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Latest 30 Comments

News - A future Wine release could use Zink to run OpenGL via Vulkan
By Phlebiac, 3 Apr 2026 at 6:02 am UTC

Quoting: Gerarderloperold game restoration? survivability? dammit forgot the word
Preservation?

News - The US Patent Office have rejected a Nintendo Pokemon patent for summoning subcharacters
By Phlebiac, 3 Apr 2026 at 5:58 am UTC

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI guess the patent office isn't allowed to just say "No, this is stupid!"
They kind of are? Besides prior art, they can also reject it for being "obvious".

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By Purple Library Guy, 3 Apr 2026 at 5:54 am UTC

Quoting: PoliticsOfStarvingIs it even an accurate way to measure Linux gaming? For the last two years or so, I don't even bother installing steam, I just go straight to heroic.
I don't think that matters much. There are Linux gamers outside of Steam, but there are also Windows gamers outside of Steam (e.g. my grandkids who only play Roblox) . . . and actually a disproportionate number of Mac gamers outside of Steam, because they probably use the Mac app store. I don't think we have any evidence that would support the idea that the percentage of Linux gamers on Steam is misleading because there are disproportionate numbers of non-Steam Linux gamers.
Plus, frankly the majority of Linux gamers are on Steam. I think you're an outlier.

News - A future Wine release could use Zink to run OpenGL via Vulkan
By omer666, 3 Apr 2026 at 5:22 am UTC

Last time I played through Wolfenstein: The New Order, which is OpenGL only, I had some (rare) stability issues, despite RadeonSI being very mature and stable in general.

Switching to Zink got rid of the crashes, so I guess even today with quite recent games it can prove very useful.

After all, having all and every API translating to Vulkan is an ideal situation (at leat from my point of view)

News - NVIDIA announce a preview of "DRM Per-Plane Color Pipeline API" support on Linux (good for HDR)
By mouacyk, 3 Apr 2026 at 3:47 am UTC

Too bad this was released on 4/1, but if true, it's meant to allow fullscreen direct scanout in HDR mode for better input latency in Plasma.

News - Death Stranding 2 gets a performance patch, including improvements for Steam Deck
By Gerarderloper, 3 Apr 2026 at 3:25 am UTC

I'm moved to a Intel Arc NUC miniPC from a BEAST system as I'm traveling far soon, forever and well NUC is a good middle ground.

Anyway it has a OCULINK port that is rated at PCIe4.0 X4 so about PCIe3.0 8x speeds. HOPEFULLY as GPU's advance they'll need less bandwidth (because nobody is going to be able to afford a 32GB GPU)

Apparently 8x vs x16 is like %1-3 performance loss. AND we have AMD, NVIDIA and Intel working on better VRAM compression, heck even the new PS6/XBOXwhatever is going to have these techs BAKED IN and ON BY DEFAULT which means future game vram usage on PC should be quite reasonable. (about time too)

News - A future Wine release could use Zink to run OpenGL via Vulkan
By Gerarderloper, 3 Apr 2026 at 3:20 am UTC

When all the performance and compatibility issues can be dealt with in a single layer, it certainly does make old game restoration? survivability? dammit forgot the word, anyway it makes that thing better for when we are all living in the desert wastelands of the future with no internet!

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By PoliticsOfStarving, 3 Apr 2026 at 12:26 am UTC

Is it even an accurate way to measure Linux gaming? For the last two years or so, I don't even bother installing steam, I just go straight to heroic.

News - Breath of Fire IV plus classic Resident Evil 1-3 from GOG arrive on Steam - but with DRM
By Cloversheen, 2 Apr 2026 at 11:56 pm UTC

I recently played through the GOG release of Breath of Fire 4 on the Steam Deck. Was absolute smooth sailing, and very much a blast of good old nostalgia. 😁

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By PlayingOnLinuxphone, 2 Apr 2026 at 11:53 pm UTC

Quoting: sarmadThis rise is very suspicious; it's too big to be happening over a single month. I'd wait till next month to see if the gain is sustained.
If this data is close to be the truth it is more likely a growth of 3 months. Chinese new year begins in January and ends in February, so both months are weak for Linux. January has not such a big impact as February. Look into past, every January is a weak month for Linux followed by the even weaker February. If you look into the last year from Win10 EOL and follow the trend until December, the March numbers could be true.

