Was hoping to get this out yesterday but time flies. Hope a day late isn’t going to bother anyone.

News⌗

• Steam Deck-related

  • ETA Prime – A YouTuber that mostly focuses on emulation – released a Steam Deck review last week, and covers the gaming as well as the emulation aspect of the Deck. Needless to say, the Deck is one of the most powerful handhelds out there for emulation. Gameranx also had a video review

  • That Boiling Steam contributer that got a Steam Deck? He recently wrote his first impressions of the device

  • Microsoft has announced official support of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription on the Steam Deck. They’ve even included documentation on their support website

  • The Steam Deck gets a 15 FPS option and a few new keyboard themes Image credit: GamingOnLinux

  • The Steam Deck finally got a low battery warning. Somehow, this wasn’t in the QA process prior to the official launch

  • We’ve almost hit the 1,500 mark for verified/playable Steam Deck titles. Over 80% of verified/playable titles are from 2015 onwards

  • The Lutris developer was sent a Steam Deck by Valve to assist with the development of the program on said device

    Many thanks to @valvesoftware for sending a Steam Deck to help the development of Lutris on the console! pic.twitter.com/mqcmNAIFBj

    — @lutris@fosstodon.org (@LutrisGaming) March 12, 2022

  • Some titles on the Deck, even though it may be Playable, can still have issues. An example is Grand Theft Auto V

  • The file size for the Steam Deck client has been reduced

  • Witcher 3 is now Steam Deck Verified

• Scoot Larson – a computer repair and data recovery service technician – recently blogged about the increasingly anti-consumer nature that is Windows 11 and made the switch to Linux. To Pop!_OS in particular. Interesting read there as far as how his journey went.

• It’s possible to play DOOM on a $4 Raspberry Pi Pico

• Several new native Linux titles are added to the Steam store every week. Check the post from Boiling Steam to learn more. A few games include Pompom, Halftime Heroes, and Billiards of the Round Table

• Google is working on building a Windows emulator from the ground up for Linux for their Stadia tech

• After years of rumors, Steam for ChromeOS is finally coming. Chromebooks that will have the initial support include a few Acer, ASUS, HP, and a few other devices

• Asahi Linux – a distro that supports Apple’s M1 chipset – has released it’s first alpha. Asahi Linux is a customized version of Arch Linux ARM with the Plasma desktop environment. Some things don’t work just yet, including the DisplayPort, webcam, Bluetooth, GPU acceleration, and a few others

• I had written a review of the Kudu laptop by System76 over on Boiling Steam. This powerful laptop ships with Pop!_OS 21.10 and comes with a Ryzen 9 5900HX and a RTX 3060, with 16 GB RAM

• Apex Legends apparently stopped working on Proton/the Deck, but now it’s working again

• The Linux and Mac ports for Psychonauts 2 are still coming

• AMD’s FSR will soon be upgraded to version 2.0

Software Updates/Releases⌗

• Iris 1.2.2 was released for Minecraft. Iris enhances the graphical fidelity of the game. v1.2.2 fixes a low performance regression, updates two translations, and contains a few other bug fixes

• A project that’s been in the works for quite a while now, but something I still wanted to highlight, is a game called Liblast (short for Libre Blast). It’s a FOSS 3D FPS created with Godot 4

• Recalbox – an emulation-oriented distro for Odroid, Raspberry Pi, and other devices – was updated to 8.1-Beta10. This release provides a bunch of bug fixes

• Bottles has been updated to 2022.3.14-trento. This brings MangoHUD support, experimental support for Steam Proton prefixes, support for GE-Proton runners, improvements to the Wine backend, and plenty of other features and bug fixes

• MineClone 2 – a survival game for MineTest – has recently been updated to 0.72.0. It’s been over a year since the last release, but unfortunately I’m not able to find what’s new with this release

• Rare – an alternative to the Heroic Games Launcher, written in Python – was updated to 1.8.8. This release includes Discord real-time presence (RPC), fixes to the launcher crashing, fixes to color schemes, as well as a few other bug fixes Image credit: Rare on GitHub

• Lakka – a distro which transforms a computer into a retro emulation console, similar to Recalbox – was updated to v4.0. This upgrades the Mesa drivers, RetroArch, the mainline kernel, the Raspberry Pi kernel/firmware, and LibreELEC. New libretro cores were added: sameduck and superbroswar. There’s a few other changes as well

• Lapce – a “lightning-fast and powerful code editor” – has been updated to v0.0.11. This brings the new Code Lens feature, and also supports multiple cursors

• Wine 7.4 was released. This sets the light theme as the default theme, converted WineD3D, D3d12, and DXGI modules, bug fixes, a bundled vkd3d library, and large scale cleanups to support ’long’ type

• GE-Proton7-10 was released. This upgrades wine, dxvk, and vkd3d-proton. It also adds video support for Nioh 2 and Persona 5 Strikers

I know for a fact there’s some other news that I missed, but I just wanted to cover the more interesting topics.

Cover image courtesy of Chubimon.