Yesterday, I became curious as to what free and open source pinball games were available on Linux. The first place I looked was the Mint/Ubuntu/Debian repositories. Using either apt search pinball or searching packages.debian.org (including package descriptions), I found only one game: the Emilia Pinball Emulator, which is included in Debian with the package name "pinball".

I tried playing it, and it works fine, though it is quite bare-bones. The upstream support seems dead, though: the last commit was in January 2020, but the last official release, version 0.3.1, was in 2003. The home page has not been updated since 2010. Version 0.3.1 still works in modern distros as long as they still have SDL 1.x, but I don't know how long that will stick around for.

Next I looked at the places where I expect to find "distro-agnostic" Linux packages. Flatpak search pinball returned no results. Searching for "pinball" on AppImageHub likewise turned up nothing. Searching for pinball on the Snap store did return one result, but it was a proprietary game.

After that I looked in other distro repositories. The Fedora repository only has one game which shows up when I searched for "pinball," and it's the same one as in Debian, also called Pinball. Though, oddly enough, Fedora claims to have version 0.3.4, even though the upstream releases only go to 0.3.1.

The repositories of NixOS and the main Arch repository turned up no results in a search for pinball. Arch AUR has two FOSS results: the Emilia Pinball Emulator, an "unofficial" fork of the Emilia Pinball Emulator, along with several proprietary pinball packages.

So what did I miss? This one pinball game from 2003 can't be the be all and end all of open source pinball games on Linux, can it? Are there any other FOSS pinball games hiding on itch or in source-only form somewhere that hasn't made it into one of the major repositories?