However, I fully agree with "wait till next month" to verify any data.

News - Lutris now being built with Claude AI, developer decides to hide it after backlash
By tuubi, 2 Apr 2026 at 9:47 pm UTC

Quoting: devlandOtherwise they are both wine wrappers. Ease of use is the whole point.
Sure. Just wanted to point out that Lutris doesn't in fact "force you to configure each game from scratch" as you said. I have no problem with Bottles, seems like a decent alternative.

News - A future Wine release could use Zink to run OpenGL via Vulkan
By Leprotto, 2 Apr 2026 at 9:41 pm UTC

For what i've understood, Zink is good enough only for those drivers which have a broken ogl implementation (i.e. Nouveau).

News - Lutris now being built with Claude AI, developer decides to hide it after backlash
By devland, 2 Apr 2026 at 9:26 pm UTC

Quoting: tuubiIn Lutris you can [...] It's not as simple and intuitive as in some of the other launchers
That was my point.

I used Lutris for a long time and when I saw how bottles handles it I didn't look back.

I'll admit that the whole AI bs made me uninstall Lutris but I should have done it ages ago just for the ease of use that bottles has.

Otherwise they are both wine wrappers. Ease of use is the whole point.

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By sarmad, 2 Apr 2026 at 9:25 pm UTC

This rise is very suspicious; it's too big to be happening over a single month. I'd wait till next month to see if the gain is sustained.

News - A future Wine release could use Zink to run OpenGL via Vulkan
By whizse, 2 Apr 2026 at 9:23 pm UTC

Quoting: F.Ultraare we 100% sure? The MR consists of 15 commits done one month ago which all seams to be legit and in fact does bring in zink
50% sure! From the comments: "This MR was meant mostly as a half joke for April fool's day, but it works and I think it might be an interesting solution overall."

News - NVIDIA announce a preview of "DRM Per-Plane Color Pipeline API" support on Linux (good for HDR)
By Berny23, 2 Apr 2026 at 9:00 pm UTC

Great news for HDR enjoyers like me, except the „AI“ stuff.

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By johnny-linux, 2 Apr 2026 at 7:48 pm UTC

Not everything is bad in the world. There are good things.

News - The US Patent Office have rejected a Nintendo Pokemon patent for summoning subcharacters
By Purple Library Guy, 2 Apr 2026 at 7:17 pm UTC

I guess the patent office isn't allowed to just say "No, this is stupid!"

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By Purple Library Guy, 2 Apr 2026 at 7:09 pm UTC

Well. This is probably some kind of mistake, but I'll bask in it.

I remember when Linux was 1% on desktop in general, 0.01% for gaming. In those days Mac was generally described as 5%. So, we're (in theory) now at the point Mac was when it was the competitor to Windows. That should be enough for a bit of hardware support, eh?

11% for English speaking . . . that's insane. But, once again says to me that something needs to be done about China not doing Linux.

News - A future Wine release could use Zink to run OpenGL via Vulkan
By F.Ultra, 2 Apr 2026 at 7:02 pm UTC

Quoting: BabaoWhiskyCongrats, it was an April fools joke PR.
are we 100% sure? The MR consists of 15 commits done one month ago which all seams to be legit and in fact does bring in zink

News - NVIDIA announce a preview of "DRM Per-Plane Color Pipeline API" support on Linux (good for HDR)
By Philadelphus, 2 Apr 2026 at 6:56 pm UTC

Thanks for the links everyone. 😆 I appreciate that the Wikipedia article starts off with "Not to be confused with digital rights management.", so it's not just me.

News - Steam store home page gets a refresh in Beta, plus another Linux SteamRT3 Beta fix
By Philadelphus, 2 Apr 2026 at 6:54 pm UTC

It does look like a good change from what I've seen (I saw some before-and-after screenshots elsewhere), but I'll wait for it to roll out to the main branch.

