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in Debian (because Debian was always mentioned as a distro good for servers, or stable machines that are ok with outdated software)
And while I get that Debian does have software that isn’t as up to date, I’ve never felt that the software was that outdated.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.