Congratulations to Valve, and especially CodeWeavers, who have tirelessly put forth the effort to make gaming on Linux and the Steam Deck easier and easier as the weeks and months go by. Proton 7.0-5 went from being a release candidate back in October, to Proton Next a month later, and now we’ve hit the stable release. What’s changed since Proton Next? Well, nothing, really. All of the same games are playable.

By default, your controller adapter polls at a rate of 125 Hz, or every eight milliseconds. However, by overclocking it, we can increase that rate to nearly 10 times at 1,000 Hz. The result of this overclock, per the document by SSBM_Arte, results in “a much closer experience to console play. It considerably improves the latency stability, which directly impacts execution, and also reduces input lag.” You might have seen this in action with a mouse.

Heroic Games Launcher continues to get TLC from its massive 2.5.0 update. The Mac version of the app definitely got some attention here – with the inclusion of Wine, DXVK, and Winetricks support – but the Linux version got some updates as well. It’s mostly fixes. They are as follows: Fix the issue with the download’s progress going crazy and duplicating the installation/update. Fix a crash on the Install dialog on some games Fix sideload games not being added to steam automatically.

There’s an incredible script that allows you to increase the Deck’s performance by modifying the swap file size, changing the swappiness value, and/or enabling TRIM on the SSD. This is all thanks to CryoByte33, a YouTuber who definitely knows his stuff when it comes to the Deck and increasing the performance of it wherever possible. With his script, you can: increase or decrease swap file size change the swappiness (or swap tendancy) value enable or disable TRIM – basically extends the longevity of your SSD What are the Benefits of CryoUtilities?

Well, this is a relief to see. Seems like NVIDIA themselves are the scalpers – rather than the ones who greedily buy them in bulk and sell them at three or four times the price – at least when it comes to the 4080/4090. See, the price of the 4080 is so expensive that it hasn’t appealed to that many people. As a result, scalpers who bought these cards, thinking that people were going to be desperate enough to scoop them up, are regretting their purchases.

Steam Deck today’s beta client update fixes store payment methods which require pop-up windows for processing not working Friday’s SteamOS preview update adds support for the 8BitDo Ultimate Wireless dongle, adds rumble support to built-in HID-Steam controller driver, and fixes USB crash with certain gamepads Thursday’s stable client update adds tons of bug fixes, and the beta update gets even more Monday’s beta client update adds bug fixes looking to mod Sonic Frontiers?

Today’s update to GE-Proton doesn’t seem too exciting, although we did get a few Protonfixes added for Skeleton Boomerang and Re-Volt. Protonfixes were removed for King of Fighters (no longer needs FPS cap) and Squad (no longer needs EAC workaround). A launcher fix was added for Secret World: Legends. Aside from that, everything else is updates. Wine staging has been rebased. DXVK-NVAPI, DXVK, VKD3D, and the “media converter” have been updated, although the patch notes don’t mention to what they’ve been updated to (presumably, they’ve all been updated to the latest git).

Aria wakens in a space station – the Entropy Centre. Right away, she’s got two major issues to deal with: the planet earth is being destroyed the Entropy Centre is abandoned, and on the brink of collapse Fortunately, Aria has the right tool to deal with this kind of situation – a talking gun by the name of ASTRA. Not only does this gun have a personality and can keep Aria some company in the abandoned facility, but she can reverse time.

Yesterday’s Proton Experimental update mostly focuses on bug fixes. But in addition to game-specific fixes, we’ve got support for another game: 雀姬 (Mahjong ladies) – which, I believe, points to an anime board game. Hidraw has been enabled for Simucube racing wheels and Fanatec pedals. In case you’re not aware, hidraw “provides a raw interface to USB and Bluetooth Human Interface Devices (HIDs)” and is “useful for communicating with non-conformant HID devices which send and receive data in a way that is inconsistent with their report descriptors.

Yesterday’s Deck client update (stable) is almost all fixes. Every bullet point except one starts with the word “Fixed.” Fixes have been made for Steam Input, Remote Play, Desktop Mode, and in general. Patch notes are as follows: General Fixed lock screen PIN reset process to not show PIN entry screen upon Steam Deck restart Fixed crash when touching gift or new inventory item notification Fixed “show password” toggle to show/hide the password.