Ok for some reason I gravitate towards Debian as my distro and trying LMDE on my gaming desktop really isn't tripping my trigger. I mainly play CSGO and my frames are reduced by half using LMDE. Watching Logan's video and hearing why he chose Ubuntu is because of the support. I used Ubuntu back in 2008 and for some reason I didn't enjoy but that might be because I wasn't willing to tweak and work with linux back then. I was reading the linux specs on steam and they say Ubuntu 10.10 or 10.04. I'm looking to you guys to help me decide. Would Ubuntu be more enjoyable?
I also had weird screen tearing issues with the nVidia drivers for my 780 watching video files.
Ubuntu is meant to be more user-friendly as a whole. There's a lot of flavors that are usually just different Desktop Environments that have been preconfigured nicely.
Kubuntu is just KDE spun Ubuntu for example, but if you want KDE and Ubuntu repositories, then it would be better and easier than installing Ubuntu and then installing KDE.
Ubuntu itself is actually based off Debian, and they use the same package manager (apt-get) to get stuff done, so it's really not that different except that Ubuntu has won over many more users than essentially every other distro so it tends to have better support or at least, more people running into similar problems.
With the proprietary drivers, there's usually a setting to help reduce or eliminate screen tearing. With open-source drivers I actually don't know at all. The downside is that Nvidia open source drivers are not nearly as fast as the proprietary ones.
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Valve do not recommend 10.04 or 10.10. That was probably a MINIMAL requirement when it launched (two?) years ago.
Don't even go for 12.04. You should get 14.04 as it's the newest LTS realse. Install your graphics driver through 'Additional Drivers' as soon as you get to the desktop as to avoid the open source Nvidia drivers that seem to barely work.
@Kai Ah yes a typo on my part. Steam has 12.04 as a minimum and 14.10 for recommended. I'm thinking of giving Ubuntu Gnome 14.04.1 a try.
@Lyam_Witherow Thank you for your explanation. I didn't know Ubuntu is based off of Debian.
I wish I would have have tried to adopt linux more 7 years ago but I lacked the patience. This forum is also making it a lot easier.
Which version of Debian are you using? I'm up and running on the latest Jessie/testing and it's damn stable and fast as far as I can see. I'm using Gnome with the open source Radeon drivers and steam runs pretty fast as far as I can tell.
Ubuntu is fine, but to me it always felt a bit bloated and unstable.
Bad CS GO performance on AMD cards is a known issue and I suffer from it too. I only get around 60 but it's extremely jittery and spikes all over the place. Tried a few different distos; fedora, arch, debian, ubuntu, all have the same results for me so I don't think it's a distro issue. I've also tried AMD's Omega vs flgrx and flgrx-updates vs open source drivers; The results all sucked ass.
Makulu Linux is pretty freaking sweet. However I did end up switching back to LMDE after I found out I could add the Makulu repo and install Makulu Constructor.