VKD3D-Proton is one of the secret ingredients for Proton to make so many Windows games work well on Linux / SteamOS with a new 3.0 release out now.

You don't need to actually do anything to upgrade, as Valve pull in VKD3D-Proton changes for Proton versions themselves that you'll see in future Proton release updates. However, if you wish to try it out in the current version of Proton we have a GamingOnLinux guide to tell you what to do.

Need a new chill puzzle game? UMAMI from indie studio Mimmox has arrived with Linux support. Across 15 hand-painted levels, you’ll tinker, toy, and rotate wooden blocks, attaching them to a board to create meals including towers of fluffy pancakes, gravity-defying burgers, freshly prepared onigiri, and even seasonal sweets for holidays such as Halloween and Christmas.

No pressure with this one is there's no timers, no wrong moves. The game encourages you to mess around and explore the layers of sugar and spice. There's also hidden animals to pet and cards to collect spread through the levels too.

A fresh demo for you to try this week, as the top-down 2D action roguelike Shroomwood has a Linux build available for you to shoot your way through.

More about it: "Play as Shroomie, a curious little mushroom navigating the ever-changing wilderness of Shroomwood. This top-down 2D roguelike adventure blends fast-paced combat with dynamic dungeon exploration. Each run through the Shroomwood forest offers new challenges, randomized rooms, and a host of peculiar creatures from classical slimes to zombie-infested mushrooms. Discover powerful weapons, stack unique modifiers, and uncover the secrets hidden within vibrant and unique biomes."

The Many Sins of House Ocampo is a new announcement from the developers of If On A Winter's Night Four Travelers and it looks great. Could be a really good one for fans of point and click mystery adventure games.

In The Many Sins of House Ocampo you play as Lucía, a young woman in 1977 Buenos Aires who discovers she's the last living descendant of the Ocampos, an Argentinian settler family rumoured to be beset by a terrible curse. Reliving the last moments of her ancestors via letters, tapes, documents and diaries, and using an interactive clue board to trace the fate of each family member, Lucía will not stop until figuring out the truth of the Ocampo curse, as well as her own origins.

I recently bought Diablo 1 via GoG and wanted to install it on my Dell Latitude for couch sessions. I installed it via Heroic and everything seemed fine, but after the Blizzard splash, the game stays black. Sometimes, when I tab out, some menu texts appear in the tab switcher thumbnail, but thats about it. I fumbled around with the graphics settings in the pre-game settings window (which is really tiny) and tries window mode, different resolutions etc. but nothing changed.

It feels a bit like a "not good enough graphics card" but... well, its Diablo 1...

Is there something I can do, or try, to make D1 playable?

If you love arcade-styled retro racing games, Wild Horse Racing looks like it could be good fun and there's a demo available with Linux support.

Don't let the name put you off at all, this is not some cutesy horse game. Here it's quite a challenge where timing is everything. You have to master control patterns from easy to godlike difficulty, leap over big jumps, and race through vibrant tracks while managing your horse. Some fun game mechanics included with each track having its own control pattern, and nailing the timing gives you a speed boost.

The horse hoof upgrade system sounds interesting to spice things up a little too, like picking and upgrading your tyres in a car racing game. As here mud and gravel build up during races to slow you to, so you have to manage that.

Based on the description on their site, the controller includes a built-in battery: "8.39 Wh Li-ion battery​, 35+ hours of gameplay... "

That was disappointing for me. Specially condidering the Steam Frame's controllers make use of AA batteries: "​One replaceable AA battery per controller, ​ 40hr battery life​"

AA Batteries might not be as convenient to use, but being able to replace them is a great advantage. All my Xbox360 controllers still work fine, but none of my PS3' Dualshock 3s.

The official docking station could be used to recharge (rechargables) AA batteries so the functionality could remain the same.

TL;DR: Valve launched the Steam Frame VR headset with an Arm-based Snapdragon chip, aiming to run Half-Life: Alyx natively and streamed from PC. The new hardware features a "Frame Verified" status for optimized games, while rumors suggest two upcoming Half-Life titles supporting PC and VR cooperative play.

This is so funny because rust has one of the worst cheating situations and majority of their players are windows users, and theres lots of games that have anticheat that allows linux and have notably less significant cheating problems like marvel rivals. in reality rust doesn't take cheating very seriously because if they did they would have more server side software that detects illegitimate behaviour like tons of other games do successfully...... even most popular Minecraft servers have better functioning anti cheat that is completely server side than rust has while getting kernel access to your pc. its pathetic and lazy development tbh and this entire post from them reads like such extreme cope....

The development release Wine 10.19 is out now for the compatibility layer that powers Valve's Proton, here's all that's new and improved. Early next year we should see Wine 11, and then at some point Proton 11 too!

From the highlights:

Support for reparse points.

• More support for WinRT exceptions.
• Refactoring of Common Controls after the v5/v6 split.
• Typed Arrays support in JScript.
• Various bug fixes.

https://dbrand.com/shop/limited-edition/companion-cube

In an IGN interview, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais said that "[they] want [SteamOS] to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC". Below is a transcript of the interview. I tried to clean it up to my best ability.

Just like Steam Deck paved the way for Steam OS on a variety of third-party handhelds, we expect that Steam Machine will pave the way for Steam OS on a bunch of different machines in either similar form factors, different perf envelopes, different segments of the market, and get to a good outcome there. We definitely want to encourage people to try it out on their own hardware. We'll be working on expanding hardware support for the drivers and the base operating system. Just last week, we fixed something that was preventing us from booting on the very latest AMD CPU platforms. Last month, we added support for the Intel Lunar Lake platforms. We're constantly adding support and improving performance. We want it to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC, but there's still a ton of work to do there.

