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Debian Wiki Games portal - This portal covers topics about video games in Debian.

Games list

For a comprehensive view of all games packaged in Debian, check the Debian Games Pure Blend lists.

Table below contains only lists games for which a specific wiki page was created.

Games availability in Debian

Debian games availability follow the same logic than other packages with a separation of main, contrib and non-free software. See Debian Policy for a more in-depth explanation.

Please do note that not *every* non-free game can be packaged¹ within Debian. Non-free repositories can only contain software for which authorization was given to be redistributable, which is not the case for most commercial games.

Frequently, some games have a separation between the engine, and the data. It can happen that some commercial games have their engine rewritten under a free license (e.g.: OpenMW, GemRB), or their source code becomes free (e.g.: ioquake3). As a result, some of these engines are available in Debian repositories, either into main when freely licensed game data are available, or in contrib when there aren't.

If you own proprietary games for which such a free engine exist, you might want to package the data with game-data-packager.

Games related software

game-data-packager and ./play.it

game-data-packager is a helper tool which takes game data as an input, and builds a Debian package as the output. The idea is to provide a clean way to install games, with both engine and data being managed from within the user's prefered package manager. Its focus is on games with free engines available in Debian repositories. Non-free binaries might be required for some games, a warning will be displayed before running non-free code for the first time.

./play.it fulfills the same purpose, but extends it to whole games. That means it will package not only the game data, but also the binaries, and create menu entries so that you can start games just like any application from your Desktop Environment. It only supports DRM-free game installers. Most of the supported games come with non-free engines, no warning is displayed before running non-free code.

Emulation

A vast collection of emulators is available in Debian. This ranges from very old computers (such as vice for C64) to console platforms (such as mednafen).

Windows compatibility layer

As its full name implies, Wine Is Not an Emulator. Its purpose is not to virtualize the hardware, but to translate system calls of Microsoft Windows systems into ones corresponding with the OS running wine.

Useful pages and links:

• Wine - compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on Linux

• WineHQ AppDB - compatibility list for applications/games running with wine

• playonlinux - frontend for Wine

• Proton_(software) is a wine fork aiming better integration with Steam platform

Debian Games Pure Blend

Debian Games Pure Blend makes available several metapackages (with names starting with games-*). It is an easy way to find a game according to its genre or some other criteria, or to install good sets of games if one plans to dedicate his/her Debian system to gaming.

A description of the metapackages is available in the Debian Games Pure Blend pages.

Platforms, Launchers, and Tools

Lutris

Lutris (lutris) is one of the most sophisticated and polished platforms for running games on linux. It can run games acquired from a variety of sources, including GOG, Steam, Epic Games Store, and Humble Bundle. Games are run via a variety of "runners," including Wine. See its website for easy to follow basic setup instructions.

Steam

See the Wiki Steam page.

Other Launchers and Tools

• RetroArch: a front-end for various emulators

• Legendary: a CLI launcher for games from the Epic Games Store

• Heroic Games Launcher: a GUI launcher that uses Legendary to launch games from the Epic Games Store

• lgogdownloader: "a client for the GOG.com download API, allowing simple downloads and updates of games and other files from GOG.com."

• minigalaxy: simple GOG Linux client.

Further Resources

• itch.io

Links

• List of games from the Debian Games Pure Blend

• All games packages in Debian Stable

• Games related links: Teams/Games/Links

• Development: Debian Games Team

• Hardware: Gamepad

Wiki pages

List of pages related to games in Debian:

• CategoryPortal | CategorySoftware | CategoryGame