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What makes Debian so different from its derivatives that gaming on it is almost an heroic task to achieve? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by qyron@sopuli.xyz to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world

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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

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[–] vividspecter@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.ee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.xyz 1 points 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.