If the embedded video doesn't take you to the correct part of the video, the correct timestamp is 5:37.

EDIT: Here’s the written article of the video:
https://www.ign.com/articles/valves-next-gen-steam-machine-and-steam-controller-the-big-interview

First, some technical details out of the way:

• OS: Bazzite, should be latest version.
• CPU: Ryzen 5600x
• GPU: Intel Arc A770 16 GB
• RAM: 32 GB DDR 4
• MESA: 25.2.7

When attempting to launch an Unreal Engine game with Proton version above 9.0-4, or Proton Experimental, or above GE-Proton 10-1 I get this crash and error:

!status && "vkQueuePresentKHR"

I've searched for this error and only found some old threads pointing to Steam Overlay being a problem. However, disabling Steam Overlay does not stop this issue.

Some of the UE games I play function on lower versions of Proton, others refuse to launch at all.

What could be causing this issue? What would I do to fix it?

EDIT:

Apparently it's an Intel card issue with a new feature in Mesa and Proton. It's so obscure and specific to Intel cards that I couldn't find anything on it.

So apparently there is some sort of anti-lag feature in the current latest version of Mesa that the newest versions of Proton can use which needs to be disabled for Intel cards with this launch command:

DISABLE_LAYER_MESA_ANTI_LAG=1 %command%

I added this to Arc Raiders, a UE 5 game that didn't launch with the latest Proton versions, and it solved the issue. There has already been a case opened on the Bazzite Github: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/issues/3252

I had been saying this stuff for awhile to family based on lil updates on the back end like their x86 emulation and when i first heard about waydroid integration it was so obvious they planned to make quest games easily ported over, its fuckin awesome, everything i expected and i couldnt be happier. i would love to install steamos on my quest 3 if its ever possible lol idk why i said implementing waydroid into proton and emulating quest games tho obviously ik thats not how either works i think i just mispoke in the excitement lol waydroid is implemented into steamos and quest games are natively ran through it obviously.

Valve released Proton 10.0-3, the latest main stable version of the compatibility layer to run Windows games on Linux / SteamOS machines like Steam Deck. And now the Steam Machine and Steam Frame too of course whenever they arrive sometime in 2026.

The secret sauce that makes Linux gaming so amazing now, enabling tens of thousands of games to run well, just not those with certain types of anti-cheat which is a continuing problem. It's been a long road to get here, with Proton 10 being in some form of Beta since April. But it's here now!

https://www.eurogamer.net/will-battlefield-6-work-on-steam-machine-valve-hopes-its-new-hardware-will-prompt-a-fresh-discussion-with-developers-over-kernel-level-anti-cheat

We're finally getting another proper modern rally racing sim with Assetto Corsa Rally out now in Early Access. Thankfully, it won't be in Early Access forever, as they think it will only take around 18 months to finish it all up.

And, surprisingly, even though it's using Unreal Engine 5 most of the early reports on it have been quite positive. It even has a Very Positive rating on Steam. Over email the developers noted how "Supernova Games Studios has extensively customized and optimized Unreal Engine 5 to meet the specific performance and visual fidelity needs of racing simulation".

Just hours ago Valve announced the new Steam Controller along with the Steam Frame VR headset and new Steam Machine. While these new Steam hardware products won't be available until early 2026, Valve has just-now upstreamed support for the new Steam Controller to the SDL3 library.

The Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) is important to Valve's Steam runtime and used by many games for cross-platform hardware/software abstractions. In ensuring good support ahead of the new Steam Controller's retail availability and seeing that it makes it into the next SDL3 update, today that new Steam Controller support is already upstreamed to SDL Git.

Following on from the success of the Steam Deck, Valve is creating its very own ecosystem of products. The Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller are all set to launch in the new year. We've tried each of them and here's what you need to know about each one.

"From the Frame to the Controller to the Machine, we're a fairly small industrial design team here, and we really made sure it felt like a family of devices, even to the slightest detail," Clement Gallois, a designer at Valve, tells me during a recent visit to Valve HQ. "How it feels, the buttons, how they react… everything belongs and works together kind of seamlessly."

For more detail, make sure to check out our in-depth stories linked below:

Steam Frame: Valve's new wireless VR headset

Steam Machine: Compact living room gaming box

Steam Controller: A controller to replace your mouse

Valve's official video announcement.

So uh, ahem.

Yes.

Valve can indeed count to three.

https://www.reddit.com/r/playrust/comments/1ouvpv1/comment/nofbyxo/

As covered recently on Phoronix there has been several exciting improvements for aging AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era graphics cards for the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. This work has been led by Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux Open-Source Graphics Driver Group with an ultimate goal of shifting the GCN 1.0/1.1 open-source Linux driver hardware support from the aging "Radeon" kernel graphics driver over to the "AMDGPU" kernel driver already used by default for all AMD GPUs/accelerators from GCN 1.2 and newer.

Timur Kristóf over the past several months worked out analog video connector support for AMDGPU DC as one of the missing features when using GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs on the AMDGPU kernel driver. He's also been working on other fixes and improvements for allowing the Radeon Southern Islands and Sea Islands GPUs to play nicely with this driver. By going with the AMDGPU driver, these first two generation Graphics Core Next GPUs can enjoy RADV Vulkan driver support out-of-the-box, better performance, and all around a more well rounded and better maintained open-source driver than using the legacy Radeon driver.