Nvidia being the odd one out

Right, I get that but also :

(Source Steam Hardware & Software Survey: January 2026 )

Entire top10, then for marketshare I don’t count NVIDIA I count the rest :

AMD : ~15%

Intel : ~6%

I’m too lazy to guesstimate when it’s below 0.5% but you get the idea, at least 75% is NVIDIA.

So “odd” yes but still a big deal in terms of market share for gamers.

To be clear though I am NOT advocating for NVIDIA (especially with all their AI BS) just showing how dominating they are in that segment.

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.

Glad to hear! I’m also no expert but if you have more specific questions, please do ask. I’d be happy to try to help.

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.

Others mentioned it but I’ll insist on kdenlive.

Yes it’s intimidating, so much so I initially started it, closed it and went back to ffmpeg, so the CLI.

What I was lacking wasn’t a good UI or UX but rather the principle of video editing. Once you actually learn the basics :

• cuts (each file become a track, each file can be sliced in smaller piece and re-arranged)
• timeline (cuts next to each other or on top of each other, including audio, videos, cards, etc)
• effects (fade in, fade out, etc)
• project management (organizing files, designing cards for titles, etc)

then regardless of which software you use it’s nearly the same.

So I would actually invest just an hour to try a tutorial, edit a 1min video, get feedback on it from friends then try again. Honestly video as a medium is not going away anytime soon, in fact arguably platform like TikTok (sadly) made it even more popular. Consequently investing a bit of time today would benefit you for decades to come.

I’ll be honest : because people is ignorant.

They tried Debian once few years ago, it didn’t have the exact driver they wanted out of the box, they gave up. They think that’s the normal and current experience.

Reality is I use Debian every day on my servers, SBCs, laptop but also my desktop. I’ve been gaming on it since the first day of the installation and it just worked. Sure I had to follow https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers and basically follow those steps. It took me maybe 15min and 1 reboot but since then NO tinkering, 0, and I’m gaming nearly daily from indie to AAA, from 2D to 3D to VR. As I mentioned in another reply sure I might not have perfectly optimized all my performance but I don’t give a shit, I’m just gaming!

Also as I mentioned elsewhere the “cutting edge” is bullshit. You can have a Debian installation, stable, and cherry pick the packages you want. Heck you can even pull from a forge the software you want, built it, run it. That’s how “bleeding edge” it can be. Of course you can use VM (with GPU passthrough), distrobox, AppImage, Nix (different from NixOS), etc so they are many many ways to make sure you use the absolute latest without breaking your system.

TL;DR: Debian does not position itself as a gaming distribution. A lot of gamers want to optimize everything for gaming and consequently assume a specialized distribution will do better. Meanwhile people who JUST want to play can definitely do so on Debian.

Gamers need the newest libraries and the newest drivers or their stuff might not run as well as it possibly could

No they don’t. They think they do because they believe they run their precious expensive hardware only at 99% whereas they imagine, I bet due to trying to compete with each others on benchmarks, that with the absolute latest driver they can actually push their GPU at 99.99% and gain .1FPS in the most popular game they might not even like and 2 points in the trendy benchmark.

Source : I’m a gamer playing on Debian, from indie to AAA, from 2D to 3D to VR, and it just works. Sure I’m not at 99% perf on my hardware, I might even be at 80% but I’m definitely spending 0% time tinkering and 100% having fun.

Switch workplace.

There are countless ways to bypass that (e.g. https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ running on a server) but honestly if a workplace does not value your expertise to hone your own tools, they don’t really value you as an employee.

lol, sorry but in what world do you live in? NONE of the OS “just works”.

I’m sorry but this is such a trope. I watched someone using an up to date iOS phone. That thing is LOCKED down to no end, countless people claim that Apple are some kind of UX geniuses … well you look somebody trying to do anything as complex as watching a video on this and it’s a damn struggle.

