With more people using Linux for gaming, certain distributions are waking up to this and making their own plans to improve and it looks like Debian is next.
The planned event is named MiniDebConf Online #2 "Gaming Edition", which is part of a wider event happening across four days in late November (19-22) and it seems the gaming section will be November 21-22. Over these days, they're planning to have various sessions with "broad appeal" that should be interesting for people who want to play and / or create games on Debian Linux. So it may be interesting to gamers and developers alike.
Some of what they have planned includes:
- Talk to upstream game developers about their experiences, how they develop, how they fund their projects or keep it sustainable
- Cover some great free game engines and game creation tools
- Look at the tools we have available to create graphics and music for games
- Fix bugs in game packages and work on game related issues
- Showcasing great games already packaged, as well as DFSG free games that needs packaging
It appears they're still taking on people for talks too, you can find what they're after and submit here if you wish to get involved in the event.
You can follow on their official site here.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I don't like debian and debian based distributions, but I must say that's good to see !
Debian is a very large part of the user base, so it will influence future development toward gaming support which will improve the experience of users and thus growing the user base on the long run.
I'm all for it ! Just more love for RPM based distributions would be nice x)
Debian is a very large part of the user base, so it will influence future development toward gaming support which will improve the experience of users and thus growing the user base on the long run.
I'm all for it ! Just more love for RPM based distributions would be nice x)
2 Likes, Who?
so it is good to see them interested by what is a vast market of non free softwareLooking at the bullet points, this seems more geared towards open source games and open source tools to create them, so I guess it stays true to what one might expect from fundamentalist beardies after all ;-).
That said, back in 2002 Debian was the first major distribution to package and include the game I had been involved with, so it's not like they have been oblivious to this particular pastime until now. It's nice to see them giving it some wider attention and publicity, though.
7 Likes, Who?
That said, back in 2002 Debian was the first major distribution to package and include the game I had been involved with, so it's not like they have been oblivious to this particular pastime until now.
Name it or it didn't happen! ;)
1 Likes, Who?
Good to hear it's still happening as there is a packaging sprint planned to get more DSFG games packaged up. As there are a ton that some people have requested to be packaged that still are not and a few of them it would probably help them get more exposure as a project. It's not like Debian is unaware about gaming if they where well then Steam wouldn't be one of the most common packages on the non-free section on the repo to be installed by desktop users.
EDIT: Words are hard.
Last edited by Gamewitch on 4 October 2020 at 4:49 pm UTC
EDIT: Words are hard.
Last edited by Gamewitch on 4 October 2020 at 4:49 pm UTC
2 Likes, Who?
aluminumgriffin Oct 3, 2020
Nice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).
(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).
(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).
0 Likes
Nice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).IMO Debian Stable is mostly for servers and stuff . . . things that are doing basic workloads and you want them to just keep doing it and never die. If you're going to be playing non-ancient games on a machine, it should probably be using at least Testing and maybe Unstable, which is still about as stable as most up-to-date distros.
(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).
6 Likes, Who?
Name it or it didn't happen! ;)The game in question would be Adonthell - Waste's Edge. And here's the Debian changelog.
6 Likes, Who?
aluminumgriffin Oct 3, 2020
Nice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).IMO Debian Stable is mostly for servers and stuff . . . things that are doing basic workloads and you want them to just keep doing it and never die. If you're going to be playing non-ancient games on a machine, it should probably be using at least Testing and maybe Unstable, which is still about as stable as most up-to-date distros.
(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).
I fully agree, however some things has a tedency to break surprisingly often in testing (QEMU in particular in my case, and also the iwlwifi tends to get really messed up with two out of three kernel upgrades in testing, not to mention the entire usb-audio on logitech webcams mess) - and I kinda like the "calmness" of the infrequent updates in stable, hence it would be nice with a "sub-section" that one could enable when one wanted to jump ahead and still mainly remain on stable.
The reason why I don't do testing (or frankenDebian) and pull in stable packages as an override is that it handles (even over time) it somewhat badly when stable catches up if one decides to go stable (my current system (this summer) is quite frankly my first pure stable since I started to use debian back in 2000 (potato)). Historically I've been using testing mainly but recently (last two years) I've found it to be far too unstable for my liking.
0 Likes
Nice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).
(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).
I'm surprised. For Nvidia, I get new enough drivers with buster-backports. It seems that's not the case with Mesa? Maybe too entangled with the rest of the system?
0 Likes
Nice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).
(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).
Backporting Mesa to stable would be difficult. You would need backports for drm, llvm, and the kernel too.
Actually scratch that. I had no idea the kernel was already in backports. I guess backporting Mesa too wouldn't be too much work if somebody was interested in doing that.
Last edited by whizse on 3 October 2020 at 8:48 pm UTC
0 Likes
slaapliedje Oct 3, 2020
That used to be true. With backports you could still have a pretty modern system, even 2 years on. Though I did just check and mesa isn't in backports YET, I think 20.x only hit testing a short time ago, so there is that.Nice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).IMO Debian Stable is mostly for servers and stuff . . . things that are doing basic workloads and you want them to just keep doing it and never die. If you're going to be playing non-ancient games on a machine, it should probably be using at least Testing and maybe Unstable, which is still about as stable as most up-to-date distros.
(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).
1 Likes, Who?
slaapliedje Oct 3, 2020
They've done it for Stretch. I'm betting it's just going to take time. They have support backports of software a lot more than they used to, it does keep Debian much fresher than it used to be.Nice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).You want unstable, possibly with Mesa packages from experimental if you're interested in in rc-releases.
(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).
