this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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fwiw I'm running Debian 12 and had no issues getting steam to run, and all games I've tried run great (with a few exceptions but not many).
I really really wouldn't recommend Debian as an OS for games. It's a server/workstation OS. I use it because I like Debian, not because it's a good idea.
I remember changing my grub config to pass arguments to the kernel for gaming performance. I bet you wouldn't need to do this on a distro designed for gaming like Bazzite.
How much of the tweaking is actually noticeable? Not trying to be a dick here. I'm so old that we didn't use to have GPUs, we had graphics cards and nobody had a "rig". Overclocking or hardware mods was the only way if you weren't willing to spend money on new hardware. Not saying Bazzite is that kind of distro but I'm so old I don't trust some spazzed out maintainer with cat ears and a discord channel. Let me break my own shit, you don't have to do it for me.
I have the exact same experience as you with Debian 11-13 and gaming. Both with Nvidia and AMD cards, various chipsets etc. Everything works. Sometimes after reading a few lines of official documentation and installing a package or two but that's about it.
The only thing that ever required some head scratching was the infamous EA and Rockstar launcher but that's not a Debian or even a Linux problem.... Everything else is identical to windows. Click install. Wait. Click play. Everything works in-game. What am I missing?
You know, honestly? I didn't do any like, testing to see how much impact each had. I just used some recommended settings like setting the kernel to PREEMPT and setting mitigations=no (this is a minor security risk, I am spectre vulnerable but this is a performance increase)
My CPU is very old and I have a newer graphics card, so I figured this would help but I didn't do any concrete testing. Seems fine.
Edit: also I had to set my CPU governor to performance. Debian had it on some low-power default setting (forgot now) and this DID matter, a lot, way more than any kernel argument. I control it some other way than a kernel arg, tho
Ah I see. I guess it makes sense to squeeze out every single % in such cases.
I believe most DE has an addon or equivalent for setting that.