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Latest 30 Comments

News - Four FINAL FANTASY games have arrived on GOG in the Preservation Program
By middle_pickup, 29 Jan 2026 at 12:38 pm UTC

Very good to see these enter the preservation program. I would like to see the XIII trilogy added as well since those are currently sort of difficult to run without user patches. My understanding is the GOG preservation program includes work on GOG's part to modify the games to run well on modern systems.

News - Deck-builder meets bullet heaven with Hordes of Fate : A Hand of Fate Adventure arriving in Q2 2026
By hardpenguin, 29 Jan 2026 at 12:31 pm UTC

Hand of Fate games were amazing. I hope this one will be at least good as well!

News - The free and open source Godot Engine 4.6 is out now with major upgrades
By Pyretic, 29 Jan 2026 at 12:31 pm UTC

Quoting: Phlebiac
Quoting: PyreticUnfortunately, NVIDIA's and AMD's Vulkan drivers on Windows is such a goddamn mess
Rather than the drivers being "a goddamn mess", I suspect a lot of it is the game engines being the problem. Godot shouldn't have that problem, but I have no idea what issues people ran into (maybe Intel and AMD Windows driver bugs?).
[Here's a recent AMD Vulkan issue on Windows](https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/109378), that could only be fixed by switching to DX12 or waiting for a graphics driver update. Keep in mind that this was a regression, meaning that this had happened before.

[Here's a recent NVIDIA Vulkan issue on Windows](https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/102219).

Again, no hate to either the Khronos Group or the Godot developers, but Vulkan just isn't well supported on Windows.

News - Meet the mind behind Bazzite - an interview with Kyle Gospodnetich
By Corben, 29 Jan 2026 at 11:35 am UTC

Why can’t we just call it a Linux distro?
I think that’s the beauty of a “Gaming distro”
Kk, not a distro, a Gaming distro it is! 😆 *scnr*

Thanks for this interview!

News - Open Gaming Collective (OGC) formed to push Linux gaming even further
By lilovent, 29 Jan 2026 at 11:29 am UTC

Yes, the usual suspects and that is telling.

News - Bazzite Linux founder releases statement asking GPD to cease using their name
By Mambo, 29 Jan 2026 at 10:56 am UTC

In further GPD shenanigans, they misrepresented videos from streamers playing on Steam Deck by splicing their handhelds into the streamer's footage, naturally without permission: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/04/gpd-are-getting-quite-desperate-against-the-steam-deck/

News - Bazzite Linux founder releases statement asking GPD to cease using their name
By Mambo, 29 Jan 2026 at 10:48 am UTC

GPD does have form claiming association with prominent third parties that never actually worked with them. It can't be naive on their part.

Previously, they claimed Valve was working with them on official SteamOS support for the GPD 4, which was also inaccurate: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/01/gpd-win-4-handheld-plans-to-support-valves-steamos-in-2025/

News - The popular Arch-based distro CachyOS gets a new release with a significantly reworked installer
By Occult, 29 Jan 2026 at 10:46 am UTC

switched to cachy os after being tired of windows after all these years and i am impressed with how easy the switch was with the new installer. Tried GRUB and limine without issue updating and boot was fine and drivers where found.

Hardware being used i9-12900KF and RTX 5070, games work with frame gen using proton-GE latest and cachy proton but found GE to be more stable with frame gen especially on arc raiders (seeing 400fps+)

Temps on hardware are much lower than windows seeing 20-30degrees on CPU which i never saw on windows before.

Yes, it takes some time to learn linux especially arch but this distro won me over.

News - Open Gaming Collective (OGC) formed to push Linux gaming even further
By Liam Dawe, 29 Jan 2026 at 10:43 am UTC

Quoting: KeksusSo this basically?

https://xkcd.com/927/
No, it's literally the opposite, that's part of the entire point. They're bundling things together, and working more on upstreaming things so there's less competing things. Did...you even read the article? It was pretty clear lol.

News - Open Gaming Collective (OGC) formed to push Linux gaming even further
By Gerarderloper, 29 Jan 2026 at 10:00 am UTC

More collaboration in open-source is always welcome.

News - GOG now using AI generated images on their store
By pb, 29 Jan 2026 at 9:58 am UTC

Vibe-coded GOG Galaxy client for Linux coming soon?

