I’ve ordered myself some parts to build a PC for Linux gaming. In the meantime, i’m deciding on which linux distro to use.
For the desktop environment I typically use KDE.
I have used Ubuntu in the past but i’m ruling it out because of snaps and other such annoyances. This also applies to Ubuntu based distros that use the same repos (KDE Neon etc).
I see the wikis recommend Nobara, but I’m reluctant to use a Fedora based distro because I’m so used to Debian/apt (both as a desktop and server distros). I’m not ruling it out completely though.
Any reason why I shouldn’t just go with Debian + KDE and install Steam? Will I be missing out on lots of performance improvements or is this easily addressed by using an additional repo for a tweaked kernel and proton version or whatever?
Debian is usually very stable, which means drivers and kernel versions will be outdated in comparison with other distros, which can make you lose possible performance. To be fair I wouldn’t worry too much about this though since I don’t expect the performance to be significantly different, but it’s something to take into consideration.
Don’t be afraid of trying a different distro, RedHat or Arch based for example, just make / and /home different partitions and you should be able to install over your root without affecting your home so it makes it easier to switch system if you want to.
I haven’t chosen cutting edge hardware (AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT) so I don’t think drivers should be an issue in my particular case.
I think separating /home is a good idea so I can try some different distros and compare.
Oh yeah, everything will work, but if next week AMD pushes a driver update that improves performance you’ll only get it in a few months. Other than that Debian is a really nice distro, I used it for a while and that’s the only complaint I had.
A separate /home is a good idea in general. Same with /var