Starting with 23.04.

System76’s Pop!_OS distribution now enables ZRAM. This is thanks to Pop!_OS developer Michael Murphy. Per the Tweet from the official Pop!_OS account, this will increase “the amount of free memory your system has available.” Supposedly this adds “increased FPS in games, or faster simulations and compiler runs,” especially on systems with a low amount of RAM. Someone on the pull request commented that on a PC with 8 GB RAM, the result of ZRAM enablement was “a solid boost from sometimes 80 FPS to 120 FPS (my refresh rate) and other times from 80 FPS to 90 FPS.

Vanilla OS, per the description on the official website, is “an Ubuntu Linux-based Point Release distribution that receives updates at the right time, neither before nor after, without sacrificing security and functionality.” It’s “your faithful colleague by day” and “your teammate by night.” The developer, Mirko Brombin, is also the developer of the Bottles application. It uses GNOME as the desktop environment – “a stock, clean version with as few changes as possible” – and as far as the gaming aspect is concerned, you don’t need to worry “about setting up your devices.

Turns out one of my followers on Mastodon is a developer for Ubuntu/Canonical. I had the pleasure of interviewing what he does for Ubuntu – he’s one of the kernel developers (Livepatch – he’ll explain what that is). It’s a pretty interesting interview, as he explains the controversy behind Snaps, why Ubuntu moved on from Unity to GNOME a few years ago, what’s going on with the Mir display server, and what we can look forward to in regards to the gaming aspect on Ubuntu.

General Linux Gaming Ubuntu is falling behind, but apparently the newly released Ubuntu 22.04 is “absolutely stunning.” We’re starting to see less and less games that are borked through Proton. Thanks, Valve and CodeWeavers, for all the hard work that you do 21 new games have been released on Steam with Linux support You can update the firmware on your DualSense controller with Sony’s new FW updater app. Works great with wine-ge-custom or GE-Proton The game Overgrowth has now gone open-source Steam Deck Looks like Metroid Prime Trilogy works very well with the Deck You can customize the theme on Steam The Deck was the Steam top seller for the week ending April 17 Variable refresh rate switching is “coming soon” Small Deck client update went out, adding a few bug fixes and some other features The dock, now called a “docking station,” has upgraded ports.

Once upon a time, ten years ago, Ubuntu was the de-facto distro used for Linux gamers. That was at the time Steam was released as a beta for said operating system. Ubuntu was the only distro that officially supported Steam. Gabe Newell had referred to this time as “a huge milestone for the development of PC gaming;” he noted Linux as being an “open, customer-friendly platform.” Caonical chimed in on the support of Steam on Ubuntu as well.

Ubuntu has a lot of hate. Snaps are part of the reason for the distaste of the distro. Well, if you happen to be using Ubuntu, you no longer have to use them, thanks to unsnap. Unsnap runs a script that not only removes all Snaps from your system, but also installs the Flatpak version of the application if it’s available. Image credit: Popey’s GitHub Repo For the time being the script only works on Ubuntu, and is in pre-alpha stage, but other distros could be supported via contributions.

I invite you to take a look at the first step in the interview process at Canonical: Image credit: Reddit and the original poster Read that for a few minutes and tell me whether the interview process is absurd, or someone at Canonical has just too much time on their hands. First, the spelling error in the first sentence: “to joint the Ubuntu WSL engineering team.” Second, “very occasionally.” It should just be “occasionally.