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
The answer is: More conservative defaults.
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 The few problems I have encountered were fixed by either installing missing libraries or renaming out-of-date ones that shipped with the game.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.