In case you hadn’t caught up on the news, the founder of PolyMC – a popular Minecraft launcher – was exerting toxic behavior towards the other developers and to the project itself. Fortunately we have our alternatives. Prism Launcher happens to be one of them. This launcher was actually created by the developers who got kicked out of the PolyMC project by the creator. It’s open-source, mostly written in C++, using Qt as the frontend, and has the GPLv3 license.

Today’s beta Steam Deck client update adds a toggle in the Developer menu for safe mode when connecting to an external display. Enabling this will force the Deck to use a low resolution when it’s docked; this might help if the external display has issues. An in-game crash has also been fixed with regards to Steam Input, and “the previous behavior of using stick deflection” has been restored, rather than “the capacitive sensor for Radial Menus that don’t have center buttons bound.

You might have heard about NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). While it may be advantagous for achieving higher framerates at lower resolutions, while still retaining most of the same graphics quality, the downside is that the technology is essentially locked behind a paywall: you need to have a RTX GPU in order to use it. But you don’t need to pay an arm and a leg for said GPU. Fortunately for us, we can make use of an alternate technology that offers much of the same capabilities: FSR 2.

Proton 7.0-5 is now available as a release candidate. Included in this update are 15 newly playable titles: Rift Unravel 2 Airborne Kingdom ToGather:Island Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull Re-Volt Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Aspire: Ina’s Tale Battle Realms: Zen Edition Deathsmiles II Primal Carnage: Extinction Pico Park Classic Edition Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind Darkstar One Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb Several bugs have been fixed:

Steam Deck new Deck client beta update increases boot video duration to 30 seconds, adds controller-specific glyphs to lock screen The Deckverse is a Steam Deck-focused YouTube channel, I recommend following him randomize your boot video? It’s possible GOL did a video going over a plugin that enhances the screen color you can more easily get boot videos with Steam Deck Repo Manager UNCHARTED: Legacy of Thieves Collection is Deck Verified Hardware the Aya Neo 2 is shaping up to be a very powerful handheld, with a Ryzen 7 6800U Native Games Return to Monkey Island gets beta support Software Updates InfiniTime 1.

InfiniTime – one of the many firmwares available for Pine64’s PineTime smartwatch – 1.11, codenamed “Red Nectarine,” adds support for external resources, while adding two new watch faces. In regards to the former, this allows the developers to store “heavy data,” such as fonts and images, into the external flash memory. This frees up more resources to the main memory of the watch. As a result of this move, this makes adding support for new watch faces and apps easier.

EmuDeck, the popular application for getting emulators set up on your Deck quickly and conveniently, has just received a brand new 2.0 update. Features with this update include: the addition of a GUI to make it easier to use it doesn’t need to be re-installed to apply customizations, thanks to a Quick Settings menu saves can be backed up to the cloud support for Vikta3K, ScummVM, and Doom performance improvements across all emulators revamped controller schemes and hotkeys bug fixes and “under the hood” improvements Best place I could find the patch notes was on their Twitter.

The dev release of Wine 7.19 is out. Notable improvements to this version include: VKD3D has been updated to v1.5, which adds support for more HLSL shading language features MPEG-4 audio support 17 bug fixes, including fixes for Resident Evil Revelations 2, Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, and Sonic Adventure DX (2004) See the patch notes on WineHQ. It probably won’t be long before GE-Proton picks up this update. We should be expecting Wine 8.

Less than a month after the arrival of the point & click adventure Return to Monkey Island, the game now has native Linux support. This is available as a public beta. The Tweet that Ron Gilbert sent out contains a link to the instructions on how to opt-in to the beta…but the link to the guide is dead if you’re not logged into Steam and you have the game in your account.

A new Deck client update has shipped to the Beta and Preview branches. Notable additions to this update are startup videos can now be longer than 10 seconds, the QAM going to the notifications tab when there’s a new message from a friend, and controller-specific glyphs have been added to the Lock Screen. Patch notes are as follows: General: The Quick Access Menu will now open to the notifications tab when you have new friend chat messages, game invites, or voice chat invites Notifications for Game Invites in the Quick Access Menu now have an option in the footer to accept them without having to navigate to the chat window Fixed an issue where Steam group chats with long names or descriptions could cause break the layout of the chat screen Increase boot animation max length from 10 seconds to 30 seconds Added controller-specific glyphs on the Lock screen Fixed an issue on the Lock screen where you’d have to dismiss the On-Screen Keyboard manually if you slept the device while it was up Fixed invoking the On-Screen-Keyboard while already in a fullscreen keyboard input scenario causing bad behavior.