Great news for those of you outside the US/UK. The Steam Deck is now available for reservation/purchase in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong! In a new Steam blog post, the following was mentioned: We are happy to announce today that Steam Deck is expanding to more regions. With the help of Komodo, Steam Deck will ship later this year in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. You can reserve via Valve’s authorized reseller, Komodo.

DXVK has been updated to 1.10.3. New features in this update include the support for shared fences, which is needed for Halo Infinite’s videos to work. Fixes and workarounds have been added to Need for Speed 3, Ninja Blade, and Ys Origin. The insanely popular Stray has d3d11.ignoreGraphicsBarriers enabled “to work around some GPU-bound performance issues.” Finally, a regression was fixed from the previous release that caused rendering issues in certain D3D11 titles, including Bioshock Infinite and Prey.

A new Deck client update has rolled out on the Beta and Preview channels. It’s small but contains a few bug fixes. You’ll particularly like this one if you dock your Deck to an external monitor and “have overscan issues.” Some bugs have also been fixed in regards to viewing guides in the overlay, or when viewing acheivements. Patch notes are as follows: Added ability to adjust image display settings for external displays that have overscan issues Fixed issues with some images being too large when viewing guides in the overlay Fixed spoiler tags in guides to be selectable so that they can be revealed Fixed issue with medium length game names in the Main Menu Overlay not properly scrolling Fixed Achievements page not updating properly when a new achievement was earned Patch notes can also be seen on Steam.

Great news for those of you who use Ryujinx, the Nintendo Switch emulator. Vulkan is now been merged with the main build! You no longer need to use the PR build. This has been a long time in the making, and I’m not going to go over the tremendous amount of benefits this backend has over OpenGL; you can read the blog post from the Ryujinx team if you want to learn more.

Kernel 5.19 released as stable just a few hours ago. Notable features include further Zen 4 APU support, further support for the Intel DG2/Alchemist GPU, idle driver support for Alder Lake processors, initial support for Raptor Lake P processors, Apple M1 NVMe controller support, and tons of other features/bug fixes/performance improvements. There’s also supposedly performance improvements for the HP Dev One. Linus himself wrote regarding the ARM support for MacBooks:

New Proton Experimental update has just landed. It’s a relatively small update but you’ll like it if you happen to be a fan of either Unravel 2 or Zuma’s Revenge! Both games are now playable. In addition, performance for HROT has been improved. Fixes have been added to Civ IV and OUTRIDERS – the former should no longer crash on world creation, and the latter should no longer hang on the black screen when launching the game on the Steam Deck.

New Steam Deck client update has rolled out to those on the Beta and Preview branches. Particularly noteworthy changes include the addition of a temperature checker that warns the user if the Deck is outside the safe operating range, favorite/popular guides have been added as an option to the Steam overlay, and sounds are no longer played when an achievement has been earned. Besides this there have been several bug fixes, including performance issues for those who have a lot of screenshots, and issues with the Steam overlay for games that don’t have achievements.

UPDATE: the SteamOS beta update is now official. As confirmed, Firefox is now Flatpak-based. There’s also a new theme for the Plasma desktop, network connections are shared between Desktop and Game Mode, a small update for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean keyboards, the controller firmware has been updated, and the Xbox login window should now render characters that were previously hidden. Looks like a new update has shipped to SteamOS on the “Main” OS update channel, but don’t get your hopes up – almost everything that I mentioned in my SteamOS piece, those packages have not been upgraded.

Pretty big release for GE-Proton today, and it seems like it mostly centers around getting some more issues with Halo Infinite fixed. First, dxvk, vkd3d-proton, and Wine have all been updated to the latest git. All three components have gotten the necessary patches for Halo Infinite merged. The campaign mode is playable now (even though it was technically working before, based on some reports I heard) and apparently there’s no need to rename or delete the video files anymore.

While I was lurking in the community Discord, I found out that ChimeraOS – essentially the fans’ version of SteamOS 2.0, featuring much more up-to-date packages and some other goodies, while still retaining the console-like experience – had its’ third anniversary last Friday. I’m more or less going to paste what I said in that Discord: “I had reviewed the distro over on Boiling Steam two years ago. I remember I installed it on a small, red cube-shaped PC I had at the time.