Congratulations to Valve, and especially CodeWeavers, who have tirelessly put forth the effort to make gaming on Linux and the Steam Deck easier and easier as the weeks and months go by. Proton 7.0-5 went from being a release candidate back in October, to Proton Next a month later, and now we’ve hit the stable release. What’s changed since Proton Next? Well, nothing, really. All of the same games are playable.

Heroic Games Launcher continues to get TLC from its massive 2.5.0 update. The Mac version of the app definitely got some attention here – with the inclusion of Wine, DXVK, and Winetricks support – but the Linux version got some updates as well. It’s mostly fixes. They are as follows: Fix the issue with the download’s progress going crazy and duplicating the installation/update. Fix a crash on the Install dialog on some games Fix sideload games not being added to steam automatically.

Today’s update to GE-Proton doesn’t seem too exciting, although we did get a few Protonfixes added for Skeleton Boomerang and Re-Volt. Protonfixes were removed for King of Fighters (no longer needs FPS cap) and Squad (no longer needs EAC workaround). A launcher fix was added for Secret World: Legends. Aside from that, everything else is updates. Wine staging has been rebased. DXVK-NVAPI, DXVK, VKD3D, and the “media converter” have been updated, although the patch notes don’t mention to what they’ve been updated to (presumably, they’ve all been updated to the latest git).

Yesterday’s Proton Experimental update mostly focuses on bug fixes. But in addition to game-specific fixes, we’ve got support for another game: 雀姬 (Mahjong ladies) – which, I believe, points to an anime board game. Hidraw has been enabled for Simucube racing wheels and Fanatec pedals. In case you’re not aware, hidraw “provides a raw interface to USB and Bluetooth Human Interface Devices (HIDs)” and is “useful for communicating with non-conformant HID devices which send and receive data in a way that is inconsistent with their report descriptors.

Yesterday’s Deck client update (stable) is almost all fixes. Every bullet point except one starts with the word “Fixed.” Fixes have been made for Steam Input, Remote Play, Desktop Mode, and in general. Patch notes are as follows: General Fixed lock screen PIN reset process to not show PIN entry screen upon Steam Deck restart Fixed crash when touching gift or new inventory item notification Fixed “show password” toggle to show/hide the password.

Huge congrats to the Heroic team for this, well, heroic release! There’s just so many cool new features, improvements, and bug fixes with the 2.5.0 update, codenamed “Yamato.” The stable update just came out a few hours ago and contains over three months’ worth of changes. Here are the highlights: download manager – works similarly to Steam’s download manager; introduced with the first beta sideload games and apps, even if they aren’t in your Epic/GOG library HowLongToBeat – introduced with beta 3 custom themes with CSS, along with two new themes the ability to add Steam games automatically improved game detection from external drives revamped Settings and login UI improved UI performance, better gamepad navigation updates to Legendary and Electron tons of other fixes and improvements See the full patch notes on GitHub

Yesterday’s Steam Deck client beta update is all about bug fixes. Fixes for the lock screen PIN, the “show password” toggle, the Switch Pro controller vibration over USB, and more: General: Fixed size of content in Update news dialog when running with Windows text scaling >100% Fixed lock screen PIN reset process to not show PIN entry screen upon Steam Deck restart Fixed crash when touching gift or new inventory item notification Fixed “show password” toggle to show/hide the password.

New driver update for NVIDIA GPUs went out today. Included in this update are the support of Dynamic Boost for notebooks with AMD CPUs, improved performance of PRIME render-offloaded apps, the removal of stutter when moving windows in GNOME, a fix for Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, and tons of other changes. Features include: Added support for Dynamic Boost on notebooks with AMD CPUs. Added support for the EGL_MESA_platform_surfaceless extension. Implemented support for over-the-air updates in the Proton and Wine NVIDIANGX build.

Wine 7.22 is now available. Features are as follows: 32-on-64 thunks for both Vulkan and OpenGL OpenLDAP library bundled and built as PE support for the RAW print processor in WinPrint more progress on the long types printf format conversion In addition, 38 bugs were fixed. Both Saints Row (2022) and Gothic II: Night of the Raven should now run. See the full patch notes on WineHQ. Cover image credit: Volition/Deep Silver

Cemu 2.0-18 came out yesterday. Notable features with this update include the option to delete shader cache from the context menu, simplified Vulkan “swapchain code,” the dropdown combobox on the Linux version should now work, and fixed resource path for the AppImage. Some other smaller bug fixes landed as well. Image credit: qurious-pixel See the commit history from November 21st onwards for more details. Download the pre-compiled build from GitHub.