I have just watched this video and in it 2 things are said that made my Linux newbie heart sink:
- Debian 13 is not going to get the latest versions of Nvidia drivers and there are better distros for us.
- Debian in general is not meant to run on the latest hardware.
I am on a regularly upgraded desktop tower gaming PC and currently I have an Nvidia card and an Intel CPU (which, I know, even just because of the mobo chipset is not a great choice).
In this conditions and wanting to invest even more in gaming and new hardware in the future, what should I run on, instead of LMDE 6?
Debian is what you put on your grandma’s Facebook machine
To put it in a less elitist way: you can put it on a family PC for light entertainment or for things like homework for kids
To be perfectly clear: most people use their PC as a glorified Facebook machine.
(it also doesn’t have to be Facebook but the concept is the same)
Debian is what you put on a system you want to work forever with minimal maintenance. Whether that be your Grandma’s computer or my headless server.
If you want something stable but up-to-date, Fedora is a very good option. Plus it has a bunch of “Spins”. The two main ones are Gnome and KDE Plasma, but there is a bunch more, and they’re all officially supported.
Then there’s also Arch. Arch should not be considered stable, but anecdotally I’ve not heard many problems with it in the past few years, so you’d probably be fine. I’d go with EndeavourOS or CatchyOS if you want Arch without the tedious setup process.
I like endeavoros. I can’t say how well it is for gaming, aside from installing steam and playing a few games…
It’s pretty simple. Endeavor has their own easy update script.
Cachyos, its popular for a reason, the wiki is really helpful, and the goal is to quickly get you setup for gaming with the correct drivers
And you mention needing up to date drivers, its arch, easy to setup btrfs/snapshot support (parititon using btrfs, its one click on the post install menu) so you can rollback when stuff goes wrong Select limine bootloader if you go this route, its the easiest for snapshots imo
I’d recommend Fedora if you want stable and modern hardware support.
Isn’t Bazzite based on Fedora?
If you’re currently running on LMDE and are enjoying it, why not just switch to the “vanilla” non-debian Mint? It should be similar enough to what you’re used to, but with more up to date software.
Reading all the comments, I think I will do that since I want to stay on the same experience. Then maybe I will have another drive in the future to test Bazzite or CachyOs on.
Try any suse favours, it will surprise you.
I am on the rolling distro (tumbleweed) and it is surprisingly stable, the only time it broke was because of a new Nvidia driver release. But it came with a rollback feature and 2 daya later everything was fixed.
Honestly, just because you can not use debian shouldn’t be any major problem in a modern pc
Debian does not get the latest versions of anything. It is designed for, above all, stability, which means changes to the stable branch are greatly delayed while testing is completed.
You can always choose not to use the stable branch.
Debian in general is not meant to run on the latest hardware.
When I see someone on social media claiming Debian is unsuitable for gaming, I know immediately that they don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ve been gaming on different distros since before Steam ran on Linux at all, and on Debian Stable for nearly a decade. This includes my current system, which was built a few months after the GPU was released.
In general, Debian can run just fine on new (Linux-compatible) hardware. If you’re talking about Debian Stable and hardware that was released less than a year ago, then you might have to pull in a newer kernel and/or firmware, but it’s not hard. In most cases, it’s as simple as enabling Debian’s Backports repository and installing the couple of new packages that you need. (You might not even have to do that, since Flatpak and Steam provide updates to much of what games need, but it would be wise to remember Backports anyway just in case you need them some day.)
The main thing to consider is that it’s not completely effortless. It will probably require a little more setup than a game-focused distro would, so if you’re considering Debian for a gaming system, you should know why you want it. For example, maybe you want a very low-maintenance system once it’s up and running. Or maybe Debian’s focus on Free software appeals to you. In such cases, a few extra steps when getting started might be worthwhile. But if you don’t have a specific need that Debian fills, then another distro might be more convenient.
Debian 13 is not going to get the latest versions of Nvidia drivers and there are better distros for us.
