Universal gaming optimisation for all Debian-based Distros — AMD, NVIDIA, Intel Arc - Lunarboar/debian-gaming-suite

I’m ditching Ubuntu. Thinking of switching to Debian.

Has anyone used this, or something similar to set up their Debian gaming setup?

This got me thinking. Do I need to install anything special to Debian 13 to be able to play games? Or can I play them with a normal Debian out of the box?

  • Prove_your_argument@piefed.socialEnglish
    63·
    11 hours ago

    Such a weird grab to avoid getting cachyos and installing the two gaming packages they have.

    it just works man. You don’t need to build-your-own-os or reinvent the wheel on an OS just not made for what you’re trying to do.

    I fully understand that you can game on any distro you want, and that linux lets you have a full time hobby just customizing it the way you want it to be. That’s all fine, if your hobby isn’t gaming but it’s instead OS customization then gaming on debian is an awesome pet project, maybe you want to try your hand at arch next?

    I just want something that works, doesn’t break from updates often (6 months 0 breaks!) does good gaming customizations (kernel tweaks, new game FSR4.1 support, gamemode and other tools readily available in the OS welcome splash) and has enough users doing what i’m doing that when I do run into an issue with something, I can find info. This checks all the boxes. Many gaming specialized distros fit into this sort of thing.

    I’m still struggling day to day with opensuse tumbleweed and basic tools. I launch moonlight and it barks about not having GPU acceleration, because they don’t include whatever it requires since it’s not really intended to be a gaming OS first despite being a rolling release and fairly bleeding edge. I can’t select color depth in the controls to get hdmi @ 4k120hz working whatsoever (until linux ~7.2 drops with official support some day…) I use debian for my servers because it’s rock solid stable but the bins are ancient.

    If you’re gaming on a system that could be considered ewaste because the parts are >5 years old and you don’t play new releases or anything with bleeding edge tech, then i’m sure debian will support everything you’re doing with next to no issues whatsoever once you take the time to install all the customizations you want it to have. Just a lot of work though to get that square peg through the round hole.

    edit: literally the first thread I popped open about an amd issue and someone is bashing debian for gaming . I know this entire comment will be very unpopular in a thread about debian because that brings those users in- but I want honesty, not ‘my team is better’ for this topic.

      • Allero@lemmy.todayEnglish
        2·
        10 hours ago

        Works fine for me, mostly.

        You go zypper inr and it should install what is essential. The rest are in the repos, but you’ll have to make a bit of search due to weird naming conventions. Luckily, zypper search exists.

        Overall, it’s be much less painful than Debian, but significantly more involved compared to gaming distros like Bazzite, CachyOS, and Nobara.

      • Prove_your_argument@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        11 hours ago

        It’s not built for it. You’ll have to install all the special packages yourself, but they’re at least in the first party repos and frequently updated. For a build-a-bear gaming OS it is probably one of the better ones because of bleeding edge bins and lots of gaming tools in their repos. Unless you are sticking with official proton only, you’re gonna have to use protonqt or some other method of keeping your proton variant of choice up to date like you would on popos or most other distros.

        A lot of convenience things are missing for me. I actually avoid using the system because it’s such a pain in the ass without hdmi 2.1 support built in. Earlier tonight I was updating it after not touching it for a few weeks and the updater app appeared to freeze and so did something somewhere in the video stack. I had about 7GB of updates that totaled nearly 3000, so it wasn’t a small amount of updates. I waited ~15 minutes and it did ultimately manage to reboot and re-checking updates showed everything was up to date despite the instability during the process. I was really hoping hdmi 2.1 support had released, but not yet.

        I don’t know how cachyos does it, but if I throw my cachyos box into the exact same display setup cable and all, it recognizes hdr and 120hz @ 4k. They have to do some kernel tweaks for that. I am stuck with 1080p@120hz or 4k@30hz otherwise in opensuse. I picked up a displayport to hdmi adapter that claims to support 8k@60hz or 4k@240hz but it still only shows up as 4k@30hz capable in opensuse with a 6800xt, cachyos sees it as 4k@60hz or 4k@120hz depending on how much screwing around with it I do.

        OpenSUSE has some pretty awesome enterprise management tools though, and they’re all built-in and included side by side with the user settings. If I was building out linux workstations at work at substantial scale i’d put it at the top one to try because of how powerful the built-in stuff appears to be for RMM.

        I went to opensuse from pop and pop sucks by comparison (tried before and after COSMIC release.) Pop was always a bit out of date because they relied on ubuntu bins that were just not quickly updated. If pop was old, debian by comparison is a fossil. OpenSUSE is as modern as it comes though.

        I built a system for a buddy four or five months ago and he was willing to go and try linux for gaming. Fairly high end, 9850x3d, 9070xt. He never used linux before. He’s still using cachyos and totally happy with it. I don’t think he’d still be using debian, fedora, endeavourOS or even opensuse.

      • ohshit604@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        11 hours ago

        If you’re using Nvidia graphics I suggest this piece of documentation for driver installation.

        Essentially if you’re running Debian 13 (Trixie) then run these commands;

        deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ trixie-security contrib non-free main non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-updates non-free-firmware non-free contrib main

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt full-upgrade -y

sudo apt install linux-headers-generic nvidia-kernel-dkms nvidia-driver
nvidia-cuda-dev nvidia-cuda-toolkit

sudo apt autoclean
sudo apt autoremove -y
sudo reboot

        Optional for RTX graphics cards, this enables the ray-tracing engine.

        sudo apt install libnvoptix1

        Just remember to disable secureboot if you haven’t already, otherwise the driver module will fail to start when you boot your computer likely throwing the kernel into a panic.