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.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    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.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      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.xyzOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      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