I've use Linux for 15 years now and solely use Debian for the last five. My current machine is a 11th Gen Intel i7, Radeon RX 6700-XT with 16GB 3200Mhz RAM. Both the O/S and Steam gaming drives are Gen 4 Nvme M.2. This runs Debian 12.5 on Xfce, Kernel: 6.7.12+bpo-amd64, Mesa 22.3.6 and latest Linux Steam version: 1718751621 dpkg package. Runs flawlessly and I get the same FPS in many games as my friends PC which is the same spec but on Windows 11.
@@Community-Compute Good card. I found it's best to stick to Radeon for less hassle and only use hardware a generation or two behind with Debian. Flatpak have improved these days but at one time, I use to find not all the packages where kept up to date like VLC or Gimp. Think that's changed now but I personally only use dpkg packages either from the Debian repositories or from source.
One aspect you might overlook and I've run into this twice now. With World of Tanks and Day of Defeat: Source. Newer packages and libraries in Arch can break games. The older packages in Debain can make certain games more stable, and by the time Debian upgrades to the problem package, the bug will most likely be worked out already.
Good point! I think gaming on Debian is great, for the most part. I was trying to show in this video that performance really isn't that different, and you get all the glorious stability of Debian ;)
Fine video. but it hurts my eyes that you didn't fullscreen the presentation 😅 Also we couldn't see the debian results of tomb raider because it was behind your camera feed. But other that that, great 👍 I'm on Manjaro, and my gaming performance is solid.
When have they recommended against it? The Steam flatpak is not officially supported, of course, and issues should go to their respective issue tracker rather than Valve's, but like, what do they expect people to use instead? Valve officially distributes Steam for the Steam Deck and as Debian packages. If you don't use a Debian derivate, the Flatpak is one of your best bets if you need to have a reputable issue tracker.
When have they recommended against it? The Steam flatpak is not officially supported, of course, and issues should go to their respective issue tracker rather than Valve's, but like, what do they expect people to use instead? Valve officially distributes Steam for the Steam Deck and as Debian packages. If you don't use a Debian derivate, the Flatpak is one of your best bets if you need to have a reputable issue tracker.
Yeah, good question. I think it might have been slightly worse at this point (about a year after Debian 12's release), with the potential to get worse as more time passes. With older hardware though, I do wonder how much of a difference it would make. I plan to run the tests again on newer hardware. Maybe I'll use your suggestion and install Steam via apt!
@@Community-Compute I don't think there will be any difference at all, because the only thing apt installs is the updater for steam which installs the latest version in your home directory and uses it's own libraries from it. At this point the only major difference would be the grapics driver
@@recurser. Yeah, you're right. The Flatpak runtime would likely have a newer mesa build. I think that could make a difference, especially for newer hardware, or near the end of a Debian release cycle. It's an interesting subject! I think I'll do a video on it -- where I compare performance in a few games between the apt and flatpak versions, using newer hardware than I used in this video. Thanks for commenting.
I compared Debian 12 vs Arch with Starfield on a Ryzen 9 7950X and RTX 4090. The game was very jittery and laggy on Debian (almost to a point of being unplayable), whereas on Arch it worked just fine. It might have been an outlier, because in many games there was only a few FPS difference (maybe 3 - 10 FPS drop on Debian 12; usually averaging around 80 - 120 FPS @ 1440p on highest settings in various games). But yeah Arch definitely takes the win for newer hardware, but if the game you''re playing doesn't have performance issues... just stick with Debian 12.
Thanks for sharing. Those results are interesting -- did you install Steam via apt or as a flatpak? Wonder how much of a difference that would make for Starfield? I agree with you, though, Arch takes the win for newer hardware or if you just want the absolute most-optimized setup!
This is exactly what I wanted to see. Debian + flaptak is all u need.I tried endavour os vs lmde6 and I didnt noticed difference in gaming + cinnamon for me is one and only usable DE. Thx for comparison. Nice video
Thanks! I actually covered how to do that in my video on Gaming on Debian. I show you how to mount a drive with KDE Partition Manager, and then how to grant Flatpak Steam access to that drive using an app called Flatseal. You don't even have to touch a terminal!