News - Open Gaming Collective (OGC) formed to push Linux gaming even further
By The_Real_Bitterman, 29 Jan 2026 at 9:57 am UTC

Quoting: Stella
Quoting: The_Real_Bitterman"Reduce duplicate efforts", "replacing Lutris with fagus launcher" ... Nobody forced them not to use Flatpaks...

This really sounds like a self inflicted issue caused by point-releases and their cravings to package everything downstream instead. Then call it a win to form an organization to fix what they caused themselves...

I mean nobody prohibited them to push their modifications to the mainline kernel even before.

While I also came to learn that all these "gaming tweaks" and "optimisations" usually don't deliver any real differences or significant improvements over something not having these "gaming optimisations".
Flatpak launchers have many issues including gamescope/scopebuddy not working and using their own outdated Mesa, as well as being affected by the Nvidia Flatpak driver issues, this is why a built in launcher is greatly preferred
Uhm, no. Gamescope works fine here. I mean there's literally an up-to-date Gamescope runtime which just maps into every flatpaks supporting it. But also why then not shipping just Gamescope outside of flatpak? Gamemode works the same way. Installed on the host and everything flatpak can use gamemoderun just fine.

What NVIDIA flatpak driver issue? Do I live in a parallel universe? Zero issue with flatpaks and NVIDIA drivers here. They just work. (Well despite the usual NVIDIA stuff you have regardless)

News - NVIDIA security bulletin for January 2026 reveals new GPU driver security issues
By clatterfordslim, 29 Jan 2026 at 9:54 am UTC

Quoting: CaldathrasAnd I've been holding off on 580.126.09 because someone here mentioned problems with XFCE.
Yes it was me I think. Screen flickering in Xfce and Cinnamon. To fix screen flickering, make sure you setup composition pipeline in Nvidia Settings.
Next put this command into your terminal and reboot.
xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/vblank_mode -s off
What this command does is switch off vblank in Xfwm4.
That is why the screen and opened apps start flickering, vblank needs to be switched off. Once rebooted Flickering gone forever.

News - The modular Linux handheld Mecha Comet is up on Kickstarter
By The_Real_Bitterman, 29 Jan 2026 at 9:51 am UTC

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: The_Real_Bitterman
Quoting: PaldinoXWhats wrong with Fedora?
Quoting: AsciiWolfWhy? Fedora is one of the best polished and easy to use distros nowadays.
The better question is, what is not wrong with Fedora. But also I am not willing to discuss this with random strangers in the GoL comments section. Sounds like a waste of effort.
That's real bitter, man.
I actually laughed at this one more than I probably should 😅

Usually I get "Username checks out" and the likes. This one is pure comedy gold. Thank you!

News - Open Gaming Collective (OGC) formed to push Linux gaming even further
By The_Real_Bitterman, 29 Jan 2026 at 9:49 am UTC

Quoting: fenglengshun
Quoting: The_Real_Bitterman"Reduce duplicate efforts", "replacing Lutris with fagus launcher" ... Nobody forced them not to use Flatpaks...

This really sounds like a self inflicted issue caused by point-releases and their cravings to package everything downstream instead. Then call it a win to form an organization to fix what they caused themselves...

I mean nobody prohibited them to push their modifications to the mainline kernel even before.

While I also came to learn that all these "gaming tweaks" and "optimisations" usually don't deliver any real differences or significant improvements over something not having these "gaming optimisations".
The issue with Lutris is that, as far as I'm aware, there are still things that don't work as well with its Flatpak version vs Native version. The one thing that I recall was that Steam can't control / monitor the run status of games run by Flatpak Lutris - which could be an issue for a distro where user is expected to be on Steam's Game Mode a lot of the times.

For a distro based on Fedora Atomic that is meant to be as battery-included (ready-to-use) as possible, it does need to include a lot of things. This is their goal - and for the most part the issue has been the sheer amount of devices they support.

Which is where kernel is an issue. I used NixOS with nix-cachyos-kernel flake. Even with THAT there are still a number of things that don't work and performance was garbage (it was already garbage with the default kernel tbh). And that's with a kernel based on the distro that is most focused on performance. As soon as I actually switched to CachyOS itself, everything becomes so much faster. Even back on Bazzite, I've had days where after a while my ROG Ally slows down and I need to restart - something which hasn't been an issue with CachyOS as I left it for the past few days to sync files from my server and download my games from Steam. At the same time, Bazzite also did some work with HHD which requires working some custom kernel and config stuff - those are getting semi-abandoned, but not fully as they do want to bring things like ROG/View Button Switching even after the InputPlumber migration.

