I distro hopped for a bit before finally settling in Debian (because Debian was always mentioned as a distro good for servers, or stable machines that are ok with outdated software)
And while I get that Debian does have software that isn’t as up to date, I’ve never felt that the software was that outdated. Before landing on Debian, I always ran into small hiccups that caused me issues as a new Linux user - but when I finally switched over to Debian, everything just worked! Especially now with Debian 13.
So my question is: why does Debian always get dismissed as inferior for everyday drivers, and instead mint, Ubuntu, or even Zorin get recommended? Is there something I am missing, or does it really just come down to people not wanting software that isn’t “cutting edge” release?
Newer packages will in theory always be better, that doesn’t really matter which distribution or use case (gaming or not) one has.
Even if Debian were generating packages the second a pull request was accepted and making it available to everyone and any one it wouldn’t change that the next pull request would, in theory (without regression) be more up to date.
If people have to wait 1s or 1 year, for gaming or not, they can have fun.
If hardware is not properly supported though it’s a different issue. It means people need to buy hardware that is well supported. It’s not specific to a distribution.
I’m playing old and new games on the SteamDeck and it works even if I don’t update it. That’s how things should be, that’s how things already are.
Anecdotes, even if important personally of course, showing things don’t work in a specific context don’t make a trend. There are plenty of things that don’t work well on Debian but also on Arch, Mint, etc and of course on Windows too. It’s very annoying but I don’t see how that helps.
My example applied to all distros, the difference would be the time it takes that code change (which resolved a critical to me bug) takes to actually be available to use.
There’s also very little that’s specific to me about that, it’s a real use case that comes up repeatedly for new releases that tend to push things graphically. I’m only going to recommend distros that minimize the time to get those fixes because it’s a better user experience for the target demographic with little downside.
I’m sorry but I might be totally out of the loop here, do gamers use Mesa? I thought proprietary drives from NVIDIA and AMD, sadly, was what most people actually used nowadays. Again to be clear I’m NOT saying it’s a good thing (it’s not!) just wondering what’s the actual share of users relying on it.
Edit: oh, looks like Mesa is now the default for AMD “AMD promotes their Mesa drivers Radeon and RadeonSI over the deprecated AMD Catalyst” (via Wikipedia), then yes it’s a big deal. Still makes me wonder what’s the current share but mostly out of curiosity.
Mesa has been the defacto standard for AMD for years. It’s always performed better than the official driver. AMD just made it their official recommendation recently.
I think Intel also uses Mesa, with Nvidia being the odd one out