this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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Linux Gaming

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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 [email protected] to c/linux_gaming
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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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[–] just_another_person 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 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 1 points 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.