Sorry for going on a rant here but the very concept is a lie. It’s like Windows being easier to use, it’s absolutely not BUT people have trained, at school (sigh) or at work, on how to use it. They somehow “forget” that they went through hours or even days of training and somehow they believe it feels “natural”. That’s entirely dishonest but why do I insist on this so much? Because it’s unfair to then compare Linux distributions to things that do not exist!

What “just works” but STILL is not perfect or flawless, is SteamOS on the SteamDeck not due to any “magic” from Valve but rather because :

• the hardware is very limited (basically selected to work well for it)
• the use case is very limited (start Steam, play)

and as soon as one start to tinker with SteamOS on SteamDeck by replacing part, adding USB-C devices, remote the r/w restriction on the OS, etc then again “just works” becomes “worked at some point”.

How I interpret this :

• Oh no, the very trend and thus powerful corporations are doing something stupid that does not work, let’s copy them!

instead of just watch the sideline as they keep on pouring more resources with nothing to show for it except the buzz they keep so hard on trying to maintain.

SteamDeck, so yes.

On desktop, SBCs, servers, etc Debian.

Step 1 : don’t.

If you didn’t yet might want to play with Precursor

Why even a phone then? I’m not being facetious here it’s actually a follow up on https://lemmy.ml/post/42255169/23589434 namely what do you actually need a phone for?

Maybe you are used to it and it’s convenient for a lot of things you do. But do you actually need one, especially knowing that it’s a legitimate threat to you?

How about no phone but a small laptop or tablet with SIM as USB dongle?

So… I’m kind of in the same situation but mine is actually by mistake. Namely my SIM somehow (OK maybe I tinkered with eSIM a bit much… anyway) works for data and SMS but not for calls. I tried to fix it a bit… then honestly I like it without. Most of the calls I received are not important, nor urgent, and the few that are can leave a message or an SMS.

I stopped relying on my phone for calls entirely and I like it.

When I tell people it doesn’t work they just shrug it off and always find a way to contact me without making a big deal out of it.

I still like having a SIM though if only to

• check where I am on a path the first time I get there
• know if the person I’m meeting might be late
• warn if I’m late on the way to somewhere

but typically my phone works well entirely offline (e.g. I do not stream music, I have actual files on my phone) so I understand.

Honestly in your shoes I’d gauge the person, if they are potentially interesting enough to explore the topic with curiosity, I’d be honest. If I just want to move on because they seem obtuse I’d keep it to the minimum.

No worries, it’s a very niche thing but IMHO interesting to dig deeper into if you are curious about the semi conductor industry.

IMEC (a chip packaging company)

That’s not what IMEC is : “Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre is an international research & development organization, active in the fields of nanoelectronics and digital technologies” and it’s a non profit. They basically do research for and with the semi industry.

nicotine+

Ooh didn’t know about it, thanks!

turns off SteamDeck sorry, what’s a “terminal”? Isn’t it at the airport?

Jokes aside… yes, obviously, it only depends what you actually need to do. I recommend though NOT to be afraid of the terminal. The whole point about using Linux is to do whatever one wants. If that means avoiding the terminal, sure, that’s fine, BUT I believe the goal still is to be able to do MORE and the terminal is itself a very powerful tool. It’s not the terminal itself as much as the composability of the CLI.

So… finding a distribution with all the GUI and TUI and avoiding the CLI until they actually want to use them is great. Avoiding it entirely because no new skill was acquired is a missed opportunity IMHO. I want more Linux users, yes, but I also want BETTER users of any OS. Skilling up users so that we can all do more, together.

There are warnings so my bet is that there is an edge case where

• one runs apt and receives NO warning
• the system keeps on doing other tasks, e.g. user copies a large file on the same filesystem or log files just increasing
• user runs apt upgrade BUT now apt would warn except it’s not run again

so basically concurrency that makes it unpredictable, except if apt was the only process writing on the filesystem (which it never is).