Bazzite is far more newbie friendly than Arch/CachyOS, and can be used for pretty much everything besides gaming

I don't think so. Immutable distro puts a lot of restrictions on its use cases, so I wouldn't consider it pretty much for everything purpose. "User friendly" is a double edged if you simply can't do what you need.

More like "super restricted so you can't easily break things" - yeah. But that doesn't mean it suits all needs.

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a case against Linux Mint.

Not so much Mint, as the LTS (more exactly long term fixed release) model you mention. I see it as a bad fit for gaming in general, yes. Mint just has additional issues due to its DE not having timely Wayland support as I mentioned above, which I think is more important for gaming than it might appear.

So yes, I recommend rolling distros for gaming as having better overall benefits than fixed releases distros. Plus the distro should have modern and sufficient Wayland support.

We are talking about recommendations anyway. No one stops anyone from using any distro they want.

Nobara, Bazzite, CachyOS and other. You should be wondering why Linux gamers use these distros instead of Debian Testing/Unstable...

Hype. Same reason many used Ubuntu vs Debian in the first place. I don't personally see a point in hype distros. If you want more rolling than Debian rolling flavors, regular Arch will do. CachyOS is especially problematic to recommend to newcomers due to them having a tendency to use all kind of non upstream and experimental / unreleased stuff out of the box. It results in such newcomers being unable to report bugs upstream and a ton of related confusion.

Bazzite is a special case, as I mentioned above, it's not really in the same category as the rest since it's an immutable distro. It's more suitable as an alternative to something like SteamOS for console like set ups.

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Personally I recommend new users to start with Debian (rolling flavor) right away.

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this can happen if you've got very recent hardware.

Or simply recent enough, say latest generation of AMD GPUs that have minimum requirements that distros like Mint often don't supply by default. My point is that I find it a bit counter productive to recommend such distros for newcomers from Windows, since it results in them having problems.

On the other side of it, the trade off of rolling distros is the need to learn more stuff, but I think such trade off is worth it and that's not time wasted.

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From what I gathered Bazzite is a very specific distro, it's not general purpose. So I'm not surprised it's more niche than general purpose Arch.

Not everyone uses computers only for gaming, I'd imagine majority actually uses them for everything, and gaming is just one use case among many.

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Mint user here. I think that's because for gaming, Mint is a great compromise. Debian's ultimate focus is stability, which makes it a fantastic choice for servers, but in gaming, you often want components that aren't quite that old. It still doesn't randomly break your stuff, unlike rolling release distros

That's why I said Debian testing / unstable, not Debian stable. Such kind of approach (whether in Mint or Debian stable itself) can cause problems too unless people understand its limitations.

I periodically see a bunch of people complaining that their hardware doesn't work, which ends up being them using Mint which doesn't ship recent kernel and Mesa.

Rolling flavors of Debian are a better fit in my opinion.

Also, I think KDE is a better fit for modern gaming features, due to Cinnamon being way slower in supporting Wayland. Having focus on its own DE and not keeping up with the times is a downside for Mint. Even Ubuntu stopped its own DE efforts for that reason.

irc every more or less official Debian related place tells you not to use those unless you really know what you're doing

You should know what you are doing no matter what you are using. That's my experience. I'd say Debian testing/unstable isn't any worse than a bunch of other rolling distros, like Arch or what not. If anything, it's more stable than Arch. Those who say not to use it are doing a disservice.

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I'm surprised in general that Linux Mint is ahead of Debian (testing / unstable).

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For the reference, I linked it in the other thread, but if you are curious, here are places in Mesa and dxvk/vkd3d-proton that deal with game specific fixes:

* radeonsi (OpenGL) and non radv Vulkan: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/util/00-mesa-defaults.conf [External Link]
* radv (Vulkan): https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/util/00-radv-defaults.conf [External Link]
* dxvk: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/blob/master/src/util/config/config.cpp#L21 [External Link]
* vkd3d-proton: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/blob/master/libs/vkd3d/device.c#L541 [External Link]

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Nice release!

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Meanwhile I'm playing Bloodlines 2 - it's quite different from original Bloodlines, but it's not bad.

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