I don’t know if that’s true or not. Nvidia has a well-deserved reputation for making their hardware painful on Linux, and although the situation is less bad today than it once was, it’s still not great. If you’re determined to stick with them, then sure, a distro that does the extra work of packaging all of Nvidia’s driver releases might be a better choice for you.
(For what it’s worth, I finally ditched Nvidia in favor of AMD GPUs, and have been very happy with the results.)
If gaming is your main goal. Bazzite or similar should likely be your first target. If you want a more desktop experience. I’d probably recommended vanilla mint. LMDE and Debian are great. But LMDE is a side project, that gets a bit less support and updates. And Debian is about stability over cutting edge anything.
Also worth noting that Debian’s definition of “stability” doesn’t mean “doesn’t crash” even in the slightest. It means “doesn’t change.” That means not changing broken software to be newer working software.
Any non-security bug that exists will stay because new software only ships for backported security updates. So if you have a crashing issue, Debian has no interest in fixing it until the next release. Unchanging is more important than working.
If you don’t have any crashes or bugs popping up, Debian is great, because it won’t introduce crashes or bugs. Nothing unexpected will happen.
By Debian’s definition, the Titanic is now VERY stable, unmoving at the bottom of the ocean.
This is not how Debian works … at … all.
Source: I’ve used it for 25 years.
Agreed. Pushing 20 years now myself. Miss debian-administration.com like Hell
I’ve been told plenty of times that when I had bugs that weren’t getting fixed that “stability means no unexpected changes, not uptime, compile the package yourself if you need it fixed.”
There are plenty of examples of upstream projects asking debian to not package their stuff because they get bug reports for things that were fixed months ago.
Debian does not ship bugfixes. Debian only ships security fixes.
If something works, it’s not going to break. But if something doesn’t work, it’s not going to unless you fix it yourself by going outside of the official packages.
That’s bollocks. Bookworm has received 11 point release updates, and they were definitely not only security updates. Read through the the 12.1 release notes, for example. “Fix playing of custom alarm sounds” does not sound like a security fix, nor a severe issue.
Security updates are released frequently, often just days apart, to individual packages. https://www.debian.org/security/
Point release updates (12.1, 12.2, up to 12.11) are released several months apart. They are thoroughly tested and verified to work together.
Ok? “You only have to wait a few months for this crash to be resolved.” still doesn’t resolve people’s issues.
“Fix playing of custom alarm sounds” doesn’t sound like a severe issue to you, but it was also something that if someone needed, they were forced to wait a few months.
Debian would rather have broken custom alarm sounds for several months, even if it was fixed earlier. Fixing a bug to me lands closer to a security issue than “shipping bleeding edge feature sets”.
It ultimately means if something you need is broken for a non-security reason, it is not being fixed until the next point release. There is a fixed unit of time in which you know your problem will not be resolved.
Packages are individually updated for security fixes. Individual packages are NOT updated for bugfixes.
Did Debian hurt you or something? You’re just raging for the sake of rage.
I’ve also used Debian on my computer for decades and rarely did any application crash. It’s just not a thing. Well… I had FreeCAD crash regularly. But it did that for years and on any distribution. Other than that I did stuff on Debian all day every day and it was just fine.
I’m not raging and I’m not even saying that Debian is bad. I’ve just been told MANY times over the years (including on Lemmy), when I’ve commented about bugs and issues I’ve had on Debian, that stability doesn’t mean “without bugs, always upright” it means “not moving, not changing.”
Debian has a very specific use case. And when people say Debian is stable they mean the base platform isn’t going to change under you and suddenly a config file doesn’t work anymore because Package v2.0 uses a different format.
This is good for people who want a low maintenance system that won’t unexpectedly break due to a random Windows update.
This is good for probably the vast majority of people that fall under “normal” computing habits. If there was a major groundbreaking bug that affected everyone, it probably would have been caught in testing.
This is not good for people who have quirky computing needs or otherwise do things in slightly niche ways, IF a bug shows up. Some bugs are minor annoyances, some require different workflows to get around.
But ultimately, people should know that if they are experiencing an issue with Debian, and it’s not just a configuration issue, they either need to have a solution for themselves (recompiling), or switch distros.
