I’ve ordered myself some parts to build a PC for Linux gaming. In the meantime, i’m deciding on which linux distro to use.

For the desktop environment I typically use KDE.

I have used Ubuntu in the past but i’m ruling it out because of snaps and other such annoyances. This also applies to Ubuntu based distros that use the same repos (KDE Neon etc).

I see the wikis recommend Nobara, but I’m reluctant to use a Fedora based distro because I’m so used to Debian/apt (both as a desktop and server distros). I’m not ruling it out completely though.

Any reason why I shouldn’t just go with Debian + KDE and install Steam? Will I be missing out on lots of performance improvements or is this easily addressed by using an additional repo for a tweaked kernel and proton version or whatever?

  • onoEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    mileage may vary if you’re looking at cutting edge games, as driver updates can significantly boost performance in that case.

    If you’re playing games in Steam, Flatpak, or any other tool that provides its own runtime, the graphics driver updates that tend to affect performance (e.g. Mesa) don’t come from your base distro.

    (Unless maybe you have an Nvidia GPU and a distro that packages its proprietary drivers? I’m not sure in that case, since I quit Nvidia years ago.)