Title pretty much says it all. I’ve been using ubuntu as my daily driver for the last 5 years or so and honestly, I’ve had a wonderful experience with it.

That said, with the way things are going, I feel like its only a matter of time before Canonical pulls the rug out so I’d like to at least get my feet wet with something other than Ubuntu and Debian seems like the logical choice.

I mainly use my machines for gaming, self hosting, programming, and weird networking projects/automation testing.

I’ve heard gaming on debian isnt as ‘out of the box’ as it is with Ubuntu. So I’m hoping somone with more experience can share some tips on what I should be looking out for or point me to some good guides. Thanks yall.

EDIT: I fucking love this community. Thank you all for your replies. I appreciate you taking the time to help me out.

  • Nia [she/her]@lemmy.ml
    251·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been daily driving Debian and gaming on it for a while now on Steam, GOG, itch, and a few other game sources, it’s been really nice and smooth. You can use the Steam flatpak if you want to get a more up to date mesa package if you use an AMD gpu, but using the default steam from the non-free repos has been fine for me on one.

    As of Debian 12, non-free-firmware is enabled by default, so you no longer have to search for any specific iso to make sure all of your hardware works, it should enable the Nvidia driver on boot now if you use an nvidia gpu, and if it doesn’t it should at least be easier now. It’s much more out of the box than it was before ever since 12 released.

    To enable the non-free repo to install Steam from it if you don’t want to use flatpak, edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file to add the contrib and non-free repos. It should look like this when you’re done.

    deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free-firmware contrib non-free 
deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free-firmware contrib non-free 

deb https://security.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main non-free-firmware contrib non-free 
deb-src https://security.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main non-free-firmware contrib non-free

    Edit: If you ever want a newer kernel in the stable version without moving to testing or unstable, they occasionally backport newer kernel versions intended for stable. Just follow this guide, (running the commands with sudo), and change the word buster to bookworm (or whatever the name is for any future debian releases). There are no backported kernels available for Debian 12 at the time of writing this.

    • lazyraccoon@lemmy.ml
      11·
      1 year ago

      To add - if you liked PPAs, they don’t exist on Debian. You’ll need to add repositories as seen by Nia’s comment. To be honest, it’s something you get past easily and quickly.

      Embrace thine sources.list.d!

    • Yote.zip@pawb.socialEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      There are no backported kernels available for Debian 12 at the time of writing this

      Where are you looking? I see one here

    • Elise@beehaw.org
      2·
      1 year ago

      How did you get gog games to play? I tried game hub but it fails to install stuff.

      • Dubious_Fart@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Lutris can let you log into your GOG account and install games no issue.

        I dont know how it handles updates, but thats only an issue if you’re playing a new game, if you’re just playing old games like Arcanum, its no issue.

      • Nia [she/her]@lemmy.ml
        2·
        1 year ago

        Ah that’s true, I forgot to mention that. They periodically put out backported versions of the kernel to get a newer version on stable which is what I do, but that isn’t enabled by default or easy to find out if you aren’t looking for it, edited my comment to add that.

      • lazyraccoon@lemmy.ml
        1·
        1 year ago

        Could go rolling with sid, or get Xanmod kernel. I think there’s also some git-mesa repositories, but I’m less sure about the latter.