I've used Debian before on my gaming laptop (nvidia card), but drivers were enough of a pain that I just switched to Mint. As much as Canonical annoys me, drivers have been much more plug-and-play for me on Ubuntu downstreams than on raw Debian.
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Nobara, which is by GloriousEggroll of ProtonGE fame, is the first thing to think of when looking for a gaming distro.
Debian is my go-to. So long as you’re already comfortable with Linux, you can get gaming working with a tiny bit of elbow grease… and unlike some other distros, Debian is rock-solid.
Last time I tried this myself I could play a lot, but never the ones I wanted and ended up switching back anyway. Ever since I've just always been running a linux and a windows PC, each to its best use.
I must stress however this experience of mine was over a decade ago and I have heard there's been a lot of improvement on the subject, with steamdeck becoming a thing and alike, so I have no up-to-date experience in what runs and what doesn't anymore. What I cán tell you however is that whichever Windows-only game did play (using Wine back then, dunno how it's done these days) always played at least 2-5x better than on the actual Windows it was made for. 😅
So good luck and I would love some information as to your eventual result!
At the end of the day, the distribution is not that important for gaming, unless you need those 1-2 extra fps. Debian is a very good choice for workstations nowadays. I was a long time OpenSUSE user, always had joys with Debian, but yesterday switched to Garuda Linux (Arch variant optimized for gaming) and I love it so far very much.
If Debian Stable supports your hardware, go for it. If not, try Debian Sid, but it won't be as stable. You can install up-to-date applications, like Steam, using flatpaks in any case.
Even if you opt for stable and there's an update that you may take advantage from, you can always update your kernel in several ways or change to Debian Sid (unstable), but you can't go back unless you change to Debian Testing and then wait the freeze of Testing which then becomes Debian Stable.
All I know is wine-mono and wine-gecko doesn't come in any default package lists on apt that you get on Linux Mint (which should include Debian and Ubuntu packages), not sure if they exist on some other mirror list somewhere but it didn't seem like it, while on Arch I got them directly from Extra (not even AUR).
Well you technically don't need mono or gecko, especially not if you're just going to use Steam Proton to play, but I use pure WINE a lot and it was a pain having to install them manually. Eventually I gave up on using mono and just downloaded the .net runtimes I needed through winetricks.
There were also some lib32 package I got from AUR on Arch that didn't exist on apt. One of those gst plugins (ugly/good/bad/nice/whatever)
Don't opt for an LTS distro for gaming (or even for regular desktop use), opt of a rolling release one... or at least one that has 2 or 3 regular yearly releases.