stay away from the same stuff you would stay away from for ball pythons(anything toxic)
young geckos are pretty susceptible to impaction due to eating substrate(from what I've read), usually as a result from attacking crickets on the ground. If you feed your geckos CGD or use the glass jar trick for feeding crix you probably don't need to worry about impaction. Adults are supposedly better at either passing substrate or digging it out of their mouth if they accidently get a mouthful.
Regardless, I use paper towels to line the bottom of my crestie cage just to be safe. They don't need any fancy substrate, as they really only use it to poop on. The only reason I would ever use anything other than paper towels is just to make it look pretty, or if I were setting up a vivarium with live plants in dirt, rather than the fake plants I have right now. If I did use dirt, I would only feed crickets in an open top glass jar(the geckos can climb in and out to eat, but the crickets can't jump out, so no mouthfulls of dirt for the geckos)
As far as drowning geckos, I've heard it mentioned before, I think from something with a waterfall that had a deep bottom pool. My water dish is way too shallow for my geckos to drown in. It probably is about an inch deep, also the dish isn't very wide. Both my geckos are longer than the dish is deep or wide so there is no way they could drown in it.
I have only had my geckos since just before halloween, so I'm very new to 'em, so take my advice knowing that I'm no expert, just repeating what I've readI hope I helped answer your questions a bit though!
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