Proton 7.0-5 is now available as a release candidate. Included in this update are 15 newly playable titles: Rift Unravel 2 Airborne Kingdom ToGather:Island Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull Re-Volt Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Aspire: Ina’s Tale Battle Realms: Zen Edition Deathsmiles II Primal Carnage: Extinction Pico Park Classic Edition Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind Darkstar One Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb Several bugs have been fixed:

InfiniTime – one of the many firmwares available for Pine64’s PineTime smartwatch – 1.11, codenamed “Red Nectarine,” adds support for external resources, while adding two new watch faces. In regards to the former, this allows the developers to store “heavy data,” such as fonts and images, into the external flash memory. This frees up more resources to the main memory of the watch. As a result of this move, this makes adding support for new watch faces and apps easier.

EmuDeck, the popular application for getting emulators set up on your Deck quickly and conveniently, has just received a brand new 2.0 update. Features with this update include: the addition of a GUI to make it easier to use it doesn’t need to be re-installed to apply customizations, thanks to a Quick Settings menu saves can be backed up to the cloud support for Vikta3K, ScummVM, and Doom performance improvements across all emulators revamped controller schemes and hotkeys bug fixes and “under the hood” improvements Best place I could find the patch notes was on their Twitter.

The dev release of Wine 7.19 is out. Notable improvements to this version include: VKD3D has been updated to v1.5, which adds support for more HLSL shading language features MPEG-4 audio support 17 bug fixes, including fixes for Resident Evil Revelations 2, Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, and Sonic Adventure DX (2004) See the patch notes on WineHQ. It probably won’t be long before GE-Proton picks up this update. We should be expecting Wine 8.

Less than a month after the arrival of the point & click adventure Return to Monkey Island, the game now has native Linux support. This is available as a public beta. The Tweet that Ron Gilbert sent out contains a link to the instructions on how to opt-in to the beta…but the link to the guide is dead if you’re not logged into Steam and you have the game in your account.

A new Deck client update has shipped to the Beta and Preview branches. Notable additions to this update are startup videos can now be longer than 10 seconds, the QAM going to the notifications tab when there’s a new message from a friend, and controller-specific glyphs have been added to the Lock Screen. Patch notes are as follows: General: The Quick Access Menu will now open to the notifications tab when you have new friend chat messages, game invites, or voice chat invites Notifications for Game Invites in the Quick Access Menu now have an option in the footer to accept them without having to navigate to the chat window Fixed an issue where Steam group chats with long names or descriptions could cause break the layout of the chat screen Increase boot animation max length from 10 seconds to 30 seconds Added controller-specific glyphs on the Lock screen Fixed an issue on the Lock screen where you’d have to dismiss the On-Screen Keyboard manually if you slept the device while it was up Fixed invoking the On-Screen-Keyboard while already in a fullscreen keyboard input scenario causing bad behavior.

The Deck might truly have a competitor now with the upcoming Aya Neo 2 handheld. YouTuber Taki Udon described this handheld as “an entirely different beast” and is “the first real improvement” over the many other handhelds that Aya Neo made in the past. For starters, the Aya Neo 2 sports the AMD Ryzen 7 Zen 3 6800U processor, which has eight cores and is capable of clocking up to 4.

Thanks to the ChimeraOS team, a new feature has recently been merged into GameScope: the –force-orientation option. Basically, what this allows users to do is to force the screen orientation via the command line when they’re using GameScope. A common problem that PC handhelds face – albeit for the Deck – is that the screen is in portrait mode rather than in landscape. With this merge, this problem can now be fixed with:

Great news! Starting today, you are no longer placed in a queue when ordering a Steam Deck. You can order one and have it shipped right away! Just keep in mind the following, per @OnDeck’s Tweet: We’re doing our best to keep Steam Decks in stock, but there’s always a chance demand will be outside our expectations. If that happens, some models in some regions might temporarily revert back to reservations, while we catch up.

SteamOS and the Steam Deck client have both been updated on the Stable branch. SteamOS 3.3.2 adds external display output resolution and refresh rate selection options in the Display Settings, as well as tons of bug fixes, ranging from the crash in Red Dead Redemption 2, in-game camera control issues when using a mouse, and SD card formatting failing erratically. As for the Steam Deck client, well, there’s just way too much to list here.