The biggest deterrent of using Arch (or any rolling release) in developing countries is the size of updates. You would need to download an average of 1-2 GB per week, using around 1-2 Mbps connection.
Before watching: shouldn't they be neck to neck? After watching: have you considered flatpak's resource consumption could be why debian always around 1 fps lower?
FPS really doesnt matter to me. Frame times yeah, but if theyre close enough what i actually care about is compatibility and how easy it is to recreate the optimal setup, with the learnings needed to keep up with the improvements: learning Proton GE is important, Wine GE through Lutris, Winetweaks for Unity Fonts, device configuration drivers like Piper for Logitech, all the different things require a lot of research to find the things that only word of mouth/keyboard can spread
My soul doesn't know where it's going right now. I use AVL MXe for music production and cachyOS for rendering. I'm completely crazy about them. Debian is unbreakable and Arch is versatile, so my soul found NitruxOS and started to catch fire. I have no peace!
@@Community-Compute NitrusOS has a different way of working things and it is very interesting because it is a Debian-RollingRealise without apt pkg etc... it works as an AppImage which for me is bad because of the lag in app versions. However, it works with distroBox. Besides coming with KDE 6 and nVidia 545 or 555, I don't remember for sure. But it is based on the test version of Debian.
Hey there - that's because I was running that particular game through the Proton layer in Steam. Essentially, I was running the Windows build of a game in Linux.
Your cam hides some of the results for Tomb Raider. The average FPS is not very interesting, it is all about framepacing, based on the graphs I guestimate that it doesn't differ much but it could matter much depending on the setup and the game (for example Deus Ex MD dxvk vs amdvlk). How much Debian vs Arch matter just depends on how old your hardware is, how old your drivers and kernel are and how old the game is and in what state it was shipped. It is very simple, just as for Windows we need drivers which were released after the game and the release of the graphics card and depending on the state of the game at shipping you might need drivers which are a few weeks up to 1-2 years newer than the game. So you can't make any general statement about Debian vs any rolling distro for gaming-performance, it depends on how new the games are which you play and it depends on your timing (age hardware vs release-date of the latest Debian). Debian is a great system but it can't do magic, if you play older games (I tend to do that myself) on older hardware then you will be fine. If you regularly play the newest games then you will be better off with a rolling distro. But of course you can also install the latest kernel and drivers on your Debian so if you like Debian (it is a great system, though I prefer Arch) then do that and be happy. Note that not all of drivers are in the mesa-package (as great as mesa is, some of it is in the kernel itself) and allegedly not all games perform as good with Steam Flatpak as with the regular install of Steam but I can't verify that myself because I never used Flatpak, I go by Brodie Robertson his experiences and he is openminded in regard to solutions like Flatpak so I trust his opinion on this.
Flatpak steam is not great, i had no problems until i encountered a game that would hard freeze my whole PC and crash it each time, some games work great but some just screw everything up
Hey - thanks for sharing. I've heard that some people tend to have some issues with it. I haven't had any yet, but did have to do some workarounds to get additional storage drives to work.
You join the fact I spoke in your last video. You need more recent Mesa, and not only . Also you are CPU bottleneck so, your benchmark is not representative of the reality. The only thing we can see is that the flatpak container drop some performances and it's a fact. If you want to bench, you need to compare with debian package. The reality is that between mesa 24 and Mesa 22 you have +/- 5% up Fps and also in the 1% low, which is the one that interest Us. If 1% are too low, you will jave stutter and a bad gaming experience even if you have 90fps average. And also, you have an AMD gpu, and it's an other story with Nvidia that provides his own mesa vulkan and dri driver. It also depends on how it is seted up by the distro (early loading etc..) but dame nvidia driver = same performances on STOCK kernel (arch and debian) However, using TKG kernel, you jave less average FPS, but more 1% FPS, so your game is smoother. I recommend you to watch the videos of A1RM4X. Bye bye 👋
I appreciate you taking the time to comment. I did mention most of your points as considerations near the end of my video. And why not use Flatpak, if it's easy and available? The point was not to prove or even insinuate that Debian is the best distro for gaming, merely that it's viable -- and I think it is. Given its many other advantages, I'm more than happy to game on Debian. Thanks for watching!
