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

  • @[email protected]English
    6•1 year ago

    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:

    bash path/to/script
    • qyronOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Using that command, the error returned was different.

      Running Stardew Valley

      /StardewValley: line 7: sw_vers: command not found

      NoFpsCap: This feature is not available

      SetGameMode( ‘titleScreenGameMode (0)’ )

      load preferences (); begin - languageCode=

      No usable version of libssl was found

      ./StardewValley: line 27: 1142 Aborted ./“StardewValley” $@

      • @[email protected]English
        1•1 year ago

        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.

        There’s a comment by ssh-mitm in this thread that might help you with getting the right libssl version without breaking your system. https://forums.stardewvalley.net/threads/no-supported-version-of-libssl-was-found-ubuntu-22-04.12155/

        • qyronOPEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          I’m going to pin that for later but the “Don’t break Debian” mantra instantly came to mind, even more when I have a laptop with Mint running the game with no issues.

          At some point, the game designer will have to update the game, or it will be lost for newer systems.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•1 year ago

        sw_vers: command not found

        I think this is a macOS-specific command. Did you download the macOS version by mistake?