I personally stopped using Debian for my desktop around linux 3.16 days, but I do still use it for my home servers (where I don’t want to be updating things constantly). If Debian works as a desktop platform for you, that’s awesome.
But OP was having issues with Debian. So OP should know that due to Debian’s unchanging nature, it will be quite a while before things start working. And they shouldn’t expect otherwise. And that’s ok, their use case is going to just be a bit more bleeding edge.
Debian is awesome. For servers. For desktop I would use something else that pushes updates more frequently.
My personal opinion ofcourse, use what you like!
Yours is the first comment in this thread that didn’t make me want to simultaneously upvote and downvote.
I have to agree, rolling release distributions are the greatest recent development in desktop linux because they make the surface area for updates small (fewer packages more frequently, so if something breaks you have fewer places to look). Immutable distros make reverting a bad update foolproof.
I ran bazzite for a while but then my work changed their VPN endpoints to use oauth, which didn’t work on the openvpn2 version available. I switched back to Fedora (which updates pretty frequently, just not constantly) so I could install and use openvpn3. I’m sure I could have figured out a way to get it running by patching it into ostree, but that felt a bit like breaking the rules.
Debian is the underpinning for all of my homelab gear.
Regardsless what distro you end up with, do your research before bying new hardware. Any hardware, such as keyboard, usb bluetooth adapter or gaming audio headset might be unsupported or supported poorly, and require out-of-kernel drivers, firmware or propietary vendor software, that work only with some kernel versions or certain distros. There often are options that have great linux support and work with any distro, but you’ll need to find them.
Pick your prefered update interval between LTS, 6 month point release or rolling based on how much time you have for administration. If you need you PC also for work, a rolling distro might break just when you need it the most. After choosing the update interval, pick the distro with chosen update interval you like the most. Say you know and like Debian but need a rolling distro, then Debian unstable might be a good choice for you. You can also run multiple distros and dual-boot.
Special purpose distros such as gaming distros can be a good choice, but they often have less developer resources and tend to die then the few developers lose their interest.
Regardless of your choice of distro, spend some time to configure regular backups.
a rolling distro might break just when you need it the most
Only if you run an update! It’s not random. I only update once every two weeks or so when I know I have time to fix problems if they arise. Easy peesy. Honestly it’s safer than Windows in that sense because Windows pushes updates on you and a broken Windows update did out me in a boot loop, post COVID even.
It’s not a bad piece of advice, rolling is still the least stable, but there are better ways to phrase it.
That works until there is a critical security issue which doesn’t care about your free time, but needs an update right now, and you might not be able to only apply the security fix, because your rolling distro gallops ahead in package version numbers.
Give me older, but stable and boring over that any day. :)
I’ve been running Gentoo and Arch on my primary desktop PC for years back when I was a student and had oodles of free time, but in past decade, Debian is what I need. Including what little gaming I do some evenings.
I ran mint (non debian) on older hardware for years and loved it mostly.
Upgraded everything in march and realised i needed newer kernel newer mesa. I could of installed from certain ppa’s but hey 12-13 years on one distro i fancied a change.
Kde took some learning (does one need all those settings) but hey functional hardware is the goal and the goal was met. Like graphics tablet i had to mess with modprobe and .sh files just works magnificently.
I can’t compare performance as 8 thread to 24 thread i do not see a fair comparison.
Leaving the comfort zone i think made me understand more about linux and that is very good.
The things I’ve been reading for years about Debian make me think most “linux” people really don’t know or understand what stable/unstable means.
I haven’t watched the video. I’ve used Debian as my operating system of choice for over 25 years.
Debian is intended to be Free, it goes to great lengths to achieve this. Many of the popular distributions are based on it as a result.
It has the option to use non-free components like firmware blobs and weird vendor encumbered video drivers.
In addition, Debian runs on a large collection of different hardware platforms and as such is supported across more devices than many other alternatives.
If you run bleeding edge hardware, you have the option of running bleeding edge software within the Debian framework. It comes in flavours: stable, testing and unstable specifically to cater to different requirements.
Pick what you need depending on your use case.
