Category: Open Source

If you want to play the classic Heroes of Might and Magic II on Steam Deck and Linux with a more up to date game engine, that includes plenty of enhancements you should look to fheroes2.

John Carmack's generosity in releasing his older source code resulted in a proliferation of free first person shooters in the 2000s, but Dutch programmer Wouter van Oortmerssen rejected this path to forge Cube based in the same "just for fun" spirit with which Linus Torvalds first began work on the Linux kernel.

ProtonUp-Qt is a very helpful application that can help you install extra compatibility layers on Linux and Steam Deck.

Do you own a lot of games on itch.io? I do, and a huge amount more from past charity bundles I've yet to go and claim so maybe the Steam Deck will help me and you get through them all.

Well well, open source continues to grow, good! Imagination Technologies will be joining up with all the rest involved in Mesa development, with their PowerVR GPUs.

Two vital open source projects for the Steam Deck had new releases today, with the DXVK and VKD3D-Proton layers that translate Direct3D / DirectX to Vulkan.

Something that I've been asked, repeatedly (and then some), is to show the Heroic Games Launcher on the Steam Deck. So here we are, let's take a look.

Not to be confused with VKD3D-Proton that the Valve team work on, the original vkd3d from the Wine team continues to be updated and a new release is out now.

Inspired by the Thief series, The Dark Mod is a brilliant free and open source game and game engine for people to make various levels with. The Dark Mod version 2.10 is out now and it's BIG.

The Steam Deck is clearly great with a lot of modern titles and plenty of AAA games, but what about the classics? For that Luxtorpeda can provide a great experience on Deck.

Two popular games should be much better on Linux and Steam Deck with the latest update to Proton Experimental.

Linux and audio have never entirely gotten along well together, when PulseAudio came along it actually solved a lot of problems but it's PipeWire that's the real future.

For those just getting into Linux and / or people who will be testing out the Steam Deck, GOverlay can be a bit of a lifesaver to help configure some extra tools like MangoHud.

More work has been done on the Windows compatibility layer Wine in development version 7.3 that's out now.

Now the Steam Deck is out, Valve has pushed out a fresh upgrade to Proton Experimental, the special testing area you can try with all the latest but less-tested fixes and improvements for running Windows games on Linux desktop and Steam Deck.

Heroic Games Launcher is truly becoming one of the best game managers available for Linux. Not only does it support Epic Games, it's just expanded to cover GOG too.

Fully free and open source, Veloren continues to expand their inspiration from Cube World and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild with version 0.12 out now.

86Box is a new one to me but perhaps some readers might be interested in it. It's an IBM PC system emulator that specializes in running old operating systems and software. Now with version 3.2 it's available for Linux.

XWayland, the way to run older games and applications that don't yet have native Wayland support has a brand new release out, bringing new features.

Bottles is the very promising free and open source application to help you directly manage installing things with Wine, the compatibility layer to run Windows apps and games on Linux.