Backporting Mesa to stable would be difficult. You would need backports for drm, llvm, and the kernel too.
Still, I recently was bored when I found an old hardrive that had Debian 5 installed on it. Tested the theory that it'd still upgrade to 10 without issue.
Left it on overnight as it was going at it, and then the motherboard died... I swapped motherboards and then it finished. Only thing I changed was instead of using Gnome 2.x, I changed to using lxde, as the original motherboard I was using was only a P3@466mhz. The motherboard swapped in was an Athlon 64 @.. 3.5 I think?
Try doing that with any version of Windows... or most other Linux distributions! I bet even Ubuntu would puke along the way.
5 Likes, Who?
LordDaveTheKind Oct 3, 2020
I'm not sure about AMD Graphic Drivers, but for NVidia GPUs the best option for me has been Dabian Buster 10, as you can have a very few components at the very top-notch up to date (the GPU driver) but keeping the whole system and its core components (the compiler for instance) frozen to a reliable release, and get just security updates.Nice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).IMO Debian Stable is mostly for servers and stuff . . . things that are doing basic workloads and you want them to just keep doing it and never die. If you're going to be playing non-ancient games on a machine, it should probably be using at least Testing and maybe Unstable, which is still about as stable as most up-to-date distros.
(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).
Last edited by LordDaveTheKind on 4 October 2020 at 12:19 pm UTC
3 Likes, Who?
We will have Vr on Linux for a damn time this will end up being a delay. I think that if we google vr daydream of (open source) we could have something interesting. Although I still think that the devices that use the linux kernel the device says or has some linux logo! At least if they use android, they should be given a minimum of publicity.
0 Likes
Avehicle7887 Oct 4, 2020
Nice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).
(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).
A bleeding edge Mesa would be appreciated in the Stable release, it's one the key areas which needs improving, Fortunately with a little tinkering it's possible to use latest Mesa on Stable without turning it into a frankendebian. Below is my Debian 9 system from 2017 running Mesa 20.1.9. Many of the required updated packages have been compiled from source.
My system has a lot of customization under the hood so an OS upgrade was not possible, had to find a way to upgrade Mesa without breaking everything else. Just a few months more until Debian 11 and I'll start clean again.
0 Likes
slaapliedje Oct 4, 2020
If you are customizing it so much you break upgrades, you might be better off with something like Arch? I have a triple boot system with Arch, Debian Sid and Win10, as sometimes it is just easier to get something running right in Arch. Good example of this is hxcfloppy emulator software. Though I do have it working well enough in Debian, Arch has a PKGBUILD if I recall right.Nice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).
(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).
A bleeding edge Mesa would be appreciated in the Stable release, it's one the key areas which needs improving, Fortunately with a little tinkering it's possible to use latest Mesa on Stable without turning it into a frankendebian. Below is my Debian 9 system from 2017 running Mesa 20.1.9. Many of the required updated packages have been compiled from source.
My system has a lot of customization under the hood so an OS upgrade was not possible, had to find a way to upgrade Mesa without breaking everything else. Just a few months more until Debian 11 and I'll start clean again.
Pretty much everything out there has one for Arch.
The ability to easily upgrade from one release to the next is where Debian is king. Redhat barely started doing that with 6 to 7... and even then Cent didn't get that feature. With the exception of re-installing because I went from 32bit to 64bit, I have been running the same Debian install on my server for more than a decade.
0 Likes
Good to hear it's still happening as there is a packaging sprint planned to get more DSFG games packaged up. As there are a ton that some people have requested to be packaged that still are not and a few of them it would probably help them get more exposure as a project. It's not like Debian is unaware about gaming if they where well then Steam wouldn't be one of the most common packages on the non-free section on the repo to be installed by desktop users.
EDIT: Words are hard.
DSFG?
0 Likes
They've done it for Stretch. I'm betting it's just going to take time. They have support backports of software a lot more than they used to, it does keep Debian much fresher than it used to be.Nice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).You want unstable, possibly with Mesa packages from experimental if you're interested in in rc-releases.
(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).
Backporting Mesa to stable would be difficult. You would need backports for drm, llvm, and the kernel too.
Still, I recently was bored when I found an old hardrive that had Debian 5 installed on it. Tested the theory that it'd still upgrade to 10 without issue.
Left it on overnight as it was going at it, and then the motherboard died... I swapped motherboards and then it finished. Only thing I changed was instead of using Gnome 2.x, I changed to using lxde, as the original motherboard I was using was only a P3@466mhz. The motherboard swapped in was an Athlon 64 @.. 3.5 I think?
Try doing that with any version of Windows... or most other Linux distributions! I bet even Ubuntu would puke along the way.
its possible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WP7AkJo3OE
from windows 1.0 to windows 8.
i'm not sure if you can update from this 8 to an 10, but you're being spoiled too much at that point ;)
0 Likes
I think they meant DFSG.Good to hear it's still happening as there is a packaging sprint planned to get more DSFG games packaged up. As there are a ton that some people have requested to be packaged that still are not and a few of them it would probably help them get more exposure as a project. It's not like Debian is unaware about gaming if they where well then Steam wouldn't be one of the most common packages on the non-free section on the repo to be installed by desktop users.
EDIT: Words are hard.
DSFG?
2 Likes, Who?
slaapliedje Oct 5, 2020
Remember that Debian is not only about libre games, and actually provides tools dedicated to the integration of non-free games: game-data-packager and ./play.itGame-data-packager is awesome, I hadn't heard of play.it though. Nice!
(there is some self-advertising here, as I am ./play.it main developer)
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