LGC has had a Matrix server for a while. But after long deliberation – despite the fact that Discord is proprietary – I’ve decided to create a Discord server. As much as I want to stick with FOSS as much as I can, the reality is most gamers and content creators alike are on Discord. On the Discord, you’re free to talk about pretty much anything that’s on your mind. Right now I mostly see it as a place to talk about the Steam Deck and Melee.

The developers of XEL make a bold claim that it’s a Zelda-like action RPG. You play as a female protagonist who ends up crash landing on a 3D sci-fi planet. She has no collection of who she is or why she’s there. She doesn’t even know her own name. The goal in XEL is to find out more about this girl’s mysterious past, as you explore the world in which she lands.

I have been informed yesterday by the developer of Justin Wack and the Big Time Hack that it will be coming to Linux day one when the game launches later this month, on the 23rd. It’s a point & click adventure that’s apparently set in the 90’s, where there’s time travel and robots. Per the description from the Steam store page: A cozy 2D Point & Click adventure featuring multiple playable characters and plenty of silliness.

Ever wanted to enhance the game of Chess with new elements? That’s where SokoChess comes in. It combines Chess with Sokoban – the latter of which involves pushing crates to their proper destination. You have Chess pieces to move, but your goal is to push the black pieces to their destination, without them overtaking yours. The game is made with the awesome open-source Godot engine, and there’s a native Linux version available that plays great!

SteamTinkerLaunch – the Swiss army knife for configuring games run through Proton – just got a big update yesterday. Included in this release are French, Polish, and Chinese translations, the ability to automatically bump the used official Proton version per game, GameScope support with NVIDIA Image Scaling 1.0.2, Flatpak support, a DXVK framerate limiter option, new FSR options, MangoApp support, improved Origin integration, and tons of other features/bug fixes! See the patch notes on GitHub.

Quite a massive release for the popular Heroic Games Launcher today. Codenamed “Chopper,” this is apparently the team’s biggest release, containing over 200 commits. There’s too many patch notes to cover, but here’s some of the noteworthy changes: improvements to the UI, including a unified Epic/GOG library, the ability to mark games as your favorite, new sidebar design, game language selection, and the ability to see if there’s a new version available if you’re not using the Flatpak GOG cloud save support if a gamepad is connected, the interface will be updated to show button icons.

Seems like the voices of outdated packages on SteamOS have finally been reaching Valve’s ears. Firefox was replaced with the Flatpak version a few weeks ago, and now, my acquaintence Luke Short – the creator of WinesapOS – noticed that Valve has been at work rebasing their Neptune kernel from the current 5.13 to 5.19. On Twitter he mentions: #Valve #SteamOS #SteamDeck is currently working on rebasing their #Linux kernel from 5.

Small update out for those of you on the Beta and Preview channels on SteamOS. Primarily this focuses on fixes for the on-screen keyboard. Patch notes are as follows: Fixed styling for CJK keyboard glyphs so everything appears centered correctly on keys Fixed Recommended Layout not always showing up for the author of controller configuration Fixed CJK font issues in SteamOS updater when running on Steam Deck Fixed focus issue when tapping the show/hide password button Removed the gap between keys on the virtual keyboard for improved typing Those of you on the Preview channel should have also received a small update today containing a performance improvement for Forza Horizon 5.

Heh, sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun. One thing that always puzzled me is why Valve didn’t include a kickstand for the Deck. I’ll probably never know, but I can at least guess that it was likely a way to cut costs down during production. I’m happy to report I now have that accessory, which – to be quite honest – is essential for a device like the Steam Deck.

ChimeraOS – one of my favorite gaming-oriented distributions – just got a big update today. Proton has been re-enabled for Windows-based games (for some reason it wasn’t before), several bug fixes have been addressed for the Steam Deck UI, Proton, and Bluetooth, a UI has been added for formatting external hard drives, “ChimeraOS Verified and Playable” games have been added to the Deck UI, and plenty of other improvements! In addition, the typical set of software packages have been updated: