I use regular bookworm with steam/Mesa/proton installed as flatpak

Works great, 10/10

I do my gaming on Bookworm with a handful of extras, and it works very well.

There is a certain group of people who insist that only the distros with the latest packages are good for gaming. Those people are wrong in most cases.

Unless you have a very new GPU (released less than a year ago), your games are not likely to get any benefit from the latest kernel.

Unless your games require the very latest Vulkan features and you run them without Steam, Flatpak, or any other platform that provides its own Mesa, you’re not likely to get any benefit from a distro providing the latest version of it.

Practically everything else that games need is comparable across all the major distros, so choose one that makes you happy, not one that some shill claims is best for gaming. Even Debian Stable, contrary to the undeserved bashing it often gets by a certain kind of gamer, is generally excellent for gaming.

For what it’s worth, Mint has a Debian-based version that I’ve heard great things about. It would probably have lots of the legwork done for you (getting flatpak, etc).

You should definitely just use what you like. If you’re going with Debian, maybe go with stable instead of sid. Your games will work. Distros that are being labeled as “gaming” just have some things added for convenience, saving steps after installation. Hopping around is not necessarily a bad thing, either. I’ve used different ones over the years from different branches. It’s good to know how they work. I can pacman. I can apt. I can dnf. I even used to apt-get and yum.

I’ll do you one better: I’m using Debian Stable for gaming and there’s nothing bad to report. Based on my experience I’d recommend that you use Stable first, unless you feel you really need Sid. I previously ran Arch Linux, but after switching to Stable and manually sourcing a few critical cutting-edge applications through e.g. Flatpak, it feels the exact same. I don’t feel like running the entire system as bleeding edge is a good idea when you can just run a couple dozen things as cutting-edge instead.

If you plan on using Sid instead of Stable, most of the following will not apply:

• Lutris has its own Deb repo if you need the latest updates, or it’s available as a Flatpak.

• If you use Flatpak Lutris and want to use MangoHud, you’ll need to install the Flatpak version with flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Platform.VulkanLayer.MangoHud (I don’t think it shows up in the normal store)

• The one gotcha I’ve found regarding Debian Stable and gaming is that Mesa will fall out of date as the release cycle goes on and probably won’t be backported. The solution is that running games via Flatpak (Lutris, Steam, etc.) uses Flatpak’s Mesa instead, which is cutting-edge. You can also try to compile a local Mesa version with this script, and you can manually trigger games to use this version instead of the system version. It does work, but it’s more complicated and a little bit more messy.

• I use the Xanmod “Main” kernel for a more recent kernel that isn’t too bleeding-edge - it stays on the previous Linux kernel version until a few point releases have come out.

• CoreCtrl is available as a bookworm-backport. I manually backported it myself but it looks like it’s official now.

• I’m running Wayland and KDE, with no issues to report (even with gaming)

• I’ve manually compiled Libstrangle for FPS limiting, but I’ve found that I can use MangoHud to transparently limit FPS as well, by using the following environment variable: MANGOHUD_CONFIG=fps_limit=YOURFPSHERE,fps=0,frame_timing=0,cpu_stats=0,gpu_stats=0,background_alpha=0. When I want MangoHud to act as normal, I switch it to MANGOHUD_CONFIG=readcfg which uses my normal config instead. Notably, Libstrangle cannot be used with Flatpak Lutris, so FPS limiting will need to be done with MangoHud if you want to limit Linux games. DXVK games can be limited with DXVK_FRAME_RATE as well, if that’s all you need.

• I make heavy use of Flatpaks for any user applications that I need to keep more modern

• If it’s not available as a Flatpak, I tend to use Homebrew to keep any other critical applications up-to-date (usually some CLI tools)

• I use cargo through rustup to keep some rust programs updated

• I use deb-get with a couple programs that aren’t on any real repos in order to get updates

• I’ve compiled a couple backports by following this guide in a stock Debian Stable VM, then copying the .deb files back out to my main system. So far this has been super easy, but I don’t want to do this unless I have to.

• If a program needs to be manually compiled, I try to install it using checkinstall. checkinstall basically fake-runs an installation and notes where everything goes, then stuffs it all into a .deb for you for a proper installation that can be uninstalled later. It’s a little buggy and doesn’t always work, but if it does it’s preferable. I rarely am forced to compile something that actually needs to be installed to system, but I’ve used it a few times with good success.

• (Do not make a FrankenDebian)

I can’t think of anything else regarding Debian Stable that I’ve done at the moment. Anything else has just worked as I’m used to on a bleeding-edge distro like Arch Linux. Debian’s large package base has really helped me with obscure programs that I used to need to compile manually with Arch Linux.

I use sid as my daily driver with official debiam steam packages etc, everything is really smooth since long time so if you want to try you should :)