

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.










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