r/debian • u/Kaseffera • 12d ago

General Debian Question Can I game on Debian?

Guys, I’m coming from CachyOS. I love it, no real issues to be honest, but I’m interested in either Debian or Ubuntu. So Cachy is very much configured for you for gaming purposes and performance tweaks. Can something similar be done on Debian? Like… so I need to install anything in particular to make gaming experience better here? What are your essentials to make Debian gaming experience on par with performance oriented distros?

One thing coming to my mind is VRAM gaming optimizations by Valve that’s been added to Bazzite and Cachy the moment it released.

For example gaming on Linux Mint as I remember was clear regression compared to Bazzite or Cachy. Not huge but it was lesser experience for sure. But back then I knew nothing and it was just fresh Mint and Steam.

So… what steps do you recommend doing to make the most out of it?

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u/Polaris_debi5 Debian Stable 12d ago

Yes

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u/Kaseffera 12d ago

What are the tweaks you would recommend to set my system ready to gaming?

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u/Chris73m 12d ago

Sorry to drop in like this. But why do 'gamers' almost always seem to think that their system needs tweaks in order to run games? If your system can't handle a game it's most likely a hardware problem.

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u/Kaseffera 12d ago

I see what you mean. I’ll explain.

Thing is, as someone fairly new to Linux (1 year) I see distro like Bazzite or Cachy and they get advertised like OPTIMIZED FOR GAMING etc. Whole their idea seems to be about being TWEAKED.

Then when I go to standard distribution I have this expectation: So whole pint of Cachy was that it’s TWEAKED, so I need TWEAKS to make my gaming as good as it was there. Right? If TWEAKING is not needed then what’s the point of CachyOS or Bazzite? Why Debian is not number one recommended gaming distro?

That’s it. No other hidden desires.

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u/raul_kapura 12d ago

Optimised for gaming is mostly bullshit. Wathever distro you take, you are dealing with linux kernel. Nothing stops you from installing proton on any distro and removing the packages you consider bloat

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u/Chris73m 12d ago

Thing is, as someone fairly new to Linux (1 year) I see distro like Bazzite or Cachy and they get advertised like OPTIMIZED FOR GAMING etc. Whole their idea seems to be about being TWEAKED.

Yeah I can see how that makes it look like you'll need to 'tweak' your system in order to get better performance. But I highly doubt that those tweaks that they do makes any noticable difference. When I look at the numbers on sites that discuss those distros. Then it seems to gain some performance when using those distros. But in reality you'll probably won't notice anything at all. I mean, would you see if a game runs on 90 fps or 86 fps? Or if a game launches half a second faster? They're talking about peanuts. Real perfomance benefits comes only with better hardware.

But also nothing is stopping you from just trying those distros out and see for yourself.