Here, let me tell you the difference between "Arch" and "Debian":

Philosophy.

One of them prefers to do things in a bleeding edge rolling updates sort of way, the other chooses staleness as an idea.

Linux is Linux is Linux. {Timestamp: 4:56} Being derived from an evolution of Minix, Linux is largely Unix based, which means it follows the Kernel/Shell/Utilities idea.

Your staleness is some people's stability in a production-grade system.

People in operations don't like being up at 3 am on Saturday because some bleeding edge update is causing parts of the system to crash erratically.

Sure, a production grade system, fine. Upgrade only once every year or something. But for home use, being stuck on Wine 5 is going to get you nowhere fast.

I am proud to announce I have done some progress! As I've said before, I have 2 Wi-Fi adapters, one pretty crap, the other fairly decent, 5Ghz. The bad one worked, the good one did not. The distributor site did not list any drivers for Linux. However, I have managed to install some kind of workaround drivers developed for Linux. Ookla Speedtest says I am steadily hitting over 100mbps of download speed, sometimes exceeding 200. Way of an upgrade from the bad adapter than averaged less than 30 and usually around 10 or even less. Not much, but I believe this is some sort of progress.

My adapter is Mercurys Mu6H, I believe. I can't post a link because of my rep, but you can find workaround drivers on github, with instructions on how to install it.

Well, it depends on what kind of approach you want to take.

Do you want fundamentals, a top down perspective, or something more abstract? Personally, I would start with a little prehistory to understand why Linux works the way it does and why so many of the popular commands are so short. Because the root is UNIX.

Then I'd uninstall/swap Vim for Nano. (This is just me making a joke at the expense of a decades dead editor war.)

Then I'd suggest understanding the fundamental idea that Linux is Linux and all that changes between distros is mostly packaging philosophy. Once you've understood that, I'd take the time to understand Window Managers & Desktop Enviroments, the colorful fluff that allows you to graphically navigate around. Understand that you're not limited to one per install, and experimentation to find a workflow that works for you (rather than you working to wrangle it) is encouraged.

Once you've understood the foundational bits, then the real fun begins.

Buuuuuuuuut that's just my opinion.

Wow, it actually seems to work!

Not that I am any less concerned, because I will still need to figure out stuff for many other games, but I guess that's a start.

Even on your local machine, it really depends where you are coming from. If you are purely and/or also a hobbyist, then yes, why not always get the latest and greatest.

I use Linux professionally as an employee and whenever my workstation doesn't work as intended, it will cause delays at work so my interest in Linux is primarily stability with bleeding edge features needed only for a few targeted things. Also, if my local system is too different from the production environment, it is a source of error as well.

In terms of complex installations where I need at least a decently recent version, I got docker, libvirt/kvm/qemu, kubernetes... The rest tend to be a whole bunch of self-contained binaries in my home folder (with a slightly modified PATH) that I can easily upgrade by swapping the binary as needed... it is all very clean and efficient.

In my experience, its a pain with a new system for the first 2-3 games when you install missing libraries and then 90%+ of the rest of the games work as intended (those that are officially supported for Linux, I'm not talking about compatibility layers on Windows only games like Wine, that's separate work on its own and frankly, I haven't invested the time to delve there), especially when you work with a battle-tested stable version of Ubuntu (get an even year Ubuntu release labelled as LTS and wait at least 6 months after the release to upgrade to it... Ubuntu 22.04 is coming out soon and unless you want to do extra troubleshooting, wait until at least October to get it).

There are really 3 things you need to get good at with Linux and then it will get a whole lot easier:
- Knowing command line basics
- Knowing how to google errors you experience
- Knowing how to navigate choice between various alternatives

The last point is a result of the open-handed nature of Linux and the accompanying open-source movement. Anybody is free to spin up their own solution (ie, no proprietary constraints) and not all actors are driven by profits (or at least, not direct profits) so while in the commercial sphere, a particular domain might have its market cornered by a single commercial actor with a single solution (and other actors are less likely to move in if it is an uphill battle with no immediate profits in sight), it is not uncommon in the open-source world to see a well established solution be gradually de-throned by a better newcomer and it really pays to always do your research.

