Just wondering if releasing the steam deck 2 on arm would be a huge deal. I know arm is famous for being more efficient, but would it still be better, even when using FEX?

One of the lesser known Fedora spins under the "Fedora Labs" initiative is the Fedora Games Lab that showcases some open-source games and can serve as an easy demonstrator for Linux gaming. Looking forward to 2026 with Fedora 44, there is a proposal to revitalize Fedora Games Lab to become a better showcase for the modern potential of Linux gaming.

Fedora Games Lab as it is right now just is a showcase of Fedora with the Xfce desktop and installing a few open-source games by default. They include classic titles such as BZFlag and Freeciv to games popular among Linux die-hards like Extreme Tux Racer as well as some more well known open-source game efforts like Battle for Wesnoth and Warzone 2100.

The project is called Wine Bar. There is a demo video on the Github project page.

Why a yet another Wine prefix manager? My primary goal was to make it possible to run Windows apps on my Macbook Air M2 running Fedora Asahi Remix, which is my daily driver. Before anyone asks, the project supports regular x86_64 distros as well. I could run Stream on this rather exotic setup, though I would rather run something opensource.

I did manage to get an old version of Heroic Games Launcher running under muvm, though the process wasn't straightforward. I definitely wanted a more user-friendly solution. Besides, I find most existing opensource Wine prefix managers to be lacking in one aspect that's important to me: they tend to either work out of the box for a given piece of software or not at all. For instance, if you have to install a package using Winetricks for the installer to be able to run, you are out of luck with Heroic (at least on that older version that can run under muvm).

I did find one project that was pretty close to what I wanted. That project is called simply Wine Prefix Manager. I had difficulties running it under muvm though. I contemplated about contributing to that project instead of creating my own, but the project in question is written in Dart / Flutter, which I didn't know. Myself, I am a C++ guy. However, I thought that perhaps learning Dart / Flutter would be a worthwhile investment of my time.

Long story short, I've created my own Wine prefix manager from a ground up, also in Dart / Flutter. It took me 5 months. It's functional and I'd like to invite people to give it a try and give me feedback. Thanks in advance!

as seen on steamdeck

So, basically, I kinda don't like very much to have an immutable distro, there are things I don't really like about steam OS but the immutability makes it so if can't really change it, for starters, I kinda don't like at all dolphin, and would prefer to use nemo, but is my understanding that next time valve pushes an update, all it would revert.

So I was wondering what other options for distros there is, that are not immutable, that allows me to not loose any basic functionality is possible, things like gamescope, and how the keyboard works with the touchpads.

Advice would be appreciated.

Presented by Igalia's Guilherme Piccoli at Linux Plumbers Conference 2025

Parking Garage Rally Circuit DX has been revealed today, greatly expanding the content of this popular retro arcade-style rally racer.

Currently, the DX version is only available to play via the browser on Wavedash. A service that was entirely unknown to me until the press email came in. With Parking Garage Rally Circuit getting Parking Garage Rally Circuit DX as a DLC on Steam next year. I imagine most people will simply wait for the Steam DLC in 2026, rather than pay to play the game in the browser and have pretty much zero ownership at all and have an internet connection required. At least with things like GeForce NOW - the games are still yours (as much as the licensing argument allows me to say they're yours - you know what I mean). Wavedash reminds me of the failure of Google Stadia…

CtrlAssist – an open source project to bring more accessible, collaborative gaming to Linux! Inspired by PC gaming sessions with my own family, where both young and old relish exploring rich stories with immersive worlds (like Witcher 3, RDR3, Hogwarts Legacy, etc) but find coordinated combat or movement control too challenging to play solo, CtrlAssist lets you combine multiple controllers into one virtual gamepad, much like assist features on dedicated game consoles.

Whether your helping grandparents through tough boss fights, or co-oping with nieces and nephews to level age gaps, CtrlAssist aims to make PC gaming on Linux fun and accessible for everyone. While I’m certain similar utilities exist, I also just wanted a holiday hobby project to practice Rust development while scratching a personal itch.

Please give it a try, share your feedback in the relevant discussion categories, or check out the open issues if you’d like to contribute, help is always welcome!

