Linux Gaming News Archives

Embark Studios' The Finals free-to-play first person shooter has proven quite popular since its release in early December. The Finals is a game powered by Unreal Engine 5 that has been running on Linux thanks to Valve's Steam Play (Proton + VKD3D-Proton). With the latest Mesa driver activity, Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with their open-source driver can now handle this popular game.

Lutris 0.5.15 has been released as the newest version of this open-source game manager that allows managing games from within Steam, GOG, various retro game console / emulator solutions, and other sources.

ScummVM 2.8 is out this New Year's weekend to end out 2023 by getting more games running on this open-source software that started out re-implementing LucasArts adventure games and other game titles.

With a set of input driver patches set to be merged today for the Linux 6.7-rc6 kernel, the XPad driver is adding support for Razer's Wolverine V2 Xbox controller.

Ahead of the holidays the open-source developers working on the Godot game engine have released Godot 4.3 Dev 1 as their first test release to this next feature release.

The Nintendo HID open-source driver is being extended with the Linux 6.8 kernel to support the Nintendo Switch Online "NSO" controllers.

Unvanquished has been a promising open-source first person shooter game in development for over a decade. It started out putting monthly alpha releases and quite a brisk development pace but in recent years the releases have been much less frequent. This year started out with Unvanquished 0.54 being released and in now approaching the end of the year is seeing a new point release.

Last year W4 Games was formed by Godot game engine developers as part of an effort to strengthen the open-source Godot ecosystem as well as work on commercial products and services, such as integrating with the proprietary game console/cloud platforms. They started out with $8.5 million dollars last year while this week announced a series A funding round of $15M.

While there hasn't been much in the way of new Linux game ports from Feral Interactive since Steam Play (Valve's Proton + VKD3D-Proton) took over the scene, they do continue maintaining their GameMode open-source service and today released GameMode 1.8 with work by them and the open-source community.

The year began with Godot 4.0 making its much anticipated debut and now this open-source game engine project is ending out 2023 with Godot 4.2 as the second revision to the Godot 4.x engine.

While more applications continue enabling Wayland support and getting into a shape by default, the PCSX2 open-source PlayStation 2 emulator recently moved in the opposite direction: disabling Wayland support for their distributed builds.

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers announced this morning the launch of the TUXEDO Sirius 16 Gen1, their first all-AMD powered Linux gaming laptop.

This weekend marks 25 years already since Valve originally released Half-Life! In celebration of this milestone, Valve released today the Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update that now includes official Steam Deck support, Steam networking and controller support, updated graphics settings, and more.

OpenRazer as the community-driven, open-source project providing driver support for Razer peripherals on Linux is out with a new feature release.

Lutris 0.5.14 is out today as the newest feature update to this Python-written open-source solution for managing your games on Linux whether they be native titles or via Steam Play / Wine as well as integrating into popular gaming services like Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and EA App. With Lutris 0.5.14 this centralized Linux game launcher has picked up some additional capabilities.

The PXN V900 gaming racing wheel is supported now by the mainline Linux kernel as of last night with the latest merged changes for the v6.6 kernel.

Back in July of last year the Open 3D Engine (O3DE) engine launched as part of the Open 3D Foundation and initially was a spin-out of Amazon's Lumberyard game engine. Out this week is O3DE 23.10 as the newest half-year update to this project.

Polychromatic continues evolving as the open-source management software for Razer peripherals on Linux that makes use of the independently-developed OpenRazer kernel drivers for improving the customization experience around Razer mice, keyboards, and other devices on Linux.

A new version of FEX-Emu has been released, the open-source project aiming to be "the greatest x86/x86_64 emulator on Linux" that includes the ability to run Steam and Steam Play Windows games on AArch64 Linux systems.

After Steam on Linux usage topped to nearly 2% in July with the phenomenal success of the Steam Deck and with greater marketshare than Apple macOS, in August it took a dip and now the September numbers are out and points to a second consecutive month of the Linux percentage receding.

A new version of the sdl12-compat library is now available, which serves as an SDL2 portability layer for allowing old SDL 1.2.x games and applications work on modern SDL2 systems.

With the AMD performance uplift on the Linux 6.6 kernel due to the EEVDF scheduler code, the workqueue enhancements for chiplet-based processor designs, and other improvements, many Phoronix readers have speculated over AMD Linux gaming performance improvements with this in-development kernel.

The sdl12-compat project is an interesting effort to allow for aging software and games targeting the SDL 1.2 APIs to work atop this compatibility layer so it in turn runs atop the SDL2 libraries. With the sdl12-compat 1.2.66 release more games and other software are now successfully working on this library.

