Small update out for Beta and Preview Steam Deck-ers. Today’s Deck client update (beta) mostly focuses on improving the offline experience. Patch notes are as follows: Fixed issue where rebooting while in Steam Offline Mode would cause games to fail to launch Fixed the Cloud Sync error notification popping up when offline Disabled Steam Offline Mode button when not connected to the internet, as trying to do this currently gets Steam Deck into a bad state.

I have been informed of a bundle of games on Steam that are all available natively for Linux. It’s called the Linux & Chill bundle. It consists of six titles, ranging from a Chess-like game to unraveling colorful, abstract designs one color at a time. Seems like it mostly consists of puzzle-like games. Per the description from the Steam store page: A bundle for those who are often forgotten. From developers who care for Linux users and want them to chill while playing a variety of relaxing games.

I have been informed yesterday by the developer of Justin Wack and the Big Time Hack that it will be coming to Linux day one when the game launches later this month, on the 23rd. It’s a point & click adventure that’s apparently set in the 90’s, where there’s time travel and robots. Per the description from the Steam store page: A cozy 2D Point & Click adventure featuring multiple playable characters and plenty of silliness.

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.

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.

glibc, or the GNU C Library, has recently been updated to 2.36. While this release does contain quite a few bug fixes, it’s also created others. For gamers in particular, it appears that this update has caused a regression with games that use Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC). That means MultiVersus, Elden Ring, Apex Legends, and any other game that uses EAC (depending on the version being used) will no longer work on Deck or on Linux via Proton.