• User Feedback and Accessibility Community Discussion
  • https://github.com/ruffsl/CtrlAssist/discussions/15
• Developer Feedback and Rust Community Discussion
  • https://github.com/ruffsl/CtrlAssist/discussions/14

#RustLang #LinuxGaming #Accessibility #OpenSource #CtrlAssist

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/22948152

OS: CachyOS GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Board: MPG B550 GAMING PLUS CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (16) @ 4.43 GHz Memory: 31.26 GiB

i try to keep it short: i have issues with some games (like the witcher 3) and often hear that its an issue with nvidia drivers etc..

So my question is: would a switch / small upgrade to a AMD Radeon 6800 be worth it?

The December blog is out!

Bringing more classic gaming goodies with the Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 7, D7VK 1.0 is out now for Linux.

From the GitHub page: "A Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 7, which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine. It uses DXVK's D3D9 backend as well as Wine's DDraw implementation (or the windows native DDraw) and acts as a proxy between the two, providing a minimal D3D7-on-D3D9 implementation."

In the release announcement the developer mentioned how they consider it "production ready" but not everything on it is quite finished, but it's good enough to run a whole bunch of games properly.

The artwork looks great, but I can see why Escapist called it "Sarah Contra 3"

Dungeons of DUSK has been announced from New Blood Interactive. It's a retro dungeon crawler set canonically between the episodes of the classic FPS DUSK. How exactly does it fit in? According to New Blood it "starts right after the end of Episode 1 of DUSK. Literally".

It's a "proper RPG" too with skills to unlock, passive bonuses, NPCs to help you along the way and multiple different game modes to crawl through. Interestingly, they also confirmed that the inspiration behind the game was DOOM RPG, a 2005 mobile game from Fountainhead Entertainment.

A political social stealth narrative game about lying and stealing from the ultra-wealthy? Better Than Us certainly sounds like a game for the times. Sitting somewhere between a point and click adventure and a visual novel, it has a really great style to it.

Developed by Little Bat Games, who made the BAFTA-nominated Vampire Therapist it's going to feature an all-star voice cast to keep you hooked in. Here's a little more about it

I'm on Linux Mint 22.2, trying to update Project Zomboid to a beta version, and when Steam gets to the 'validating' part of the update it hangs. The content_log.txt file shows the following:

[2025-09-30 17:04:24] GetCellList - failed to get AppData for WinUI

[2025-09-30 17:04:24] Load failed: /home/USERNAME/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/libraryfolders.vdf.

[2025-09-30 17:04:24] Load failed: /home/USERNAME/.steam/debian-installation/config/libraryfolders.vdf.

The 'GetCellList' error repeats a bunch so I'm assuming that's where it's hung up, but I wasn't sure if the 'load failed' messages were relevant so I included them too.

I've tried restarting Steam, my computer, and internet comments suggested deleting the files that are causing the problem, but when I temporarily moved them to the trash that didn't fix the issue (they've been restored now). Any ideas for next steps would be greatly appreciated! Please let me know if I need to be adding any more info from different log files.

We're on the road to the release of Wine 11 early next year with the first Release Candidate now available for the Windows compatibility layer. This is what Valve's Proton is originally based on, and so eventually next year we'll see Proton 11 too.

Now that this release is out, they will move onto a feature-freeze to focus on fixing up bugs.

The highlights of this Wine 11 RC 1 release include:

• Mono engine updated to version 10.4.0.
• Locale data updated to Unicode CLDR 48.
• TWAINDSM module for scanner support on 64-bit.
• Various bug fixes.

A few game fixes were noted for the likes of Oblivion, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, King's Quest: Mask of Eternity and various others.

Oh no, it's going to pull me back in isn't it? War Thunder is finally adding infantry combat to its roster of war games in a future update. Testing is due to begin this month, being spread across stages for an eventual full roll-out during next year as the mode is still under development.

Interestingly, they're taking some elements from another game they publish called Enlisted, with you controlling a squad. They said you control a single soldier, but you have "full tactical control over the entire squad" and they will automatically follow you and assist in all combat situations.