At the same time, these are versions of the kernel for specific usecase. Linux is still predominantly used for servers - Valve and everyone else do try to upstream what they can, but obviously not everything can make it upstream. Nevermind the need to just move fast and support hardware if we want people to take Linux seriously as a desktop OS and not just get easily dismissed with, "Yeah, it's cool, but it doesn't support my hardware until months later, so it's a useless OS for me."

It does matter - a lot of these does matter. I used to be someone who scoffed at all these custom stuff but after trying to do it myself, I really do appreciate how well they make these things as ready-to-use as possible even for newbies.
My experience seems to differ a lot. But first of I am a Tumbleweed user since forever. Hardware support on rolling release is usually not a big deal. It's all those pesky point-releases drawing the "Linux does not support new hardware"-image. While I say, a point release has nothing to do on a Desktop system.

As of CachyOS being so much faster I can not confirm. Everything I benchmark myself (with Tumbleweed vs Cachy) was roughly on par. Sometimes Cachy delivered a few more frames sometimes Tumbleweed. Most of the time neither did.

Tbh I don't know what TW does with their -default Kernel as there's also a -vanilla Linux kernel in the repos. Maybe they do some optimisations themselves which is why it doesn't get outperformed by Cachy.

As of unsupported Hardware I didn't ran into any systems not supported by Tumbleweed. Sure they do not have dedicated images for certain hardware as like Bazzite does. There's just one version (not counting Tumbleweed based distros like Kalpa or Aeon here). Also I do only own regular PCs, Laptop and a SteamDeck. Neither of which required extra tweaks or drivers (besides NVIDIA) to run properly.

Using stuff like OpenRGB made all the RGB stuff work as well.

No need for extra input drivers for the SteamDecks trackpads or extra buttons. They just worked (assuming Steam is running otherwise they where mapped to Keyboard and Mouse)

And so one. Zero issue since years. No need for a dedicated distro either. But I might as well not run the problematic systems, maybe, which is why I didn't ran into issues.

I am not sure if I understood the first thing you said right. What can't be controlled by flatpak Lutris? Inhibit screensaver? Sure this works. That's what portals and DBUS is made for.

News - UK lawsuit against Valve given the go-ahead, Steam owner facing up to £656 million in damages
By pb, 29 Jan 2026 at 9:19 am UTC

Quoting: drenAgain this is misleading. Once you download your game from GOG, you can completely remove them from the scenario of installation at all. You have the files, you can install it on as many computers as you want and you don't have to login to play the game. You absolutely cannot do that with Steam.
You absolutely can. There are lots of DRM-free games on steam and downloading the files is the only thing you need to do in order to run them. Obviously you can't do that with games relying on Steam DRM (at least not without using workarounds), but that's something the developer put in there, and not valve. Valve does not require any kind of DRM for games sold on Steam.

News - UK lawsuit against Valve given the go-ahead, Steam owner facing up to £656 million in damages
By pb, 29 Jan 2026 at 8:55 am UTC

If valve's cut inflates the prices, then how come games that are not on steam (ubi/origin/nintendo exclusives) cost the same? $60/70 at launch? They're selling on their own stores, so shouldn't they be 30% cheaper or something? Or how about epic exclusives? Dead Island 2 was $59.99 at launch (one-year epic store exclusive), and a year later it launched on steam at the same price. Shouldn't they take advantage of epic's lower cut and give the consumers a better price in the first year, before the alleged steam price parity was enforced? No? Anyone?

News - Open Gaming Collective (OGC) formed to push Linux gaming even further
By Stella, 29 Jan 2026 at 8:37 am UTC

Quoting: tpauOften you have hardware that has no or just out of tree drivers, so i welcome any concerted effort to change that.
Gaming critical software for me also includes wine, wine-staging, umu, proton, LACT, coolercontrol, DXVK, VKD3D , Mangohud, Goverlay, LinuxGamingBenchmark,CapFrameX,Heroic-Launcher, Lutris, Playnite, VR-Stuff , OBS,OpenRazer, OpenRGB and more besides the drivers.
I agree, while I could just use Fedora Kionite and customize that, I can't really be bothered to do that when someone else already has done the hard work for me. When I'm tired after a long work week, I just want to play games and have a reliable working OS, and Bazzite provides just that.

