going to give stable a try and see how far I get with gaming and go from there. I’ve never run straight Debian as a desktop it’s always been on servers so my experience there is limited.
I’m curious as to the update script you are talking about. Care to point me to an example? Wouldn’t flatpak update do the trick for everything running in flatpaks? And apt update/upgrade for the rest?
Yeah exactly. An update script just runs all these updates in a single command
this is what mine looks like (apparently lemmy does not like &&'s so take care with the
&bits):debupdate() { echo -e "##======================== Nala upgrades ============================##" sudo deb-get update 1> /dev/null # fetch deb-get repos ahead of time just for timing purposes sudo nala upgrade # nala is better than apt echo -e "##======================== Flatpak upgrades =========================##" flatpak update echo -e "##======================== deb-get upgrades =========================##" sudo deb-get upgrade echo -e "##======================== Rust upgrades ============================##" export CARGO_PROFILE_RELEASE_LTO=true export RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" rustup update && \ cargo install-update -a # this is a custom cargo package: https://crates.io/crates/cargo-update - take care as this doesn't inherently recompile with the same flags you originally installed with echo -e "##======================== Homebrew upgrades ========================##" brew update && \ brew upgrade echo -e "##======================== yt-dlp upgrades ==========================##" # I let yt-dlp manage itself $HOME/Applications/yt-dlp/yt-dlp -U echo -e "##======================== Antidote upgrades ========================##" # antidote is a zsh plugin manager antidote update sudo -u root zsh -ci 'antidote update' echo -e "##======================== Upgrades Finished ========================##" }Ah okay fair enough! Thanks for sticking to the conversation. I will rebase everything to stable and goes that a try for awhile!