Great news to one of Boiling Steam’s contributors. John Kehayias – AKA podiki or 9bladed, depending on where he is on the Internet – just got his Steam Deck today. He happened to be one of the few lucky ones that got their pre-order within the first 10 minutes they went live. He got the email from Valve on Monday, paid for it, got the shipping info from FedEx on Wednesday, and received it today.

I think I will set Friday as a day to cover the various software updates that have come to Linux (particularly gaming-related) during the week. A noteworthy mention is Heroic Games Launcher. Not only has the launcher received gamepad support, but the app is now available on Flathub. This is big news for those of you who have a Steam Deck, as the Deck only has support for Flatpaks. Combined with the gamepad support, now you’ll have almost the same seamless integration as Steam.

Honestly don’t even know why I’m bringing this up. Probably just gives me the opportunity to poke fun of Windows. As Valve isn’t prohibiting anyone from installing different operating systems on their new handheld device, users are free to install Windows, and starting today, they can make better use of Windows on the Deck, thanks to most of the drivers finally being available. The GPU, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth drivers have to be installed separately.

Gardiner Byrant, Liam Dawe from GamingOnLinux, Jason Evangelho from Forbes, and Nick from The Linux Experiment got together to discuss their thoughts about the Steam Deck and how it has changed their gaming habits. They also talk about the future of native Linux games, inform Jason about the Steam Machine initiative and what happened to them. There’s apparently a lot more that they talked about, as so far Liam and Gardiner have only uploaded small clips of the entire discussion.

As the title of the post mentions, I have now added a to-do list for LGC on the GitHub’s README file, including new features to add to the site, bug fixes, and future planned articles. This is so you can get an idea of content to look forward to, and it also serves as a reminder for me what I need to work on. Note that some articles have lower priority than others and may not be worked on.

Oh yeah kid, a new (refurbished) laptop in all it’s glory. Here’s some photos: Comes with a Ryzen 9 5900X, a RTX 3060, 16 GB DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,200 MHz, and 500 GB of PCIe Gen 3 storage. Full review, including benchmarks, will be on Boiling Steam. Reason for this is, LGC is too new to be asking for hardware review units at this point; when I asked for this unit I was writing for BS at the time.

The demo for Kirby and the Forgotten Land was released on the Nintendo eShop a day less than a week ago. Pretty good game if I say so myself, albeit for the somewhat unsettling Mouthful mode. I dumped the demo and put it on my desktop, and, of course, it runs day one on Ryujinx, the Switch emulator. Lots of stuttering (that’s the shaders getting cached), but after the shaders have been cached it runs decently.

My acquaintance (and who I work for on a freelance basis), Gardiner Byrant, has released a new video today on his YouTube channel that covers a wide swath of Steam Deck news since the time the device went “live” on February 25th. In it he covers Proton updates, specific games that were updated to have better Steam Deck support, how Valve has made development for the Steam Deck easier, Bungie’s distaste for the Steam Deck, unofficial testing for titles on Deck through GamingOnLinux, the interview with Gabe from IGN, accessories for the Deck, Collabora’s collaboration with Valve on SteamOS 3.

The beauty of having LGC open-source is someone has already created a pull request to fix the commenting situation. Previously, comments were universal; they could be read across every post. Thanks to Gabriele Musco (who I assume is also GabMus from Reddit), this is no longer the case. Comments will be individual to each post. The downside here though, is the comments that were previously posted are now gone. Don’t worry though, I have taken a screenshot of the comments so I can keep the wonderful feedback you guys had.

So I had contacted Feral Interactive – the Linux daddy when it comes to bringing games over to our beloved platform – a few days ago and had asked them if they’d be up for a Q&A. They declined (at least, for the time being), but they did tell me Total War: Warhammer III is coming to Linux in the spring. That’s actually good news: I had thought they had all but given up on porting decent titles to Linux, due to the advent of Proton.