Linux Gaming Showdown: Debian vs. Arch 

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.

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.

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.

I’ve been using Linux mint Debian edition LMDE6 for a long time and I get excellent performance using steam flatpak.

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)

Valve specifically recommends against using flatpak for steam, because it causes a lot of issues

I would be interested to see how this would have shaken out if you used the native install of Steam on Debian

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.

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.

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?

i recently bought an 8840hs asus and was really looking forward to something like this! thanks bud!

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

thanks bud. i recently bought an 8840hs asus and was really looking forward to a recent video like this.

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 :)

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!

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

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

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

comment for algoritm

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.

why does it say Windows 10 in both sides? minute 3:43

thanks man

You should make 1 video about their derivatives: Garuda vs Mint.

I didnt think performance would matter anyway . But personally I find Arch easier to maintain as a whole than Debian.

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 👋

Great video, suscribed.