FPS really doesnt matter to me. Frame times yeah, but if theyre close enough what i actually care about is compatibility and how easy it is to recreate the optimal setup, with the learnings needed to keep up with the improvements: learning Proton GE is important, Wine GE through Lutris, Winetweaks for Unity Fonts, device configuration drivers like Piper for Logitech, all the different things require a lot of research to find the things that only word of mouth/keyboard can spread
I've use Linux for 15 years now and solely use Debian for the last five. My current machine is a 11th Gen Intel i7, Radeon RX 6700-XT with 16GB 3200Mhz RAM. Both the O/S and Steam gaming drives are Gen 4 Nvme M.2.
This runs Debian 12.5 on Xfce, Kernel: 6.7.12+bpo-amd64, Mesa 22.3.6 and latest Linux Steam version: 1718751621 dpkg package. Runs flawlessly and I get the same FPS in many games as my friends PC which is the same spec but on Windows 11.
That's awesome to hear! I actually just upgraded to that card (well, close enough, 6750xt)!
@@Community-Compute Good card. I found it's best to stick to Radeon for less hassle and only use hardware a generation or two behind with Debian.
Flatpak have improved these days but at one time, I use to find not all the packages where kept up to date like VLC or Gimp. Think that's changed now but I personally only use dpkg packages either from the Debian repositories or from source.
One aspect you might overlook and I've run into this twice now. With World of Tanks and Day of Defeat: Source. Newer packages and libraries in Arch can break games. The older packages in Debain can make certain games more stable, and by the time Debian upgrades to the problem package, the bug will most likely be worked out already.
Good point! I think gaming on Debian is great, for the most part. I was trying to show in this video that performance really isn't that different, and you get all the glorious stability of Debian ;)
@@Community-Compute How to Install is and games in this?
It happened with TF2 as well, but it was later fixed when they ported the game to 64 bits.
thanks bud. i recently bought an 8840hs asus and was really looking forward to a recent video like this.
Awesome! I hope it helps.
Fine video. but it hurts my eyes that you didn't fullscreen the presentation 😅
Also we couldn't see the debian results of tomb raider because it was behind your camera feed.
But other that that, great 👍
I'm on Manjaro, and my gaming performance is solid.
Whoops 🤣. I'll share the whole thing next time! Thanks!
@@Community-Compute 👍
i recently bought an 8840hs asus and was really looking forward to something like this! thanks bud!
I’ve been using Linux mint Debian edition LMDE6 for a long time and I get excellent performance using steam flatpak.
Valve specifically recommends against using flatpak for steam, because it causes a lot of issues
When have they recommended against it? The Steam flatpak is not officially supported, of course, and issues should go to their respective issue tracker rather than Valve's, but like, what do they expect people to use instead? Valve officially distributes Steam for the Steam Deck and as Debian packages. If you don't use a Debian derivate, the Flatpak is one of your best bets if you need to have a reputable issue tracker.
When have they recommended against it? The Steam flatpak is not officially supported, of course, and issues should go to their respective issue tracker rather than Valve's, but like, what do they expect people to use instead? Valve officially distributes Steam for the Steam Deck and as Debian packages. If you don't use a Debian derivate, the Flatpak is one of your best bets if you need to have a reputable issue tracker.
I would be interested to see how this would have shaken out if you used the native install of Steam on Debian
Yeah, good question. I think it might have been slightly worse at this point (about a year after Debian 12's release), with the potential to get worse as more time passes. With older hardware though, I do wonder how much of a difference it would make. I plan to run the tests again on newer hardware. Maybe I'll use your suggestion and install Steam via apt!
@@Community-Compute As someone gaming on debian with the apt steam package +1 to this.
