Grab a coffee for the Sunday Section round-up

Another week will be starting soon, so it's time to catch up on a few missing pieces for Linux and Linux Gaming that we didn't get around to covering this week.

Firstly let's start with the open source news!

AMD has released Radeon Rays v4.1, a "high-efficiency, high-performance ray intersection acceleration library for DirectX12 and Vulkan". This release actually puts it under an open source license now (MIT) and so it's all up on GitHub. Nice to see AMD do more open source.

KDE Plasma 5.22 Beta has been released, as the KDE camp continue to advance their flashy flagship Linux desktop environment. The aim of this release is to further "stability and usability" fixing up bugs, solving annoying paper-cuts and there's a number of big improvements for Wayland support again too which is quite exciting to see! 2021 looks truly set to be the Year of Wayland on the Linux desktop.

Developer Luke Jones who has been hacking away (with a number of others) on getting ASUS ROG laptops better support on Linux, has written up a blog post going over the current status of a number of patches. A number have already been merged and available in current Kernel versions, with more merged and on the way for future Kernel versions. Excellent to see more hardware seeing better support.

Interested in learning more about PipeWire, the new audio and video daemon that will go on to replace PulseAudio? Check out the interview in the Fedora Magazine with Wim Taymans, one of the original GStreamer developers and a founder of PipeWire.

The Linux App Summit has been in full swing once again, with a number of interesting topics. You can catch up on the official YouTube Channel.

OpenLoco, the free and open source game engine reimplementation for Chris Sawyer's Locomotion saw release v21.05. Here's what's new in the release:

• Feature: Implement cheats window with financial, company, vehicle, and town cheats.
• Feature: Remember last save directory in configuration variable.
• Feature: Tween (linear interpolate) entities when frame limiter is uncapped for smoother movement.
• Fix: Boats get stuck in approaching dock mode when water is above a certain height. This was incorrectly fixed in 21.04.1.
• Fix: Decouple viewport updates from game ticks for smoother panning and zooming.
• Fix: Some available industries are missing in the 'Fund new industries' tab.
• Fix: Station construction preview image is using wrong colours.
• Fix: Element name is not shown when inspecting track elements using the Tile Inspector.
• Change: The multiplayer toggle button on the title screen has been hidden, as multiplayer has not been reimplemented yet.

Oh and Vulkan, the high-performance open and modern graphics API got a website facelift.

We also finally changed our own YouTube Channel introduction video, which was going on 7 years old! It's now showing off me getting scared in VR - a bit more modern. We also started uploading VOD from our Twitch (follow us on Twitch!) livestreams so you can keep up with it all.

Paradox Interactive seem to be in a bit of hot water with fans right now, as the botched roll-out of the latest Europa Universalis 4 expansion has caused a lot of issues. It's now one of the most negatively reviewed item on Steam, leading to Johan the Studio Manager of Paradox Tinto to put up an apology.

Unrailed, the frantic co-op railtrack building game from Indoor Astronaut and Daedalic had a big update recently with a whole new game mode. This mode sees you race against the clock, with randomized biomes. They also added a new auto-save feature to the checkpoint system. Unrailed! is available from the Humble Store and Steam.

Hope you all have a good weekend, see you next week for more news!