I love getting insight with developers as far as what it’s like developing their project. I like the concept of having a distro that transforms a PC into a living room console, which, as Alesh Slovak (AKA alkazar) explains in this interview, is exactly what ChimeraOS does. So let’s take a deep dive into the mind of Alesh and see just what is cooking with this console-oriented distro. There’s two things from this interview that I want you to pay particular attention to, and that is:

Software Updates ChimeraOS 32 was released this week, adding the usual software upgrades, fixes for Aya Neo, and improvements to certain areas openrazer – a collection of Linux drivers for various Razer peripherals – version 3.3.0 released, adding support for a plethora of new devices, improvements to the software, and a collection of bug fixes EndeavourOS, based on Arch, has received the “Apollo” release. This adds new features and bug fixes during the installation process, as well as after the system is installed.

So, if you’re like me you probably read Pine64’s April Fools’ Day blog post and took it with a grain of salt. Well, in today’s blog post by the same company, Lukasz Erecinski clarified about that. No, the unicorns aren’t real, but the PineBuds are a thing. Wireless, Bluetooth earbuds that are similar to Apple’s Airpods (but with the probable exception of it being significantly less expensive, with the added benefit of customizable firmware).

Don’t get me wrong; OBS is a great tool to record your screen, regardless of what operating system your using. But you might have noticed something while trying to record gameplay on Linux: the CPU gets taxed quite a bit, even when using the NVENC encoder on NVIDIA GPUs. As a result, the framerate drops. Introducing a new, open-source screen recorder: gpu screen recorder. The developer of this project claims this significantly reduces CPU usage, “at around 0%” due to keeping the window image on the GPU and sending it directly to the video encoding unit with CUDA.

I now have renewed interest in playing the original Metroid Prime for the GameCube. Why’s that? Because there’s this GORGEOUS HD mod that has finally been released after four years in the making. Just look at the screenshots yourself. The game still looks great nearly 20 years later, but now it got a fan-made upgrade in the visual department that makes it look like the game came out not even five years ago.

Last night ChimeraOS – the distro that turns your PC into a gaming console, similar to SteamOS 3.0 – version 32 was released. The kernel was upgraded to 5.17.1, the Mesa drivers were upgraded to 22.0.1, the NVIDIA driver was upgraded to 510.54, and a few other components also received an upgrade, including steamos-compositor-plus and RetroArch. In addition to software upgrades, some other changes have been made. The GOG launcher script, for instance, has been improved to allow better compatibility, and the Deck UI has a fix for missing artwork, including from games outside of Steam, such as Epic, Flathub, etc.

Wow. Earlier today New World became playable on Proton. Now we’ve added yet another game playable from our Steam Deck library: Back 4 Blood. If we take a look at the patch notes for this month, you’ll notice this as the last bullet under the “New Features” section: Developer Note: We have made an experimental change that we believe will make the game playable on Proton platforms such as the Steam Deck, SteamOS, and Linux.

Yesterday a new blog post was submitted on the Ryujinx website. I wanted to extract some of the highlights of this post. To start things off, graphics are now more “stable” on OpenGL with Intel and AMD GPUs. Though games like Pokémon Legends Arceus displayed just fine with Ryujinx’s Vulkan build, previously the game would look horrendous: That’s no longer the case: Game Builder Garage and WarioWare: Get it Together! had a few GPU regressions fixed.

New World is a pretty massive hit. On Steam Charts, the game has recorded an all-time high of 913,027 players. Almost 18k have played as of the past hour. For a while, the game couldn’t run on Linux through Proton due to the EAC it had. But it seems like that’s no longer the case. YouTuber CTRL ALT REBOOT got some footage of the game running on Linux Mint. The Reddit post mentions “after Apex Legends was patched for EAC on Linux, it seems that now New World got the same treatment,” and noted that the game runs “fairly well” with some stuttering here and there (probably shaders getting compiled).

Are you a fan of the Budgie desktop environment? Well, you can hear about the project’s upcoming plans later this month. By participating in the event you also have the opportunity to provide feedback. For those unaware, the Budgie desktop environment, as the page for it on Wikipedia mentions, is focused on “simplicity, minimalism, and elegance” and is tightly integrated with the GNOME stack, such as GTK. It is the default DE shipped with Solus.