@@Community-Compute I don't think there will be any difference at all, because the only thing apt installs is the updater for steam which installs the latest version in your home directory and uses it's own libraries from it. At this point the only major difference would be the grapics driver
@@recurser. Yeah, you're right. The Flatpak runtime would likely have a newer mesa build. I think that could make a difference, especially for newer hardware, or near the end of a Debian release cycle. It's an interesting subject! I think I'll do a video on it -- where I compare performance in a few games between the apt and flatpak versions, using newer hardware than I used in this video.
Thanks for commenting.
Hey men I was thinking to do the same thing xD good to know some one else fall on the same :3 . great video, I only use Debian with flatpak :)
I compared Debian 12 vs Arch with Starfield on a Ryzen 9 7950X and RTX 4090. The game was very jittery and laggy on Debian (almost to a point of being unplayable), whereas on Arch it worked just fine. It might have been an outlier, because in many games there was only a few FPS difference (maybe 3 - 10 FPS drop on Debian 12; usually averaging around 80 - 120 FPS @ 1440p on highest settings in various games). But yeah Arch definitely takes the win for newer hardware, but if the game you''re playing doesn't have performance issues... just stick with Debian 12.
Thanks for sharing. Those results are interesting -- did you install Steam via apt or as a flatpak? Wonder how much of a difference that would make for Starfield? I agree with you, though, Arch takes the win for newer hardware or if you just want the absolute most-optimized setup!
This is exactly what I wanted to see. Debian + flaptak is all u need.I tried endavour os vs lmde6 and I didnt noticed difference in gaming + cinnamon for me is one and only usable DE. Thx for comparison. Nice video
Great video.
The only problem I have with the flatpak Steam is that I can not reach my installed games (They or on a separated Hdd)
Thanks! I actually covered how to do that in my video on Gaming on Debian. I show you how to mount a drive with KDE Partition Manager, and then how to grant Flatpak Steam access to that drive using an app called Flatseal. You don't even have to touch a terminal!
@@Community-Compute Did not know that, thanks for the tip.
The biggest deterrent of using Arch (or any rolling release) in developing countries is the size of updates. You would need to download an average of 1-2 GB per week, using around 1-2 Mbps connection.
Hey, that's a great point! I hadn't thought about that. For anyone on a metered connection, a point release disto might be best!
Before watching: shouldn't they be neck to neck?
After watching: have you considered flatpak's resource consumption could be why debian always around 1 fps lower?
Yeah, that could be it, especially on the older hardware I used. Close enough for me!
FPS really doesnt matter to me. Frame times yeah, but if theyre close enough what i actually care about is compatibility and how easy it is to recreate the optimal setup, with the learnings needed to keep up with the improvements: learning Proton GE is important, Wine GE through Lutris, Winetweaks for Unity Fonts, device configuration drivers like Piper for Logitech, all the different things require a lot of research to find the things that only word of mouth/keyboard can spread
You should make 1 video about their derivatives: Garuda vs Mint.
Hey, great idea. I've been meaning to try out Garuda Linux.
@@Community-Compute Grandchildren fight!
@@MrAbrazildo 🤣
My soul doesn't know where it's going right now. I use AVL MXe for music production and cachyOS for rendering. I'm completely crazy about them. Debian is unbreakable and Arch is versatile, so my soul found NitruxOS and started to catch fire. I have no peace!
I'll have to look into NitruxOS - this is the first time I've heard of it!
@@Community-Compute NitrusOS has a different way of working things and it is very interesting because it is a Debian-RollingRealise without apt pkg etc... it works as an AppImage which for me is bad because of the lag in app versions. However, it works with distroBox. Besides coming with KDE 6 and nVidia 545 or 555, I don't remember for sure. But it is based on the test version of Debian.
@@franklinEditor That sounds like an incredibly unique distro. I don't mind AppImages. I use a few of them in place of .debs when I'm lazy 🤣
why does it say Windows 10 in both sides? minute 3:43
Hey there - that's because I was running that particular game through the Proton layer in Steam. Essentially, I was running the Windows build of a game in Linux.
