Hello everyone, Liam here for your usual monthly update. This was first posted on Patreon.

To start with, I wanted to say a big thank you to all of you. This pandemic has been...difficult to say the least. I am completely exhausted all of the time but thanks to your support, even if it's just a few $$ per month, it's allowing GamingOnLinux to continue to have no adverts and allow us to take the time we need to do things properly without rushing to be first. I'm trying not to burn out but I've been feeling that a fair bit lately.

Apologies there hasn't been livestreams lately, they will return once things have calmed down! We're still likely a good month away for that yet though. Be sure to follow us on Twitch for when they do return! Just as a reminder on that too: if you have Amazon Prime, you get a free Twitch Sub every month you can manually support us or anyone else with!


Misc

- The article search now allows for "strict" searching. This means if you search for "black mesa", it absolutely has to have those two words together in that exact order. Should help narrow down some of your searching. Part of our effort to make finding things easy, on top of the article text searching (instead of only titles) we added in the last few months.

- Overhauled the button styling for all the forms across the website. You should notice now the primary button like "Post Comment" are now a light blue, whereas other buttons are a darker colour to bring attention to the main action on every form. This is an accessibility adjustment to help people, and stop the confusion on the "Send Correction Report" button which you can use to send us a suggestion to edit an article.

- Don't forget we now accept different currencies on Patreon! You can find how to change your pledge from USD if that affects you here. It likely works out better for you paying in your own currency :)

- Polls in the GOL Forum had a bug fix to accept a zero by itself as a valid option. Due to PHP's empty checking, it treated it as an empty string and just cut it out. This is fixed.

- Advised the developer of Nebuchadnezzar on their dependency issue preventing it launching on anything but Ubuntu. They solved it with my help. It's looking good to go.

- Advised the developer of Sword of the Necromancer on their dependency hell, and it really was hell. The fix is here. It's a 5 minute job, and makes it work anywhere. They mentioned to have now done it. Hooray.

- Advised the developer of Mini Countries on their graphics issues, did QA for them to ensure the Linux version worked well. This included tracking down issues with Unity and OpenGL to point them in the right direction.

- Got involved in the Steam release of OpenTTD, to get people in to advise them on building for Steam+Linux as it's different to standalone builds. Some comments later, and some testing from me personally across both Ubuntu and Arch with it now ready to release.

- Advised the developer of Copy Editor: A RegEx Puzzle on their launching issues. The same one the APICO demo had, with it using Electron and the Steam integration is rubbish and just doesn't work causing it not to launch. Advised them on a launch script workaround.

- Updated the Steam Tracker with January figures!

- Our Steam Tracker now has the latest figures for Steam's Monthly Active count at the bottom, showing the latest speculated Linux figure.

- Articles newly live since last monthly update: ~186


I continue to be supremely grateful to all of you,

Best wishes and good health, and again thank you for the continued support through troubled times, Liam.

Last edited by Liam Dawe on 13 February 2021 at 12:36 pm UTC