https://blog.c10l.cc/09122023-debian-gaming
A post describing how to set up a Debian system for gaming
A few days ago I published my Debian setup for gaming. Let me know if anything in there doesn't make sense or could be improved!
Agreed. I'm still a complete noob so this is a very interesting approach to using Debian. Never would have considered something like this myself.
I take that as my fallback solution when my Nobara installation's stability problems overwhelm me again. Maybe switching OS at some point.
However, you just covered the most important / critical part: the basics. The rest of the setup must still have been some tedious work.
This is prety much it actually.
I did do a lot more stuff but only things specific to my personal setup, like having the games on a separate Btrfs partition which can be mounted from other OSs, that kind of stuff.
Assumin all one wants to do is install a few games from Steam, once the setup I described is done, everything is an apt install steam away.
nice. this gives me the incentive to continue down that path. already have one TB SSD for if, not hard to add a second
I run a bog standard bookworm + kde. Only needed to update kernel from backports when I replaced my aging 1060 with an rx6750xt for more recent amdgpu firmware. Games run just fine. Solid as a rock.
Awesome stuff! I'm running KDE as well - can't wait for Plasma 6 to start hitting the repos to get HDR on CP2077.
I have an even newer GPU so a more current kernel was needed. I went with testing because I prefer to follow a more up-to-date system, and it's almost as solid as stable so I don't see many downsides. I wouldn't do it on a server but on the desktop I can easily work around or fix whatever minor nags appear.
I really wanted to get Mesa from experimental though as it follows upstream pretty closely (just a few days lag usually), and testing being generally closer to it probably helps. Or not, I haven't really tested that assumption. :D
This is fantastic! I recently installed Debian after not having tried it for years, and was wondering what the best way to get things such as newer versions of Mesa is.
In your article you brought up alternative Kernel options, from what I've always been told these kernels don't really make a massive difference than the regular kernel. Do you have any experience with the ones you mentioned, and if so did either have an actual impact for you?
Additionally, since I've only recently started using AMD cards (took me a bit to scrape up the money to move over from Nvidia, but it has been done thankfully) are there any details on what the additional firmware components add on? I have a 6700 XT so I'm not sure if that counts as being new enough to need them (I suspect it doesn't but figured I'd check).
Do you have any experience with the ones you mentioned, and if so did either have an actual impact for you?
I'm currently using the Xanmod variant. I haven't compared them in any objective way but I have the impression that with the Debian kernel I get slightly more stuttery games. It's very minor though. I imagine with recent enough CPU and GPU the difference would be minimal, if any. It's easy to switch between kernels, so it doesn't hurt to have them all installed to try them out. In the end, whatever works for you is the best choice.
are there any details on what the additional firmware components add on?
I'm not sure. You can search dmesg for messages of missing firmware (grep for amdgpu and if there are any missing ones it should show). In any case, there are no downsides to just pulling them from upstream the way I mentioned in the post. If the driver requests them, they will be loaded and you'll benefit from it. Firmware files that are not required by the driver will just sit on your drive taking up a little bit of space.
I imagine all those files would eventually find their way into firmware-amd-graphics (https://packages.debian.org/trixie/firmware-amd-graphics), so you're really just getting them earlier.
If there is firmware missing, some functionality of the GPU might not be available and you could have degraded performace or maybe other issues.
Anyway, if you go through the post or parts of it, let me know how it went. If there's anything that needs correction or could be improved, I'd be glad to amend it.
Thank you for the breakdown! I've pretty much always been on Nvidia GPUs since I had a computer with an actual dedicated GPU, so this is all quite new to me.
I did end up following your guide though shortly after I mentioned my questions here, since I figured they both fell under the "If they're not needed, it won't cause any harm" - I did definitely notice that during the upgrade I got a ton of notices about missing firmware for the amdgpu module, whereas after I pulled the firmware files and added them, the notices were gone after a reboot when I went to go install Liquorix so it seems to have been for the best either way.
I haven't had a chance to try out too many games yet, but I did give Halo Infinite a quick go which I did notice had a lot of stuttering previously, and it does seem to be better in that regards now! It'll also be nice to be able to use the native version of Steam, not that I have any qualms with Flatpak but as silly as it is, MangoHud can't read the media status of Spotify while under Flatpak whereas it can when running natively. I like having the media info present, and it kind of continues to light my issues with Flatpak sometimes (in which most things work, but there are always those small things that don't due to the sandboxing), but I digress haha.
Really appreciate the guide again! It all went smoothly and all the steps were laid out very concisely! I love that the steps had an explanation rather than just effectively being a list of commands to run without any context leaving me with the question of "Why should I run this", even down to the comments that you added to the various apt configuration files.
You're welcome! Also thanks for the feedback.
I've added a note on the firmware section clarifying there's no harm in just pulling them, and also a link to a Stack Exchange answer explaining how to configure the default kernel.
Yeah it’s quite ice. I opened an account a while ago after reading about it on Hacker News but I don’t really write much these days.
The fact that I have everything in git and a Makefile that doesn’t let me forget how to publish stuff helps to just write when I get the itch.