News - Open Gaming Collective (OGC) formed to push Linux gaming even further
By fenglengshun, 29 Jan 2026 at 8:29 am UTC

Quoting: The_Real_Bitterman"Reduce duplicate efforts", "replacing Lutris with fagus launcher" ... Nobody forced them not to use Flatpaks...

This really sounds like a self inflicted issue caused by point-releases and their cravings to package everything downstream instead. Then call it a win to form an organization to fix what they caused themselves...

I mean nobody prohibited them to push their modifications to the mainline kernel even before.

While I also came to learn that all these "gaming tweaks" and "optimisations" usually don't deliver any real differences or significant improvements over something not having these "gaming optimisations".
The issue with Lutris is that, as far as I'm aware, there are still things that don't work as well with its Flatpak version vs Native version. The one thing that I recall was that Steam can't control / monitor the run status of games run by Flatpak Lutris - which could be an issue for a distro where user is expected to be on Steam's Game Mode a lot of the times.

For a distro based on Fedora Atomic that is meant to be as battery-included (ready-to-use) as possible, it does need to include a lot of things. This is their goal - and for the most part the issue has been the sheer amount of devices they support.

Which is where kernel is an issue. I used NixOS with nix-cachyos-kernel flake. Even with THAT there are still a number of things that don't work and performance was garbage (it was already garbage with the default kernel tbh). And that's with a kernel based on the distro that is most focused on performance. As soon as I actually switched to CachyOS itself, everything becomes so much faster. Even back on Bazzite, I've had days where after a while my ROG Ally slows down and I need to restart - something which hasn't been an issue with CachyOS as I left it for the past few days to sync files from my server and download my games from Steam. At the same time, Bazzite also did some work with HHD which requires working some custom kernel and config stuff - those are getting semi-abandoned, but not fully as they do want to bring things like ROG/View Button Switching even after the InputPlumber migration.

At the same time, these are versions of the kernel for specific usecase. Linux is still predominantly used for servers - Valve and everyone else do try to upstream what they can, but obviously not everything can make it upstream. Nevermind the need to just move fast and support hardware if we want people to take Linux seriously as a desktop OS and not just get easily dismissed with, "Yeah, it's cool, but it doesn't support my hardware until months later, so it's a useless OS for me."

It does matter - a lot of these does matter. I used to be someone who scoffed at all these custom stuff but after trying to do it myself, I really do appreciate how well they make these things as ready-to-use as possible even for newbies.

News - GOG now using AI generated images on their store
By Purple Library Guy, 29 Jan 2026 at 8:26 am UTC

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleI find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative.
That sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous. So, Geoffrey Epstein spent his own hard earned money on sex with underage girls. I am morally indignant about that. Not you, though, that would be "performative".

News - Valve tweak Steam AI disclosure form for developers to clarify it's for content consumed by players
By Purple Library Guy, 29 Jan 2026 at 8:21 am UTC

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddle
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleCopyright law is very outdated for current technology.
So is capitalism. But if we're going to insist on capitalism, then within that framework I'm not sure what's going to stop anyone who creates anything from starving without copyright. We can fix copyright if we fix the overall system it's in.
For me, the strongest case for sticking with markets is the historic drop in extreme poverty: from high 60s–80% globally in the 1970s down to under 9% today.
Oh, sure, the drop in extreme poverty. So first of all, I've heard plenty about the supposed drop in extreme poverty, but I've never heard anyone mention a figure that extreme, that's just in the ridiculous propaganda realm. Don't know where you got it, but I'm pretty sure it's nonsense even in terms of the official stats that are generally bandied about.

Second, "extreme poverty" is defined in these sorts of statistics as "making less than $2 per day". That's in purchasing power parity with the US dollar. So then, if you're an American, and you make more than $60/month, you're not in "extreme poverty". Homeless people can starve to death in the US on way more than that. It's ridiculous. And since it's purchasing power parity, it is equally ridiculous everywhere else. Masses of people are, in real life, extremely poor, but the statistics claim they are not. They are quite simply statistics built to generate reassuring lies.

