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(Originally posted to Cohost on Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 1:46 AM)
All of my computers were running Debian Stable (XFCE) with Flatpak packages, and I've noticed some issues:
On my primary desktop, many games didn't start on Steam, or crashed later. Sometimes my desktop was unstable too, which I initially blamed on XFCE
My low-end laptop took a long time to start up Steam, and couldn't play above Proton 5.0 unless using community builds of Proton from Flathub. Librewolf refused to save to the downloads folder
My mini PC had the same issues as my laptop, but everything took a minute to start despite it using an SSD, and Steam gave the error "Steamwebhelper is not responding". I had this even on the native build of Steam (then again, I didn't restart my PC to investigate further)
I thought it was PEBKAC, but didn't know where to begin to troubleshoot. As a last-ditch effort, I installed Fedora XFCE.
And holy hell did these issues go away
Fedora has been a better out-of-the-box desktop experience for me. Its XFCE spin has more starter programs, and it comes with most tweaks I typically add post-install (btrfs + compression, zram, earlyoom, and pipewire)
Aside from unreliable family sharing and some per-game issues, Flatpak Steam works on all of my devices how they should.
Just a daily reminder that if one distro doesn't work for you, feel free to try another