@@Community-Compute ooh cool that makes sense!! :D
Your cam hides some of the results for Tomb Raider. The average FPS is not very interesting, it is all about framepacing, based on the graphs I guestimate that it doesn't differ much but it could matter much depending on the setup and the game (for example Deus Ex MD dxvk vs amdvlk). How much Debian vs Arch matter just depends on how old your hardware is, how old your drivers and kernel are and how old the game is and in what state it was shipped. It is very simple, just as for Windows we need drivers which were released after the game and the release of the graphics card and depending on the state of the game at shipping you might need drivers which are a few weeks up to 1-2 years newer than the game. So you can't make any general statement about Debian vs any rolling distro for gaming-performance, it depends on how new the games are which you play and it depends on your timing (age hardware vs release-date of the latest Debian). Debian is a great system but it can't do magic, if you play older games (I tend to do that myself) on older hardware then you will be fine. If you regularly play the newest games then you will be better off with a rolling distro. But of course you can also install the latest kernel and drivers on your Debian so if you like Debian (it is a great system, though I prefer Arch) then do that and be happy.
Note that not all of drivers are in the mesa-package (as great as mesa is, some of it is in the kernel itself) and allegedly not all games perform as good with Steam Flatpak as with the regular install of Steam but I can't verify that myself because I never used Flatpak, I go by Brodie Robertson his experiences and he is openminded in regard to solutions like Flatpak so I trust his opinion on this.
Whoops!
Nice PDF...
It's a LibreOffice Impress document :)
thanks man
Flatpak steam is not great, i had no problems until i encountered a game that would hard freeze my whole PC and crash it each time, some games work great but some just screw everything up
Hey - thanks for sharing. I've heard that some people tend to have some issues with it. I haven't had any yet, but did have to do some workarounds to get additional storage drives to work.
Yea it happend to me on Zorin OS. On mint, lmde, mx, opensuse I did not encounter any problems with flatpak steam
I didnt think performance would matter anyway . But personally I find Arch easier to maintain as a whole than Debian.
That's totally fair! I also use Arch. Love it, but just think it might be too much for some.
@@Community-Compute The trouble with Arch eventually an update will break it.
comment for algoritm
Watched right up until I saw Flatpack
You join the fact I spoke in your last video. You need more recent Mesa, and not only . Also you are CPU bottleneck so, your benchmark is not representative of the reality.
The only thing we can see is that the flatpak container drop some performances and it's a fact.
If you want to bench, you need to compare with debian package.
The reality is that between mesa 24 and Mesa 22 you have +/- 5% up Fps and also in the 1% low, which is the one that interest Us. If 1% are too low, you will jave stutter and a bad gaming experience even if you have 90fps average.
And also, you have an AMD gpu, and it's an other story with Nvidia that provides his own mesa vulkan and dri driver.
It also depends on how it is seted up by the distro (early loading etc..) but dame nvidia driver = same performances on STOCK kernel (arch and debian)
However, using TKG kernel, you jave less average FPS, but more 1% FPS, so your game is smoother.
I recommend you to watch the videos of A1RM4X.
Bye bye 👋
I appreciate you taking the time to comment. I did mention most of your points as considerations near the end of my video. And why not use Flatpak, if it's easy and available?
The point was not to prove or even insinuate that Debian is the best distro for gaming, merely that it's viable -- and I think it is. Given its many other advantages, I'm more than happy to game on Debian.
Thanks for watching!
The flatpak version of Steam includes the latest mesa drivers....so...the results we see in the video are pretty much the same.
@@delf0s5781 yep! That was the point I was trying to make. Very similar results, with all the stability of Debian!
Great video, suscribed.
FPS really doesnt matter to me. Frame times yeah, but if theyre close enough what i actually care about is compatibility and how easy it is to recreate the optimal setup, with the learnings needed to keep up with the improvements: learning Proton GE is important, Wine GE through Lutris, Winetweaks for Unity Fonts, device configuration drivers like Piper for Logitech, all the different things require a lot of research to find the things that only word of mouth/keyboard can spread