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I find that Fedora hits the right balance of stability while being up to date for anything desktop and specifically gaming focused, Debian has different priorit

by argsnd 9mo ago

I find that Fedora hits the right balance of stability while being up to date for anything desktop and specifically gaming focused, Debian has different priorities and packages can be a bit too old. And it’s less of a faff than Arch.

kentonv 9mo ago
Eh, aside from GPU drivers -- which I download directly from nvidia anyway -- I don't feel like gaming is much affected by the distro packages being a couple years old. We pretty much just run Steam, Discord, and Chrome on these things, and those all have their own update schedule independent of the distro.
- tapoxi 9mo ago
  You're right because the games run in containers anyway, steam-runtime.
- sznio 9mo ago
  I'm hopeful that's been fixed by now, but when I switched to Linux a year ago I started with Debian, and had a lot of issues with input latency for games on Wayland. Switched to Fedora which was two KDE versions ahead and never had that issue again.
  - joe200 9mo ago
    Because you used Debian stable (which is mostly for servers). Try Debian Testing. And don't get fooled by its name "testing" - it is because Debian community reserved "stable" for Debian stable. Debian testing is also stable :-)
eru 9mo ago
Archlinux can be a pretty good choice for gaming. Not necessarily because of anything Archlinux does: most distros can do anything, if you configure them. No, just because the Steamdeck's distro is built on Arch, and so you can piggyback on what they are doing.
- OJFord 9mo ago
  Arch is really in a sense the absence of a distro, but keeping a package manager with up to date packages. No bloat bundled, just install exactly what you want. I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too. That's nothing against Arch, it's what I use, I'm just saying really the only magic is in doing less.
  - eru 9mo ago
    > Arch is really in a sense the absence of a distro, but keeping a package manager with up to date packages. No bloat bundled, just install exactly what you want. You might be right in terms of a desktop environment. But Arch does have its own opinions, eg it picks systemd by default. And it gives you a default kernel that has a few patches applied and a config picked for you. > I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too. Yes, that was in my original comment. However setting up all the configs take a bit of time, and with Arch you can just literally copy large parts of the config files from the Steam deck. One advantage that Arch has over many distros: as a rolling distributions it's usually easier to get up-to-date packages, you mostly get them by default.
joe200 9mo ago
You are comparing Fedora with Debian stable. Everyone who wants to have Debian stability (and ecosystem) with the most new upstream software should go for Debian Testing (and don't be fooled by the name "testing" !). Debian Stable is for servers, Debian Testing is for desktops. Just try Debian Testing (and I used Slack, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian)
- ahartmetz 9mo ago
  This is from like 20 years ago, but I remember Debian Testing as the one where updates broke the system most frequently, or maybe the longest without fixes: Stable was stable, Sid / unstable was what most Debian developers were using... and Testing was the weird thing that was neither a release nor tested and fixed "live" by developers. What changed?
  - cogman10 9mo ago
    Most of the problems that break a system are being resolved in unstable rather than testing. I've ran testing on my home server, though since it's a bit old now I've switched it over to stable when testing switched to stable.
  - joe200 9mo ago
    This is how the flow happens: [upstream] -> [Debian Sid] -> [Debian Testing] -> [Debian stable] The testing happens in Debian Sid.
    - ahartmetz 9mo ago
      But who actually tests Testing? If it's not the Debian developers themselves, fixes could take a while. I seem to recall Testing breaking because of package version combinations that never existed, so were never tested, in Sid.
      - joe200 9mo ago
        The same question applies to any other distribution (Fedora, Arch, etc): who tests them ?

by argsnd 9mo ago

kentonv 9mo ago

Eh, aside from GPU drivers -- which I download directly from nvidia anyway -- I don't feel like gaming is much affected by the distro packages being a couple years old. We pretty much just run Steam, Discord, and Chrome on these things, and those all have their own update schedule independent of the distro.

tapoxi 9mo ago
You're right because the games run in containers anyway, steam-runtime.
sznio 9mo ago
I'm hopeful that's been fixed by now, but when I switched to Linux a year ago I started with Debian, and had a lot of issues with input latency for games on Wayland. Switched to Fedora which was two KDE versions ahead and never had that issue again.
- joe200 9mo ago
  Because you used Debian stable (which is mostly for servers). Try Debian Testing. And don't get fooled by its name "testing" - it is because Debian community reserved "stable" for Debian stable. Debian testing is also stable :-)

eru 9mo ago

Archlinux can be a pretty good choice for gaming. Not necessarily because of anything Archlinux does: most distros can do anything, if you configure them. No, just because the Steamdeck's distro is built on Arch, and so you can piggyback on what they are doing.

OJFord 9mo ago
Arch is really in a sense the absence of a distro, but keeping a package manager with up to date packages. No bloat bundled, just install exactly what you want. I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too. That's nothing against Arch, it's what I use, I'm just saying really the only magic is in doing less.
- eru 9mo ago
  > Arch is really in a sense the absence of a distro, but keeping a package manager with up to date packages. No bloat bundled, just install exactly what you want. You might be right in terms of a desktop environment. But Arch does have its own opinions, eg it picks systemd by default. And it gives you a default kernel that has a few patches applied and a config picked for you. > I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too. Yes, that was in my original comment. However setting up all the configs take a bit of time, and with Arch you can just literally copy large parts of the config files from the Steam deck. One advantage that Arch has over many distros: as a rolling distributions it's usually easier to get up-to-date packages, you mostly get them by default.

joe200 9mo ago

You are comparing Fedora with Debian stable. Everyone who wants to have Debian stability (and ecosystem) with the most new upstream software should go for Debian Testing (and don't be fooled by the name "testing" !). Debian Stable is for servers, Debian Testing is for desktops. Just try Debian Testing (and I used Slack, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian)

ahartmetz 9mo ago
This is from like 20 years ago, but I remember Debian Testing as the one where updates broke the system most frequently, or maybe the longest without fixes: Stable was stable, Sid / unstable was what most Debian developers were using... and Testing was the weird thing that was neither a release nor tested and fixed "live" by developers. What changed?
- cogman10 9mo ago
  Most of the problems that break a system are being resolved in unstable rather than testing. I've ran testing on my home server, though since it's a bit old now I've switched it over to stable when testing switched to stable.
- joe200 9mo ago
  This is how the flow happens: [upstream] -> [Debian Sid] -> [Debian Testing] -> [Debian stable] The testing happens in Debian Sid.
  - ahartmetz 9mo ago
    But who actually tests Testing? If it's not the Debian developers themselves, fixes could take a while. I seem to recall Testing breaking because of package version combinations that never existed, so were never tested, in Sid.
    - joe200 9mo ago
      The same question applies to any other distribution (Fedora, Arch, etc): who tests them ?