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.
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 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
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.
I can install the proprietary drivers myself. It will be a blast from the past, as when I started in Linux. Fun times. That concern is easy to address.
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 The few problems I have encountered were fixed by either installing missing libraries or renaming out-of-date ones that shipped with the game.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.
Try Fedora 38 and enjoy that different type of pain.
Use an Ubuntu derivative geared towards gaming maybe. Ubuntu stock is made generic to perform as best for core features on as many hardware configurations as possible. 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.
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!
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:
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 actually get it to work on Ubuntu anymore.
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.
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