Valve and their open source contractors sure are a busy bunch. VKD3D-Proton, which translates Direct3D 12 to Vulkan version 2.8 is out now.

Just shy of two years since Xfce 4.16 the latest release has landed with Xfce 4.18 that comes with tons of new features and a "gazillion" bug fixes.

Heroic Games Launcher continues to get cleaned up after the last major update, with v2.5.2 HOTFIX #2 now available.

Collabora have given an end of year update on how the work towards running the Windows compatibility layer on Wayland is coming along and it sounds good.

Thrive just continues to impress. It's a free and open source evolution sim built with Godot Engine and version 0.6 is out now with big new helpful features.

Linus Torvalds has officially released the Linux kernel 6.1, and as usual there's absolutely tons of new features and fixes.

Naev is a reasonably well known free and open source 2D space sim, one that's about to get a whole lot bigger with the v0.10 release now in Beta (specifically, it's on its second Beta).

Another year is coming to a close and so the team behind Wine, the Windows compatibility layer, are readying up for another major stable release with version 8.0.

When the EA App replaced Origin on Steam, it came with a whole bunch of problems for gamers on Steam Deck and Linux desktop. Now, it should hopefully be sorted in Proton Experimental.

Unciv is a popular open source remake inspired directly by Civilization V. It's been around for a while now and it's finally heading to Steam.

As part of their original initiative about sharing patent pledge to not go after others on accessibility, EA have recently released Fonttik as open source to help game developers. Not only that, they've pledged more of their patents to this goal.

Polychromatic, powered by OpenRazer, is a front-end UI for users to easily manage their Razer devices and a new release is out now with version 0.8.0.

Linux Mint 21.1 is now available in Beta to get testing, based upon Ubuntu 22.04 with kernel 5.15 it's a long-term support release so you'll be able to continue using it until 2027 before needing a major update.

Intel recently announced a big driver update for their Arc GPUs on Windows, because their DirectX 9 performance wasn't as good as it could have been. Turns out, they're using code from the open source DXVK which is part of Steam Play Proton.

Blender, the absolute power-house free and open source 3D creation suite, has a big release out with Blender 3.4 and it's awesome.

Valve has finished the current Proton Next testing, with Proton 7.0-5 now available as an update in your Steam Library replacing the previous Proton 7 version. Here's a run over what's new.

The Heroic Games Launcher to help manage games on Steam Deck and Linux with GOG, Epic Games and other apps you can sideload has a new release out to clean up after the recent big update.

MineClone2 is pretty much as close as you can get to Minecraft without playing Minecraft. It's free, open source and runs on the Minetest voxel game engine. A new release is now available with version 0.81.0.

Vulkan version 1.3.233 was released back in November, and with it came two new extensions from NVIDIA designed to help speed up gaming on Linux and Windows. Their tech is even used in DirectStorage from Microsoft.

OpenRA is one of my absolute favourite open source projects allowing you to play the Westwood classics like Command & Conquer, Dune 2000 and Red Alert has a new Playtest up over a year after the last release.