I have a dual-boot Windows partition just for games and I keep using it less and less. Valve has done incredible work with Proton. It has been months since I have booted into Windows, and that’s with a weekly games night where we are generally trying something new every week.
They could have talked about how also flatpak gives access to other games and emulators or even steam if you are so inclined
Are there distros that are actually unsuitable for gaming, besides ones that are designed to be CLI-only or specific to antediluvian hardware?
I feel like gaming-specific distros just include stuff that you could otherwise just manually add to any other distro and make it suitable.
Depends on what you want to play. If you want to play current games with current hardware then current kernel and drivers help a lot. A base Debian would (if it even works) probably less FPS than an current gaming distro.
A base Debian would (if it even works) probably less FPS than an current gaming distro.
Can you please elaborate on why? I’m running Debian stable with NVIDIA drivers and… it “just works”. I’m using Steam to get Proton and game content (e.g. was playing Elden Ring minutes ago). I didn’t tinker much so wondering what I could be missing.
Throw a distro like Nobara or Bazzite on and see what you get. You might have it optimized quite well, but chances are that the kernel version is far enough behind that many of the graphics tweaks aren’t compatible. nVidia open drivers have come a long way in a very short time, and they rely on newer kernels.
You should just be able to shrink a partition and dual boot between distros, or put another drive in and use that.
Presumably because things like Mesa and video drivers would be somewhat out of date
Drivers are 535 on stable, cf https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers so it’s definitely not the very latest yet even though drivers are important I doubt (and please share benchmarks if I’m way off) there is a radical performance difference.
Oh I’m not advocating that you switch distributions. If you’re happy with performance there’s no reason to change.
The only thing that gives me pause with outdated drivers is the possibility of being exposed to unpatched security vulnerabilities. But in my experience Debian does provide updates when it’s critical.
I will say there is something to be said for out of the box experience. Im on zorin mainly because it has a lot out of the box. Granted its not a great gaming one necessarily as it is stability focused over bleeding edge but I could see ones where the gaming elements are ready right after install as being desirable.
Agreed, I’ve been running gaming-focused distros mostly because of the convenience of everything being ready and set up, but I’ve never had any issues on a non-gaming distro to set it up for gaming either.
