In a few previous years, I decided to do a fresh take each time on what the best Linux distribution was for gaming - so I'm back for a 2025 edition of the article that will cause you to tell me how wrong and terrible I am.
A lot of early UNIX and therefore Linux games struggled with the fact that the X toolkit was geared towards constructing staid graphical user interfaces, rather than for the speed and flexibility needed by games. Magic can come out of people working against imposed limitations however, and games like Xkobo succeed by this.
Doing the rounds across the net right now is a small update to the Steam checkout process when you're making a purchase, to make it clear you don't own what you buy.
Recently, we had the news that Rockstar updated Grand Theft Auto V to include BattlEye anti-cheat, and they have not enabled the Linux / Proton support that BattlEye offers. With that change, the online mode is now broken for Linux / Steam Deck. This just highlights an ongoing problem with the Steam Deck verification system.
There's a lot of blog posts and news articles being written right now centred around Microsoft's plans for updates to Windows 11, and potential kernel changes, with some thinking this means big things for Linux gaming.
The Spanish game development scene does not get much attention paid to it, especially when compared to some of its other European counterparts, but sometimes you encounter polymaths like Ángel Ortega that deserve to be highlighted. There is a real auteur talent here that was impossible for me not to appreciate.
Valve don't exactly like to give out sales numbers, so we often have to make educated guesses but sometimes with huge hits like Black Myth: Wukong, it gives us a slightly clearer idea on how the Steam Deck is actually selling.
Today marks 6 years since Valve decided to change everything, especially for Linux fans, with the announcement of Steam Play Proton. Thanks to it, the Steam Deck and Desktop Linux gaming have continued to thrive.
While the studio's destiny would later see it become consumed by Microsoft, in its earliest days Bungie instead stayed a Mac focused development house. They would later switch to cross-platform development, which soon caught the attention of a fledgling Loki Software. Bungie would again cater to an underrepresented video game market.
In November 2022, we started a side project in my company, a video game called Cuprum 2929. Because I love Linux (being a full user since 2009) and I'm the owner of the company, I made the bold decision to fully develop it on Linux.
While other vendors continually push out new handheld pc models, sticking similar internals into different shell designs and gradually bumping up RAM or the Processor, the Steam Deck just keeps selling like hot tasty cakes.
Doing the rounds right now is a post from Valve's Steam support, when a user asked about what would happen to their Steam account when they died and it's not great news for anyone hoping to pass on your Steam account.
This will be preaching to the choir for some readers, as you didn't exactly need another reason not to use Windows right? Microsoft's new Recall AI will take screenshots of everything you do and that sounds truly terrible.
As if things couldn't get any worse, now EA are looking at ways of putting adverts in video games to squeeze every possible penny from you.
I love my Steam Deck, as any regular reader will know. It's my favourite gaming device but it could always be better right? And with competition hot (hi Nintendo), I hope Valve have more plans.
According to the StatCounter, Linux on the desktop has continued to rise and remains above 4%, with this being the healthiest it's ever looked on the desktop.
The Allegro library is a cross-platform backend for low-level game routines, which for much of its history was very much associated with the MS-DOS freeware scene that was still going strong well into the early 2000s. Seeing this wealth of game content, the Fedora contributor Hans de Goede decided to see if he could port some of these over to Linux.
There really are a lot of games, and with more releasing every year, Steam has gotten rather large as a platform with it now listing over 100,000 games.
While the Steam Deck is now two years old, and has since had the Steam Deck OLED refresh for a few months now, it seems there's just no stopping it.
An action platformer first released in 1999, you play as Urban Gutter, a man taken by an evil scientist to a secret military base and changed into a cyborg against his will. The acronym in the title then is a bit odd, but your one goal is to escape and enact as bloody a revenge on the world as possible. Any hope for true catharsis here often gets lost in frustration however.
Bluesky
Mastodon