Third, much of this drop in "extreme poverty" represents the destruction of the peasantry. People are driven off their subsistence farms by various modern "enclosure movement" equivalents, they move to the cities and live in shanty towns where they are half starved, scraping by on whatever informal ways to scratch out a living they can find. But! Before, when they had adequate food that they grew themselves, decent shelter and generally were poor, but more or less OK, they weren't really in the monetary economy, so they made less than $2/day. Now that their lives are precarious and they can barely eat and their homes are made of cardboard or some damn thing, they make more than $2/day so they're not in "extreme poverty". Lucky them!

Fourth, another massive proportion of the drop in poverty is China. There was a period where China represented more than 100% of the drop in extreme poverty . . . which is to say, in the rest of the world extreme poverty was increasing, but it was decreasing so much in China it more than made up for it. This is not exactly a triumph of free market capitalism.

In any case, "markets" and capitalism are not the same thing. You can have markets without capitalism, it's easy, just replace all the firms owned by individual rich people and stock market investors with firms owned by governments and worker co-operatives, but leave the markets in place. Badabing, markets but no capitalism. And, you can have capitalism with no markets--we see this in US military contractors, who are often the sole source of a good which they sell only to their sole customer using cost-plus contracts which define the price paid as a function of how much it costs the firm to make the product, plus a percentage for profit. That isn't a market. And yet they are capitalist firms--private individuals own them, capital is invested in them for the purpose of generating a profit which can be reinvested.

Maybe you should talk about things you know something about. Nobody who, confronted with the term "capitalism", responds with the term "markets", knows much about either.

News - Open Gaming Collective (OGC) formed to push Linux gaming even further
By tpau, 29 Jan 2026 at 8:15 am UTC

Often you have hardware that has no or just out of tree drivers, so i welcome any concerted effort to change that.
Gaming critical software for me also includes wine, wine-staging, umu, proton, LACT, coolercontrol, DXVK, VKD3D , Mangohud, Goverlay, LinuxGamingBenchmark,CapFrameX,Heroic-Launcher, Lutris, Playnite, VR-Stuff , OBS,OpenRazer, OpenRGB and more besides the drivers.

News - The modular Linux handheld Mecha Comet is up on Kickstarter
By Purple Library Guy, 29 Jan 2026 at 7:52 am UTC

Quoting: The_Real_Bitterman
Quoting: PaldinoXWhats wrong with Fedora?
Quoting: AsciiWolfWhy? Fedora is one of the best polished and easy to use distros nowadays.
The better question is, what is not wrong with Fedora. But also I am not willing to discuss this with random strangers in the GoL comments section. Sounds like a waste of effort.
That's real bitter, man.

News - UK lawsuit against Valve given the go-ahead, Steam owner facing up to £656 million in damages
By Purple Library Guy, 29 Jan 2026 at 7:49 am UTC

Quoting: williamjcm
Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe basic question is whether the 30% cut generates windfall profits. If it does, then lawsuits that successfully reduce that cut will leave Valve in place but reduce costs for the consumer.
It most definitely will not. It's not a "tax" that gets added on top of the game price like Tim Sweeney would want you to think.
Really? What is it then? Monopoly money?

News - Open Gaming Collective (OGC) formed to push Linux gaming even further
By Stella, 29 Jan 2026 at 7:27 am UTC

Quoting: The_Real_Bitterman"Reduce duplicate efforts", "replacing Lutris with fagus launcher" ... Nobody forced them not to use Flatpaks...

This really sounds like a self inflicted issue caused by point-releases and their cravings to package everything downstream instead. Then call it a win to form an organization to fix what they caused themselves...

I mean nobody prohibited them to push their modifications to the mainline kernel even before.

While I also came to learn that all these "gaming tweaks" and "optimisations" usually don't deliver any real differences or significant improvements over something not having these "gaming optimisations".
Flatpak launchers have many issues including gamescope/scopebuddy not working and using their own outdated Mesa, as well as being affected by the Nvidia Flatpak driver issues, this is why a built in launcher is greatly preferred

News - GOG now using AI generated images on their store
By Avehicle7887, 29 Jan 2026 at 6:51 am UTC

Personally I don't care if they use AI or not in their artwork. I go there to buy games and as long as they keep releasing new stuff then I'm buying.

I'm probably in the minority here regarding this. What if they want to save a bit of money on artists and instead focus their funds on more important things? They can draw the promo page in mspaint and doodles for all I care.