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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The comments on this article are closed.
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)
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Quoting: Guestso 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.
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Quoting: kaimanThat 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! ;)
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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
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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)).
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Quoting: aluminumgriffinNice, 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)).
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Quoting: EikeName it or it didn't happen! ;)The game in question would be Adonthell - Waste's Edge. And here's the Debian changelog.
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aluminumgriffin Oct 3, 2020
Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: aluminumgriffinNice, 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.
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Quoting: aluminumgriffinNice, 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?
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Quoting: aluminumgriffinNice, 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
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