Debian Linux is planning a gaming-focused event online in November

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

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)).

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.

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.

Quoting: whizse

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)).

You want unstable, possibly with Mesa packages from experimental if you're interested in in rc-releases.

Backporting Mesa to stable would be difficult. You would need backports for drm, llvm, and the kernel too.

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.

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.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

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)).

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.

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.


Last edited by LordDaveTheKind on 4 October 2020 at 12:19 pm UTC

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.

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)).

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.

Quoting: Avehicle7887

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)).

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.

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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.
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.

Quoting: GamewizardGood 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?

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: whizse

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)).

You want unstable, possibly with Mesa packages from experimental if you're interested in in rc-releases.

Backporting Mesa to stable would be difficult. You would need backports for drm, llvm, and the kernel too.

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.

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 ;)

Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: GamewizardGood 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?

I think they meant DFSG.

Quoting: GuestRemember 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.it

(there is some self-advertising here, as I am ./play.it main developer)

Game-data-packager is awesome, I hadn't heard of play.it though. Nice!