There are new and improved gaming controller and peripheral support to find with the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel.

A new release of Box64 is now available, the Linux x86_64 emulator for running programs and games on non-x86_64 architectures like ARM/AArch64 and RISC-V.

While many Linux gamers are all-set these days by making use of Steam and leveraging Valve's Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux, for those running macOS or also wishing to enjoy more office/application-oriented Windows software on Linux support, CodeWeavers is out today with CrossOver 23 as the newest release of their commercial Wine-based software.

Following the release of Godot 4.0 earlier this year, Godot 4.1 has been released today as an incremental update to this incredibly powerful, open-source game engine.

For Linux gamers running the lightweight Openbox X11 window manager, the newest Steam beta update brings a new option to fix problems with Steam's dropdown menus being unclickable.

The visually-stunning Unigine Engine that these days is most commonly used in commercial simulation applications recently published Unigine 2.17 where they have finally made their Vulkan and Direct3D 12 renderers production-ready.

Xonotic 0.8.6 is out as the latest update to this long-running, open-source first person shooter game.

Ahead of the Linux 6.5 merge window expected to open up next week, a patch providing sound quirks for the ASUS ROG Ally's CS35l41 audio is now queued in the sound subsystem's for-next branch.

With today's release of SDL 2.28 it also marks the SDL2 library entering maintenance mode for this open-source software that's relied upon by Valve and many cross-platform games.

Building off the huge Godot 4.0 release from March, the first beta of the Godot 4.1 game engine is now available for testing as another step forward for this open-source, cross-platform game engine.

Following the recent sdl12-compat test release, sdl-compat v1.2.64 has been released as the newest version of this library implementing the SDL 1.2 API/ABI atop SDL 2.x interfaces for enhancing game compatibility on modern Linux environments.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux team has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.9 as the latest major update to this Direct3D 12 on Vulkan API implementation that is used by Steam Play (Proton) for running modern Windows games on Linux.

The sdl12-compat project that implements the SDL 1.2 API/ABI atop SDL 2.x interfaces for better game compatibility on modern Linux systems is out today with a new pre-release.

Lutris 0.5.13 is now available as the newest feature release for this open-source game manager.

While DXVK is used by Steam Play for implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 APIs atop Vulkan and there is also VKD3D-Proton for Direct3D 12 on Vulkan, D8VK's aim is for the aging Microsoft Direct3D 8 API atop Vulkan for enhancing the experience of older games on Linux.

It's been just under two years since Amazon's Lumberyard game engine was spun into the Open 3D Engine and the Open 3D Foundation established under the Linux Foundation. Today the project is celebrating its newest open-source game engine update with Open 3D Engine 23.05.

While prominent gaming peripheral manufacturer Razer still is not officially supporting Linux with their vast array of products, thanks to the community-driven OpenRazer project there is unofficial open-source support and can work quite well when paired with the likes of Polychromatic as a nice user interface. Out today is OpenRazer 3.6 in enabling the latest Razer products on Linux.

Following the Lutris 0.5.13 beta from mid-February, a second beta of this open-source game manager is now available.

While the Godot 4.0 open-source game engine only shipped at the start of March, there are already plans underway for some renderer upgrades that will be part of the upcoming Godot 4.1 engine upgrade.

For those Linux gamers making use of Nintendo controllers, a few notable fixes are on the way for the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel cycle.

Turtle Beach gaming controllers will see support by the widely-used XPad driver with the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel.

When SDL3 development kicked off last November for this open-source library that is widely used by cross-platform games and other software, QNX support was removed alongside other old targets. Just months later, the QNX platform support is being revived.

Development work on SDL3 continues at full-speed for the next version of this hardware/software abstraction library that is commonly used by cross-platform games. The newest feature merged is support for child pop-up windows.

FEX-Emu 2303 was published today as the newest version of this open-source software for enjoying x86 64-bit Linux software to run gracefully on 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) including the likes of Linux games and Valve's Steam client with Steam Play (Proton).

The Godot engine developers are starting off March with a bang... The much anticipated Godot 4.0 engine that has been in development for years has been released as stable!

As written about last year, the Laminar Research developers responsible for the incredible X-Plane flight simulator software have been working to make use of Mesa's Zink for leveraging OpenGL atop Vulkan to thereby avoid vendor OpenGL drivers that can vary in quality across platforms. With X-Plane 12.04b3, that goal is finally realized.

The much anticipated Godot 4.0 open-source, cross-platform game engine release is imminent. Out today is Godot 4.0 RC3 which could end up being the final test release before this big game engine release.