I remember the first time I managed to run Doom outside of the usual “point-and-click mentality” on ZorinOS. It felt like I went back to the DOS era where I had to do the good ol’ SETUP.EXE to setup the soundcard, etc. But yeah – you’ve got to let go your “do it for me” mentality and start to get used to do the stuff yourself. But it gets easier when you get used to it.
Wow, you nearly described the same experiences I had just recently - when I installed steam and a few games for the first time on Linux. And I was also like “Oh, what? It actually works!!”
I immediately shrunk my windows on dual boot and will likely uninstall it completely in near future. No need for bloated windows anymore
Yeah, I nuked my windows drive about a year ago, there’s still some games I’d like to play that don’t work, but they’re few enough that I just don’t play them and don’t really mind.
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.
I just refunded the stanley parable because I couldn’t easily get it to work on my arch system. Though I suspect the fault lies somewhere between hyprland and wayland, as I tried all other fixes I could dig up, but I can’t easily get X on my system to test, so I just ended up requesting a refund.
Apart from that things have just worked. Funny how a title that is supposed to run native is one that gave me a headache (proton also just flat out refused to launch it).
This can’t be true. If you are on Arch, this should be very easy to do. I’ve had a backup i3 session available on my system for years alongside sway. It should be as easy as installing an X based DE and then selecting that session from the display manager
Im actually not sure if this is important, but I know hyprland has a different xdg portal, so there is that, then I have a dual monitor setup with different refresh rates and last I checked X was a pita to set up for that (to work correctly).
Like could I actually just install some Xorg DE / WM and send it? Possibly would be as easy as grabbing something from AUR / pacman and relogging, but doing it right from hyprland and with my specific setup is dubious. Then there is the question of actually having to use Xorg to play one specific game.
In the end it is more effort than I am willing to put into troubleshooting a game I will probably not actually finish.
For anyone interested: I've been using a large 144Hz 2560x1440 monitor next to a pair of 60Hz 1920x1080 ones with only a touch of xrandr (one line per screen) to make the positioning comfortable for me (just as a matter of preference, due to monitor height differences).
Idunno when this person last checked (and seemingly then set a permanent opinion, as many do for some reason) but getting X to handle differing refresh rates in multi-monitor setups is trivial now, unless I'm missing something.
Don’t know much about this game but tbh this looks rough by today’s standards. In my opinion, looks worse than the witcher 3 OG from 2025 or whatever. Maybe I’m missing the point? I don’t know what the latter acronyms are in the title.
5900HX: mobile Radeon CPU 6800M: mobile Radeon GPU
This game looks roughly equivalent to TW3 because it is roughly contemporary with TW3. (2015 vs 2017). HZD was well known for being a very pretty game in motion when it came out, though this video doesn’t really do it justice to be honest.
I imagine the point of the video is seeing the framerates on mobile hardware in Linux.
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!
You can do this with the Flatpak version of Steam, but you have to give it access to the disks.
Flatseal is the easiest way to do this.
Open Flatseal
select Steam
scroll down to the “Filesystem” section
click on the + icon on the “Other files” area
either put in the full path, or use something like “/run/media” to give it access to all user-mounted storage devices (this value may vary depending on how the disk is mounted)
Restart Steam (if it was running). You should be able to access additional devices.
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.
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.
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