Heroic Games Launcher keeps getting better and better with every release. v2.3.0 has graduated out of the beta phase and has now become stable. Here’s what we can look forward to with this new version. First is themes. There’s five different themes to select from in the Settings menu under General, including the one pictured in the cover. Great to add a personal touch to the app and make it more consistent with the coloring scheme of your desktop environment.

For those who aren’t aware, recently Reggie Fils-Aime, formerly the president of Nintendo of America, released a memoir: Disrupting The Game – From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo. Kind of amazing to think a man who has such high prestige would come down to earth to write his thoughts on his journey, from Proctor & Gamble to Pizza Hut to Panda Management to Guiness Imports to Derby Cycle to VH1 to Nintendo.

I got a chance to talk to James Ramey, the president of CodeWeavers. CodeWeavers is responsible for a lot of the work that goes into Proton, which he’ll explain in this interview. I asked a few questions regarding his background as a gamer, but also his thoughts on the Steam Deck, whether we’ll see Halo Infinite running through Proton on NVIDIA in addition to AMD, and how he has reacted to how well Proton has been progressing.

Proton Experimental gets its first update for the month of May. Newly playable titles include: Gary Grigsby’s War in the East/West Beneath a Steel Sky Video playback has been fixed in: Street Fighter V Disintegration POSTAL 4: No Regerts A few bug fixes were added, specifically for Elden Ring and DEATHLOOP. The former should no longer crash after an extended gameplay session, while the latter should be able to resume after a long system suspend.

Yesterday the Steam Deck client got an update. Included in this update is Steam hardware survey functionality, several bug fixes, per-game performance profiles, improved functionality when switching between online and offline modes, new keyboard layouts, a “Stop Streaming” button in the Power menu when hosting a Remote Play session, plus a few other goodies. Here’s the full changelog: General - When connected to an external display, Steam Deck interface is now scaled to virtual 1280x800 resolution (more work on this feature and functionality is underway) - Added Steam hardware survey functionality for Steam Deck - Fixed issue with multiple new Steam Inventory items notifications appearing - Fixed issue with users showing up as Favorites when they are no longer friends - Fixed issues with various dialogs laying out incorrectly when the on-screen keyboard is visible - Fixed on-screen keyboard and magnifier interstitials not taking input on first launch of some games Per-game performance profiles - Players can now set game-specific performance settings.

Well, chances are you’ve probably come across this already in the headlines yesterday, but if not, NVIDIA is gradually taking strides towards the FOSS philosophy, starting with their GPU kernel modules. They’re now open-source and available on GitHub, under a dual GPL/MIT license. All the documentation is there too, including how to compile it and what CPU architectures are supported. Linux kernels 3.10 and newer are supported. Wow. About time. It’s good news; ever try to downgrade your NVIDIA driver on Linux and end up borking your system?

Just posted today, Days Gone is now Steam Deck Verified. All the post shows is a screenshot with the green checkmark with all the requirements met, including full control functionality, Deck pad icons, legible text, and a decent default graphics configuration. Nonetheless, it’s a massively popular title, one that’s been published by PlayStation PC LLC. Great to see a hit like this look and feel good on the Deck! Image credits: Steam post

Slippi Launcher version 2.5.0 released a few days ago. The developers acknowledged that this is a big version difference from the previous 2.1.15 release and said that they’ve “been hard at work on a lot of developer side improvements that will make it easier for us to work on some big features we’re really excited about.” So first thing’s up, Dolphin updates are now transparent and done in the background. This means less waiting for the application to start.

WinesapOS has been updated to 3.1.0-alpha.0. Primary new features to this update include better Intel and NVIDIA graphics driver support, the winesapOS repo has been added, and most of the pre-installed applications now come as Flatpaks. Previously, since the Neptune kernel doesn’t support NVIDIA graphics, users who used GPUs from said company would get a black screen on boot. Now NVIDIA users can select Arch Linux, with Linux linux-lts (fallback initramfs) and still be able to use winesapOS.

Earlier today the Heroic Games Launcher got updated to 2.3.0 Beta 2. Changes in this new beta includes the ability to choose what platform to install games to on Linux and Mac OS (for example, you can install the Windows version of a native game), change the theme, add games to your Favorites collection, and new ways to sort installed games. There’s also bountiful UI bug fixes, performance improvements, and other features.