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
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.
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.