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??
I don’t use Sid, but testing, it’s working almost flawlessly. Each release (once every 2 years, I guess), I take few hours to check everything work; remove shader cache, etc.
My setup, right now (dirty, for authenticity) :
$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free non-free-firmware deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free non-free-firmware deb https://security.debian.org/debian-security/ testing-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware deb-src https://security.debian.org/debian-security/ testing-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware # bullseye-updates, to get updates before a point release is made; # see https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch02.en.html#_updates_and_backports deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware # add by me deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/* deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:/darktable/Debian_Testing/ / deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/lutris.gpg] https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/strycore/Debian_Testing/ ./ # Uncomment these lines to try the beta version of the Steam launcher #deb [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam #deb-src [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam deb [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam deb-src [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam # Uncomment these lines to try the beta version of the Steam launcher # deb [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam # deb-src [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam deb [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam deb-src [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam deb [ signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium-archive-keyring.gpg ] https://download.vscodium.com/debs/ vscodium mainI play a lot, we just played Grounded with friend yesterday.
Hope this helps.
Instead of relying on testing directly, consider using named releases (in this case, trixie for testing). Then stay on the official release for a couple months as testing stabilizes and then go to the next testing release.
I did that in the past and it worked really well. Testing gets a lot of churn right after a release as packages get rapidly upgraded, so I find it’s usually better to wait a bit.
When you say “check everything works” what do you mean?
Testing goes stabler and stabler with time. Then testing move to release and the previous untesting (sid) move to testing. It’s a that moment that you can have surprise. This is the moment where I often wait one month or two, apply the updates and check my os is working as before, meaning running my day to day applications and game and see if things work. The only problem I had once was shader cache. I removed few things in .cache and I was good.