Otherwise, for the libssl library, its related to security and encryption. Those tend to be upgraded aggressively and disabling the previous less secure way of doing it tends to be perceived as an important feature by most (myself included). Technically, the Baldur's Gate installer is in the wrong for not updating its dependencies, but it is not that well maintained so... all that to say that yes, OSes are moving targets and a lot of that movement is positive and needed.

...

That would be my guess, though without a centralized server using a certificate signed by a trusted CA (either public or baked directly into the game's binary) or user-friendly mechanism to exchange keys, you will get limited guarantees against a MITM attack when using tls with non-technical end-users.

My guess is: Some legacy mechanism to talk securely with a centralized server that they never bothered ripping out of the game.

So I got down ranked for helping a member. I am done GOG community

I don't know too much about Linux, but once I installed Ubuntu (not so long ago) and several games like Slain, Childrens of Morta and Baldur's Gate 2 EE, yet everytime woked fine :/

Sorry for the late answer. I only saw this thread today, but I nevertheless have a few remarks.

Congratulations! Keep going. :)

But manually installing packages from an older release (or a different distribution) is dangerous, as it might break your system, especially when they contain system libraries. In general it is better to extract the required library from the package and install it directly in the game directory, which I guess is also what the play.it or lutris scripts will do.

Of course it has. :P Apparently you were trying to run the game on Ubuntu 20.04 which according to the game card is not a supported platform. And you did not even tell that in your initial post, which would have made it easier for people to help you. ;)

When you try to run a game on Windows 10 which is marked for Windows 7 only you might be lucky, but you also might run into trouble. That's the same, no matter if you are on Windows, MacOS or Linux. Of course we can blame Beamdog and GOG for not supporting newer Linux releases. But we already know that GOG's Linux support is lousy and has only gotten worse during the last years.

Running arbitrary scripts with sudo or as root on your system is dangerous. Better do not do that (and never recommend it to beginners).

No, it's not a simple thing like installing a game. This thread is about trying to install and run a game on an unsupported platform. When you do that on Windows you also might run into a lot of trouble. Running the game on Ubuntu 18.04 probably would have been the simple thing you assume and would have been running out of the box (at least that's what I hope, trusting GOG for once :P).

There are for sure packages on Debian which are outdated. Not having the time to check it in all details, but in this case it looks more like the typical complaint from a developer who does not understand how stable software distributions work. Stable distributions use to have a freeze and testing period before release and in general do not update software during the release cycle, but instead patch it in case of security problems or serious bugs. Checking the changelog of xscreenserver and the freeze dates at least the last 4 stable Debian releases seem to contain the most current version of xscreensaver which was available at that time.

That would indeed have been best. Given that a library that was missing got installed, I figured the risk was low of overwriting something, but I was troubleshooting in a vm anyways. But yeah, in an ideal world, you don't want a deprecated implementation of tls anywhere in your system. From a security perspective, it is better if applications relying on such a deprecated library explicitly fail.

Anyways, I briefly tried the play.it and got as far as installing the resulting deb, but then the installed game wouldn't launch. However, once I saw in the play.it instructions that they were simply bundling the missing libssl, I figured I could just solve that problem in isolation instead and that did the trick.

Supported or not, its the Ubuntu version most people are likely to have at this point (and it will only get worse on 22.04 is out). 18.04 is reaching EoL in about a year and while I stick with the LTS releases, I prefer not to fall too much behind.

Realistically, 18.04 will still work after it reaches EoL for quite a while on most hardware, but personally I don't like running things that are EoL if I don't absolutely have to.

So, I install my Linux games on 20.04 as well and given that the problem he encountered were somewhat familiar to me, I assume that's what he was running, but I should indeed have inquired anyways.

Sometimes, you don't have a choice, but here, you indeed don't need to run the GOG installers as root. They install fine as non-root.

A script I did download on GOG.com for a game.. I do trust GOG to not be malicious..Yeah I see GOG community as I said above I am done with this shit stain that is left.

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