What makes Debian so different from its derivatives that gaming on it is almost an heroic task to achieve?
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):
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!
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.
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.
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 The few problems I have encountered were fixed by either installing missing libraries or renaming out-of-date ones that shipped with the game.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.
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.
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:
I think your old problem (several years ago) was that Debian ran the launch script with dash. I think your new problem is the libssl version shipped with Debian.
Seems like Stardew Valley is built against an old version that isn't shipped with most distros anymore. In fact, based on the forum posts, I'd be surprised if you could get it to work on Ubuntu either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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