Well I’m hopping around… again. I thought I had a good stable setup going but then something happens upstream that goes against what I want/believe in (looking at you RedHat) and I’m back on the hunt again.
I thought about trying out a Debian based distro but then I thought “why don’t I just use Debian itself (Sid, not stable/Bookworm)”.
Most if not all gaming software have a way to be installed on Debian so I don’t think that could be an issue.
Is anyone else using Sid? Am I missing something by not going with a gaming focused distro??
The advent of Flatpaks have really made Debian Stable into a serious contender for desktop Linux, and Debian 12 is a remarkably good release even by Debian’s standards. Bookworm has received a lot of praise since its release, and I think people (like myself) are starting to reconsider what a desktop Linux can look like.
It does take a little bit of extra setup to get more cutting-edge stuff for the applications you use most often, but after sourcing everything and stuffing all the individual updating mechanisms into an update script, you’ll get the best of both worlds - stable base and rolling user applications. If nothing else you should try Stable first before resorting to Sid - you may be inheriting Sid’s volatility without a proper usecase. If you don’t run Debian Stable or Debian Sid/Arch Linux, you’ll probably want to go somewhere in the middle like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which is cutting-edge with extensive testing baked-in.
I’m going to give stable a try and see how far I get with gaming and go from there. I’ve never run straight Debian as a desktop it’s always been on servers so my experience there is limited.
I’m curious as to the update script you are talking about. Care to point me to an example? Wouldn’t flatpak update do the trick for everything running in flatpaks? And apt update/upgrade for the rest?