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?
I would recommend Nobara, Bazzite or PopOS for gaming; My personal experience with Debian is that it’s a great OS, but the focus lies less on cutting edge features or support of the latest hardware, and more on stability over everything else, and the desktop environment is more of an convenience feature - Debian is very happy as a headless server. If you want an OS with record setting uptimes, pick Debian; but for gaming you want to be on the cutting edge, and that’s simply not the case with Debian.
Opensuse Tumbleweed. You get the drivers, it’s stable, and the one time it isn’t you just roll back to the prior snapshot in the boot menu that it takes automatically. Steam runs great on it. Honestly about the best there is.
First of all, no, youre not a noob, the corrent Name for people who contradict their own statements in less than 2 minutes of reading their Text (first you say you run Debian, them you say you are running Mint, which are completely different distros), is A stupid dummy dummy dumb dumb. (Seriously, .ml mods, you either let me say the R word, or you insta block such braindead clumps of biomass)
Second, LMDE still has newer packaged than vanilla Debian, afaik
Third, did you not take a single look at debians Home page, before installing something you yourself call Debian? It literally States that it is a „Stable OS”.
Fourth, if you dont want to overwork your single braincell, just use flatpaks. They already have their own drivers in their Sandbox, so you should be fine.
You use Arch, btw.
Asking the others, since I don’t think you are up for a conversation with me: is it a wild guess to imagine that the high chance to receive this kind of comments is the reason why Linux doesn’t have a wider penetration on the consumer market?
I know the alternative of a call center slave from India for Microsoft is not exactly the most appealing, but anything is better than this, in my opinion.
I am in since a few months, as stated in one of the comments, and it is already the 4th or 5th time I get someone responding in this way.
For the most part its because most people who are in such Forums know way more about Linux than the Indian call center, and would much more like to think about real questions, such as actual comparisons between software and specific appliances.
The Questions you are asking had already been answered hundreds of times in other threads. There are whole megathreads about these Questions.
People have thrown hundreds of hours into writing Wiki pages so you can choose what distribution is for you based on literal essays, if not even longer, detailing the exact philosophy of every distribution, what it is for, what it isn’t for, and what to expect from it.
Yet you choose to disregard those works from people, instead deciding to ask for yet another Tl;Dr, because you just can’t be bothered to type your Question into searXng or Reddit or Kagi or even frickin’ ChatGPT, which would all be able to answer it.
No, not even that. You can’t even be bothered to do the bare minimum and offer actual information to the people trying to help you in their free time, making them have to painfully dig through your pile of horsecrap until they even understand what it is you want help with.
I’ll just use AI next jfc, talk to a therapist.
You can use the sgfxi installation script to get up to date drivers. :P
Thanks for the suggestion.
I just tried following the tutorial and… it only made me more proficient at using Timeshift.
To be exact, it prompted me to create a xorg.conf file, which apparently is not in my system. I accepted and it brought me to a black screen with a black screen that remained there for 5 minutes. I force rebooted the machine and it failed to launch lightdm.service.
So USB, Timeshift and back we are.
I am afraid I am not at your level yet. Been stable on Linux since only a few months.
Thanks again though, at least I know it exists.
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.
Just remember to check archlinux.org before system updates.
Stable doesn’t mean “won’t crash”, or that there’s any guarantee that there are less problems. It just means that there won’t be any big changes during the distro’s lifecycle.
That might mean it crashes less since you won’t see much in terms of new features, or it might mean you have to live with a very annoying bug for a few years because the package maintainers didn’t want to back port the fix for whatever reason.
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.
Isn’t Debian the FOSS-only one? Or am I misremembering?
I’m sure one can have their install that way but mine isn’t.
I’m gaming perfectly fine on my Debian machine. Only one single time in years I had a problem with some custom tailored script from someone that linked as minimum a dependency that was newer than the version served in apt
This. My main rig runs arch and I do my heavy gaming there, but for travel I have a laptop running Debian, it has no problem running Steam and games via Proton. I’ve also done some light coding, even a bit of 3D modeling. It’s not basic, it’s bulletproof.
I’d recommend Fedora if you want stable and modern hardware support.
Isn’t Bazzite based on Fedora?
It is, and it’s amazing for gaming
Honestly I think the utility beyond gaming is totally undersold:
- automatic background updates ( system and flatpaks)
- ujust singular commands for common tasks
- All of what really should be mandatory software out of the box, including some huge QoL extensions
- Bazaar package manager
It really fixes a lot of Linux’s shortcomings, in my opinion.
Yes, I believe so.
yeah but you install your software via cringepak (bloat) or shitty rpm-ostree and nothing is as well documented vs traditional distros
That should be fine since I am planning to put it in its own partition and maybe disk, isolated from my main driver that would be Vanilla Mint, no?
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 you want newer stuff the non-stable branches of Debian are perfectly usable.
Testing (the upcoming release) should be your first stop. But even Unstable works just as well as most other distros. There might be the occasional issue, but anything serious is generally fixed quickly.
Debian stable is intended for use cases where an update must never change anything that could cause any problem. For the average desktop it’s perfectly fine to have things change or to be mildly inconvenienced every now and then.
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
what is the story on that domain why does it lead to a gambling site now
Think StackExchange, but a Debian-centered forum instead. And I didn’t expect the link to appear, as I didn’t give it an explicit https://www/. In the comment. For others, do not click that link. The site’s long dead.
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!
Pika… pika pi!
Pika… PikaOS?
Pika pi, pi ka, pi chyuu, pika ¡pi! pika chyuu.
Pika pika pi chyu chyu pika pi?
Translation:
Hey! If you like Debian, but want something a bit more cutting edge…
Have you heard of PikaOS?
Roughly, PikaOS is to Debian as Nobara is to Fedora.
Also, I am hungry, can you spare an onigiri?
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.
Yours is the first comment in this thread that didn’t make me want to simultaneously upvote and downvote.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
You should clarify that the roll back takes two seconds and the two days was the wait to upgrade again :D I do love Tumbleweed.
Fuck, you are right. It could be understood in that way.
