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Seems like the voices of outdated packages on SteamOS have finally been reaching Valve’s ears.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:

Some Deck users were apparently experiencing stuttering issues with the SteamOS 3.3 update. Though I never had such a problem myself, at least it’s good to know Valve is addressing the feedback. I haven’t tested Red Dead Redemption 2 on Deck but it seems that game had a VRAM issue too. Here is what’s new with today’s SteamOS beta update: Temporarily reverted RDR2 VRAM workaround to pre-3.3 behavior Fixed an issue causing random 0.

A few months back Gardiner Bryant showed off the Half-Life vinyl wrap that he got for his Steam Deck. Come to find out he got the skin from Moskeeto Designs. I really liked the Portal-themed skin that he has, so I got in touch and asked if he would send it over for review. Turns out he sent me all four of his skins (for some reason he’s not selling the Minecraft skin anymore; it has since been replaced with the Space Commander skin)!

EmuDeck version 0.17.6 just came out a few days ago. For those who aren’t aware, EmuDeck makes it incredibly easy to get emulation of retro to more modern titles set up on the Steam Deck. And what’s nice is combined with the Steam ROM Manager, roms can get added to the Steam Deck UI with nice cover art, and you can launch the game directly through this interface. At any rate, the latest update adds support for the Anbernic Win600 and some other goodies.