A few years ago, almost out of despair, I moved away from Debian in order to be able to play a few games natively.

On those days, the main concern with running games on Debian came mostly from unavailable dependencies or older, incompatible versions.

Fast forward today, returning to Debian, all installers from GOG run smoothly, with no error, but many games report errors on launching.

So, as per the title, what crazy voodoo magic is cast upon Debian to create Ubuntu, Mint and others, making those derivatives gaming-capable but their base distro not?

Can someone enlighten me on this, please?

Out of many games I tried, I managed to run three: Kingdom Rush and the Frontiers sequel and Martial Law.

Other titles failed miserably, including Desperados, Eschalon and even Stardew Valley.

Because it’s useful/required info:

system

  • AMD Athlon II x2 250
  • 8GB RAM
  • GeForce G210

It’s a very reliable work horse, with maxed out memory. The GPU proprietary drivers are no longer available; running nouveau.

When launching from the console, I get this report (example from Stardew Valley):

start.sh: 7: Bad substitution

start.sh: 9: source: not found

start.sh: 12: get_gameinfo: not found

start.sh: 13: get_gameinfo: not found

start.sh: 14: get_gameinfo: not found

start.sh: 29: define_option: not found

start.sh: 32: standard_options: not found

  • aruser@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    From your report, what command are you using to launch Stardew Valley? It appears to be a bad shell interpretation. Are you using sh or bash? What’s the first line of the “start.sh” script? What’s your “echo $SHELL”?

    I’ve been using debian testing for years for my gaming PC, for laptops and debian stable for servers. I’m very happy with it!

    • seaQueue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      IIRC debian defaults to using dash for /bin/sh, the problem could be as simple as pointing these scripts at /bin/bash (or another bash location) instead.

    • qyron@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I was using sh but when using bash start.sh it gave a completely diferent prompt, regardless not running. Copied the entire prompt on another reply.

      “echo $shell” returns bash : echo : command not found

    • paddycasy@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Same here. Radeon open source drivers. VR is working, too (HTC). Most oft the time what I need to find out is the correct Proton Version (Took me a bit oft time to geht Cyberpunk running). Other than that no problems at all.

    • qyron@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Under the Steam client? I’ve read Steam solved a good deal of issues with gaming on Linux but Steam is not really my thing.

      Or do you run your games natively, like I described?

      • raef@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        A lot of my games on Steam fail to run if I switch from proprietary Nvidia drivers to open, so I wouldn’t count on that

        • qyron@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Steam also carries a good deal of top shelf games; I run old and/or lesser known games.

          All the games I mention ran under Mint but, because I enjoy making my life complicated, I moved from it to Debian. So…

          • raef@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Just a warning that Steam doesn’t always play nice with open drivers. It’s the only thing that keeps me on proprietary

            • qyron@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
              11·
              1 year ago

              I’ll keep that in mind but Steam doesn’t cut it for me.

  • seaQueue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81·
    1 year ago

    There are three issues IMO.

    Another poster mentioned more conservative defaults, which certainly doesn’t help compatibility.

    There’re also issues with any non-free software that might be a dependency of the game you want to run.

    And finally Debian has a focus on stability, so it takes much more time for software updates to filter their way through the debian ecosystem before they’re released.

    Roll all of that together and you’ve got a system that’s anywhere up to a year or two behind the released versions of things your games need to run, and isn’t necessarily motivated to improve the situation.

    Flatpak Steam and similar systems should be mostly fine, until you need a fix that’s just recently been rolled into the Linux kernel or your DE or your GPU software stack. If you want the most compatible gaming system you really want to chase current releases of everything in the kernel/library/DE/GPU driver stack and that’s just not feasible on Debian unless you’re building a ton of your own packages on top of Sid. I did that for a while and eventually just switched to Arch instead.

    • qyron@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’ll be moving to the testing branch soon, so I’ll get more frequent updates but the errors I’m getting don’t seem to be related with outdated or missing dependencies.

  • ono@lemmy.caEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    The answer is: More conservative defaults.

    My gaming system runs Debian Stable. (AMD GPU, Sony game controller, steam-devices and pipewire installed.)
    Steam games work fine.
    Flatpaks (e.g. emulators) work fine.
    GOG games mostly work fine. The few problems I have encountered were fixed by either installing missing libraries or renaming out-of-date ones that shipped with the game.

    You haven’t described your system or stated what errors you’re struggling with, and nobody can help you without that information, but chances are they can be fixed if you take the time to understand them.

    Edit: BTW, You might want to check out Lutris, if it covers games that you play. There’s nothing magic about it, but some people find it useful as a time/effort saver.

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    As others said, it looks like the issue is the startup script expects bash shell, but Debian defaults to dash as its default shell. If you’re running these scripts directly, run them like this instead:

    bash path/to/script
    • qyron@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Using that command, the error returned was different.

      Running Stardew Valley

      /StardewValley: line 7: sw_vers: command not found

      NoFpsCap: This feature is not available

      SetGameMode( ‘titleScreenGameMode (0)’ )

      load preferences (); begin - languageCode=

      No usable version of libssl was found

      ./StardewValley: line 27: 1142 Aborted ./“StardewValley” $@

  • vividspecter@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    You don’t say what version of Debian you’re using but avoid stable on a gaming system. Debian tends to be more minimal OOTB too, and you may need to enable some non-free repos. Hardware matters too, with certain distributions having better Nvidia support in particular.

    • qyron@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Vanilla 12, with all repositories enabled, soon to move to the testing branch for a somewhat rolling distro.

      More information is available on my post.

      • vividspecter@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Nouveau is certainly not perfect so that could be the issue. There is work going on it still but I wouldn’t expect miracles. Unless you’re saying it’s all fine on other distributions. I’d probably just avoid Debian if that’s the case.

        • qyron@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I can install the proprietary drivers myself. It will be a blast from the past, as when I started in Linux. Fun times. That concern is easy to address.

  • raptir@lemdro.idEnglish
    31·
    1 year ago

    What GPU do you have? Honestly any of them could have a better driver setup out of the box on Ubuntu.

    • raptir@lemdro.idEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      And just to say - it’s not that you couldn’t fix it, but installing the proprietary drivers for an Nvidia card or updating mesa for AMD or Intel would help.

  • Willdrick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have Debian on a secondary laptop and it’s rock solid. I’m really tempted to go debian on my main rig but keep the gaming stuff as flatpaks for more frequent updates

    • qyron@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Debian was my daily driver for years. For fun I mostly ran games from the repos and out of boredom learned how to run Neverwinter Nights.

      It was when gaming onnlinux gained more traction I moved to a derivative but Debian is Debian and I really want to go back.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    Try Fedora 38 and enjoy that different type of pain.

    Use an Ubuntu derivative geared towards gaming maybe. Debian stock is made generic to perform as best for core features on as many hardware configurations as possible, mostly for server stacks. There’s also a TON of tools and scripts out there that can tune a default install for you to make it perform better for gaming.

    • qyron@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I ran Mint for about six years but Debian is my first love. It’s a harsh and cruel mistress but it has a mystique I never found on other distros.

    • agent_flounder@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Or use Nobara and probably quite a bit less pain; meanwhile, stability for me has been …not as good as mint … But I havent tried to track it down either so maybe it’s just something simple.