Quoting: XpanderWhy on earth is there so much empty space. Everything is squished into the middle. I have my monitor in landscape not portrait ffs.
well thats not steam only issue ofc. Every freaking site does that these days :(
There's lots of UX research that shows that above a certain length lines of text become hard for people to read. Reading skill impacts this somewhat (e.g., better readers can handle slightly longer line lengths), but there's an upper limit above which a line is so long it becomes taxing for readers to easily follow it back to find the start of the next line. This applies to any written text; it's why newspapers, books, papers, etc. run multiple columns rather than lines of text straight across the page.

This collides with the fact that as humans our horizontal field of view is larger than our vertical field of view, so monitors wider than they are tall make sense for computers due to the way our eyes work. But just extending text all the way across would be horrible to read, so it often ends up slightly awkwardly confined to a central region of the screen.

I agree that a good solution would be to have more stuff in sidebars (navigation links, etc.). Or perhaps go with multi-column layouts, though how well that works would depend heavily on the site. (Having read a lot of scientific papers in two-column format, it's really annoying to have to constantly scroll back up and then down again to read each page.)

(Interestingly, the research I found suggested ~80 characters as an upper limit for line length for "expert" readers. I counted the first line of my comment in the preview as being 119 characters long and didn't feel like I was having difficulty reading my text – I guess voraciously consuming written material ever since I first learned to read has its perks – but having read the occasional page with line lengths in what must have been the hundreds of characters I definitely concur that there is an upper limit on what's not taxing to read.)

News - Steam store home page gets a refresh in Beta, plus another Linux SteamRT3 Beta fix
By Xpander, 2 Apr 2026 at 6:34 pm UTC

Quoting: VigilNot everyone displays one program at a time taking up the whole monitor. Some people have multiple programs side by side on their widescreen monitor.
Sure, your filemanager scales perfectly depending on the window size. So thats not the point. Sites should scale a bit better, given 16:9 is still the most popular aspect ratio for desktops.

News - The US Patent Office have rejected a Nintendo Pokemon patent for summoning subcharacters
By Linux_Rocks, 2 Apr 2026 at 5:56 pm UTC

I wonder if this has anything to do with Nintendo suing the US government over the stupid tariffs? Don't get me wrong, it's good that they threw it out, cause it was bullshit. But the orange moron is that petty, and he would be more than willing to exploit any false populism from this sorta shit.

tl;dr: fuck the US government and Nintendo. lol

News - The US Patent Office have rejected a Nintendo Pokemon patent for summoning subcharacters
By GustyGhost, 2 Apr 2026 at 5:49 pm UTC

Reminds me of high school girls ganging up on one another because they think she's prettier.

News - Ubuntu MATE seeking maintainers as the creator looks to move on
By tuubi, 2 Apr 2026 at 5:36 pm UTC

Quoting: CaldathrasWell, I'll concede that that's entirely possible. Although, my T580 is on Mint XFCE 21.3 and it does not detect the WiFi printers. Perhaps the applet is not activated by default in XFCE?
I don't know, but it works fine on my work laptop (T14 Gen 6) with Mint Xfce 22.3. Check that "Discovered printers" is enabled in the View menu of your printer configuration panel (system-config-printer).

News - BOXROOM is a clever casual room builder to give your Steam games a shelf
By nullzero, 2 Apr 2026 at 5:29 pm UTC

Very nice, even though it is not linux native, it's a nice gimmick. Thanks for the heads-up Liam.

After playing a bit I already found I'll never be able to fit everything there:
> [Steam screenshot](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3697917776)https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3697917776
Spoiler, click me
Game sheft with Half-life/Portal on the left, Half-life 2 / Portal 2 on the middle and empty on the right...

😆

It would be perfect if it also fetched boardgames from bgg site collections.

Quoting: TangoBakerIf you pick up the game box and open it, you get an option to start the game from there. What I haven't found is how to delete the starter desk.
You can extend the wall to cover the table + window and "dig" more room in the other wall. Not optimal just tried and it works

The 8 slot has an X. It worked to delete both initial desk and a new added one.

EDIT: fixed comment has I found a workaround.