Archlinux can be a pretty good choice for gaming. Not necessarily because of anything Archlinux does: most distros can do anything, if you configure them.

No, just because the Steamdeck's distro is built on Arch, and so you can piggyback on what they are doing.

Arch is really in a sense the absence of a distro, but keeping a package manager with up to date packages. No bloat bundled, just install exactly what you want.

I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too.

That's nothing against Arch, it's what I use, I'm just saying really the only magic is in doing less.

You are comparing Fedora with Debian stable. Everyone who wants to have Debian stability (and ecosystem) with the most new upstream software should go for Debian Testing (and don't be fooled by the name "testing" !). Debian Stable is for servers, Debian Testing is for desktops. Just try Debian Testing (and I used Slack, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian)

This is from like 20 years ago, but I remember Debian Testing as the one where updates broke the system most frequently, or maybe the longest without fixes: Stable was stable, Sid / unstable was what most Debian developers were using... and Testing was the weird thing that was neither a release nor tested and fixed "live" by developers.

What changed?

Most of the problems that break a system are being resolved in unstable rather than testing.

I've ran testing on my home server, though since it's a bit old now I've switched it over to stable when testing switched to stable.

This is how the flow happens: [upstream] -> [Debian Sid] -> [Debian Testing] -> [Debian stable]

The testing happens in Debian Sid.

But who actually tests Testing? If it's not the Debian developers themselves, fixes could take a while. I seem to recall Testing breaking because of package version combinations that never existed, so were never tested, in Sid.

Debian testing is pretty much the worst option to choose. It can be as "unstable" as unstable, while being nearly as out-dated as a stable at points.

If you want to help Debian test the next release and actually report issues choose Debian testing.

The "testing" name is one of the worst decision of Debian community IMHO. It misleads people.

I very much agree with this, it also scared me off Debian Testing initially as well.

I wonder how many potential users have been scared off by the name... Maybe Debian devs like it that way, less annoying desktop users to support.

It looks like you have never used Debian testing (or used it 10 years ago ?). The testing phase is in Debian Sid and _not_ in Debian testing.

Eh, aside from GPU drivers -- which I download directly from nvidia anyway -- I don't feel like gaming is much affected by the distro packages being a couple years old. We pretty much just run Steam, Discord, and Chrome on these things, and those all have their own update schedule independent of the distro.

I'm hopeful that's been fixed by now, but when I switched to Linux a year ago I started with Debian, and had a lot of issues with input latency for games on Wayland. Switched to Fedora which was two KDE versions ahead and never had that issue again.

Because you used Debian stable (which is mostly for servers). Try Debian Testing. And don't get fooled by its name "testing" - it is because Debian community reserved "stable" for Debian stable. Debian testing is also stable :-)

You're right because the games run in containers anyway, steam-runtime.