this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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Linux Gaming
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(Elaborating now that I'm not on mobile...)
Yes, I have, as well as developed and packaged software for both. And not just a little. Your comment about how release cycles work is patronizing, and your diatribe is misleading.
Debian Stable currently has kernel 6.5 for those who choose to install it. Not that it matters, because a higher kernel version number doesn't magically grant better performance. Specific changes may help in specific cases, but most kernel revisions don't offer any significant difference to games. The more common reason to want a new rev is to support specific hardware.
Unless you have a very new GPU (released less than a year ago), your games are not likely to get any benefit at all from the latest kernel.
And unless your games require the very latest Vulkan features and you run them without Steam, Flatpak, or any other platform that provides its own Mesa, you’re not likely to get any benefit from a distro providing the latest version of it.
Practically everything else that games need is comparable across all the major distros, including Debian. (Arch might have hundreds of other packages that happen to be newer, but those won't make games run faster.)
OP, choose a distro that makes you happy, not one that some random person claims is best for gaming. If what Debian offers is appealing to you, rest assured that it is generally excellent for gaming.
A question here: plan to upgrade to 7800xt sometime in the near future. The card is quite new, so i have doubts after your reply above. I am mainly gaming and do basic office stuff (Libre office is enough). Also, though I can install Ubuntu - press X to win type install works for me - I am new to linux, so not big on fiddling with obscure packages. Just want games to run well - so, in this specific usecase, what distros would you recommend to try?
That GPU is indeed new, and I don't have one, but I think the amdgpu driver has supported it since kernel 6.4 or 6.5. Any distro offering that and recent AMD firmware will probably work. (You could also manually install the firmware files if you change your mind about fiddling and want a specific distro that hasn't caught up yet.)
I don't generally recommend specific distros, since people's needs and preferences vary so widely. However, I would probably try Linux Mint (and the KDE Plasma desktop because I dislike Gtk) if I were in your position. Mint gets a lot of praise for being an easy distro based on the good parts of Ubuntu. It also maintains a Debian edition (LMDE), which I think is a good insurance policy in case Ubuntu ever goes off the rails and becomes unsuitable as a base for Mint.
If you find yourself struggling to choose, remember that you're not married to whatever distro you try first. If you run into a problem that's not easily solved, you can always switch.
Thank you, that helps.
The fiddling bit is not that i am particularly against, it just requires learning things that have no other use for me outside of playing a random game in my free time (so spending that valuable time on learning about OS internals instead of things i actually care about).You can call me a perfect user for windows - i just am tired of them trying to track me, changing their shit constantly and pushing their services within the product i paid for with my own money. Hence linux.
So what i am looking for is an out of the box experience that will not turn my eyes red.