As a longtime Debian Stable user, I can attest that gaming on it works just fine, whether via Proton or natively.

It was rough at the first half year or so after Steam Linux client launched where system libraries were simply too old and one had to smuggle in libc from Ubuntu, but that got solved by the next Debian release, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since. :)

Of course, I wouldn’t recommend Debian for a gaming system for a newbie. It’s just what I’ve been using as my daily driver for decades, so I did not want to switch to something else just for something as unimportant as gaming.

Same here. I keep shaking my head in disbelief when I read all this “you need this custom niche distro if you want nvidia without problems” posts, and then look at my totally uncustomized Debian Stable PC, on which I’ve been playing modern games for many years now. :)

Really, the only trouble I’ve had was not Nvidia related at all - in the very beginning when Steam Linux client was released, Debian had too old glibc, and I had to resort to LD_LIBRARY_PATH/LD_PRELOAD tricks with glibc snatched from an Ubuntu package. But next Debian release fixed even that, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.