A lovely blast from the past of 2015, Nuclear Throne from the revived Vlambeer has update #100 out now with some major additions and improvements. Originally founded by Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman, nowadays Nijman owns 100% of the company after Ismail sold their part in it back in 2024.

Going back 10 years ago, Nuclear Throne was easily one of the most popular games in its genre. To this day, it's easily still one of the best too. Valve have also now given it a re-test and they've given it the green tick of Steam Deck Verified approval. It does have a Native Linux version, but Valve set it to use Proton 10.

Github workflows:

• fixup automatic building and attachment of GE-Proton release tarballs.

Proton:

• changes imported for upstream proton
• changes imported for upstream build environment
• changes imported for upstream lsteamclient
• changes imported for upstream steamvr
• FEX now builds as part of proton as per upstream changes
• wine-wayland/em-10 patches rebased
• wine-staging patches rebased
• SDL dummy controller will no longer be active when steam input is inactive (such as when wine-wayland is enabled, in which case steam input doesn't work)
• ffxvi (16) crash with wayland enabled fixed
• DLSS Scaling now available
• add PROTON_DLSS_INDICATOR to enable DLSS hud
• add PROTON_FSR4_INDICATOR to show FSR4 watermark
• docs: Update Readme for scaling _UPGRADE variables:

fsr4 PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE Automatically download amdxcffx64.dll and upgrade games with FSR 3.1 to use FSR 4. Version to download can be specified by supplying it as a value, like so PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE="4.0.1", instead of 1. Downloads version 4.0.2 of the required DLL by default. This option also disables AMD Anti-Lag 2 currently due to various issues.

fsr4hud PROTON_FSR4_INDICATOR Enable the FSR4 watermark at the top left portion of the screen.

fsr4rdna3 PROTON_FSR4_RDNA3_UPGRADE Identical to PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE but for RDNA3 GPUs. Enables some required compatibility options and downloads version 4.0.0 of the DLL by default.

fsr3 PROTON_FSR3_UPGRADE

dlss PROTON_DLSS_UPGRADE Automatically download and use newer versions of nvngx_dlss(d|g).dll DLLs. Version to download can be specified by supplying it as a value, like so PROTON_DLSS_UPGRADE="310.2", instead of 1, to download version 310.2.1.0. This option also sets DXVK_NVAPI_DRS_SETTINGS to use the latest preset. If you provide your own config for it through this environment variable, your configuration is going to be applied..

dlsshud PROTON_DLSS_INDICATOR Enable the DLSS overlay at the bottom left portion of the screen. This is exactly the same as FSR4_WATERMARK=1

xess PROTON_XESS_UPGRADE

Protonfixes:

• yet another fix for space engineers
• fix for the outer worlds 2
• ntsync disabled for SOMA
• upscaler download handler utility added
• Check if a directory is readable before attempting to map it.
• fix for Zeit 2 added
• fixes added for Death end re;Quest series from GOG
• Add fix for "They Are Billions" crash when using Russian localization
• Add fix for "Not For Broadcast" and "Not For Broadcast: Prologue"
• Fix CEF issues in Duet Night Abyss

If anyone else finds Steam’s desktop chat client a bit unreliable on Linux—sluggish UI, finicky context menus, emoji pickers that vanish when you try to click them—there’s a solid alternative worth knowing about.

You can use Steam’s web-based chat directly in your browser at:

https://steamcommunity.com/chat/

Just log in and everything works noticeably smoother: menus behave, emojis are clickable, and the interface feels much more responsive. The only catch is you’ll need to keep a browser tab open for it.

Hope this helps anyone else looking for a more stable Steam chat experience.

FEX 2512 is out today as the newest monthly update for this software that enables running x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on ARM64 Linux, including the likes of Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for being able to run Windows games on 64-bit ARM Linux devices.

The FEX project is all the more important now that Valve announced the Steam Frame VR headset powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 ARM64 SoC. The Steam Frame will be using FEX for allowing x86/x86_64 games to run on this AArch64 device. Valve and the FEX project also both recently confirmed that the FEX open-source project has been sponsored by Valve as a strategic play. So expect a lot more optimization and gaming-focused work to continue for FEX with the Steam Frame now inbound.