Gaming on Debian, Lutris and Steam

Most people already know about Steam, Lutris is a similar frontend for installing and running mostly Windows games on Linux through Wine. It’s pretty easy to install, so it will be a short walk through of what I had to do to get it up and running.

Install Nvidia drivers

I run with Nvidia graphics cards, so this part will be for Nvidia drivers.

Make sure contrib and non-free are activated for apt in the file /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://debian.lth.se/debian/ buster main contrib non-free

Where buster is the release name of the Debian release.

Usually a normal apt-get install <pkg> will work just fine. But from what I have read we need to activate i386 architecture to download the 32-bit version of Nvidia drivers.

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
$ sudo apt update

Activate i386 architecture for 32-bit packages Now we are ready to install Nvidia drivers including the 32-bit packages

$ sudo apt install -y nvidia-driver nvidia-driver-libs-i386 nvidia-vulkan-icd nvidia-vulkan-icd:i386

Install Nvidia drivers I usually reboot after I have installed Nvidia drivers, I don’t know if it is needed.

Install Steam

Well Steam is in the normal Debian repo, so it can easily be installed using apt

$ sudo apt-get install -y steam

Install Lutris

Lutris is not in the normal Debian repo but a Debian package is hosted by opensuse.org, but we need to add this as a repo

$ echo "deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/strycore/Debian_10/ ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/lutris.list

now when we have the repo, we need the public key for it so apt will trust installing from the repo

$ wget -q https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/strycore/Debian_10/Release.key -O- | apt-key add -

and at last we can update apt cache and install Lutris

$ apt update
$ apt install -y lutris

Now we are ready to Game on Debian.