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??

  • lal309@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Very valid points. Since the RedHat announcement, I’ve migrated all my home servers to Debian so I thought “why not switch over my gaming rig as well”. As I thought about which district to use I came to the realization that I don’t want another situation where I’m using a distro based on another distro and that other distro decides to do something that affects the distro I’m using and blah blah. So then that leaves me with using the base (Debian, Arch, etc.) to avoid what I just mentioned.

    I’ve been using Linux for quite some time so I can usually handle some break/fix. I haven’t tried Linux Mint yet but again, I rather just go straight to the base and go from there.

    Still want to read your post tho. I’ve got Sid setup and ready to go and I do want to see how much breakage it introduces as I continue to use it. If it’s a bit too much, I’ll give stable a try.

    • Yote.zip@pawb.socialEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I don’t want another situation where I’m using a distro based on another distro and that other distro decides to do something that affects the distro I’m using and blah blah. So then that leaves me with using the base (Debian, Arch, etc.) to avoid what I just mentioned.

      Yeah this is generally where I’m at as well. There’s no point tying yourself indefinitely to a downstream distro/maintainer because they configured some stuff that takes 1-3 hours to do yourself. Downstream distros may also break some stuff or configure things poorly, so it’s just better to get it from upstream and follow their guidance.

      Linux Mint gets a special mention even though it’s derivative, just because it’s a solid and reputable distro with a long history of being sane and easy to use. If I’m recommending Linux to a new person they always get Linux Mint as an answer.

      • lal309@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Out of curiosity, are you running Steam/Proton/etc on Flatpaks because the normal packages are too outdated in stable or because the dependencies for them are too outdated?

        Also are you not running into issues where the flatpaks can’t talk to each other? For example, installing a proton version on the steam path. Since flatpaks are isolated and have limited access to the system, wouldn’t I run into issues there?

        • Yote.zip@pawb.socialEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I run Flatpaks for gaming mainly because I want cutting edge Mesa (which is inherently used while running games from Flatpaks). It’s not necessary right now since Bookworm was just released and Mesa is not that old, but as a long-term plan I think this is more consistent. I don’t think Steam will have a problem keeping up to date without Flatpak, but Lutris is probably best kept cutting-edge via external Deb repo or Flatpak. In general Flatpaks are pretty terrific and I recommend using them for a lot of things nowadays anyway (I even used a lot of them on Arch Linux). There’s really no performance cost anymore, and most Flatpaks are configured seamlessly from the start so you don’t need to worry much about access issues.

          Flatpaks can generally access anything they want, but you might have to allow that access manually, depending on how the Flatpak is initially configured (Flatseal makes this super easy). Usually this just means you’ll need to allow read-only or read/write access to specific directories where your personal files live. The biggest problem that Flatpaks have is that they absolutely can’t access /usr (and /usr/bin by extension), and this can make things like running mangohud %command% or strangle 60 %command% more or less impossible. You can actually still access stuff via /run/host/usr/bin from inside a Flatpak if you give it host permissions but things run this way usually get very confused and don’t work correctly. You can also try to use flatpak-spawn to do some interesting things from within the “sandbox”, but its usecases are limited in my experience. Notably you can cut off internet access from a game that’s being run, but flatpak-spawn also currently has a bug/oversight which wipes out the environment variables for the spawned process, which usually causes some havoc.

          There are also “portals” that hook into Flatpak, which I don’t know nearly enough about. If you use KDE for example, when you “open” a file using a Flatpak’d program, KDE will swap in a native file dialog and let you pick a file from anywhere even if the Flatpak doesn’t have access, and then it grants a temporary one-time access to that file to the program. For example I disallow Discord from accessing practically everything, but I can still upload files from anywhere on my system to a Discord channel with the KDE file portal.

          In terms of Proton versions and Wine versions etc, there’s no issues here. I usually use ProtonUp-Qt to install different versions, and Steam/Lutris/Bottles will have no issues accessing these even if they’re Flatpak’d.

          Edit: Also, you can theme Flatpaks like this. You’ll need your system themes to be installed to ~/.themes and ~/.icons in order for Flatpak programs to access them, and then you can set default global overrides for the theming environment variables and access to ~/.themes etc. using Flatseal. This will allow all programs to use your themes without individual configuration.