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Latest 30 Comments

News - Stop Killing Games final verified vote count for the EU petition is just under 1.3 million
By soulsource, 27 Jan 2026 at 3:27 pm UTC

Quoting: Mountain ManHow broad do we expect this law to be?
The original introduction video to the campaign talked about this. They also mentioned that in an ideal world, all of what you mentioned would be regulated in a way that allows people to keep accessing the content they bought a license for. However, the initiators were aware that it would never happen if it was that broad, so they picked games as a smaller target. That's not perfect, but it's a start.

News - UK lawsuit against Valve given the go-ahead, Steam owner facing up to £656 million in damages
By pb, 27 Jan 2026 at 3:26 pm UTC

PCR stands for Parasite Corporation Representatives, or...?

News - Stop Killing Games final verified vote count for the EU petition is just under 1.3 million
By Mountain Man, 27 Jan 2026 at 3:11 pm UTC

I honestly don't see this going anywhere. You really can't demand that software developers not take advantage of cost saving technologies like cloud servers. What's next, demanding that music and video streaming services make their content permanently available to customers in the event that they shutdown? And what about software other than games that depends on servers and key activations? Phone apps? Digital thermostats? Network connected security cameras? The long list of "smart devices" that require some sort of online service to function? How broad do we expect this law to be?

Frankly, I think this is never going to happen.

News - Stop Killing Games final verified vote count for the EU petition is just under 1.3 million
By soulsource, 27 Jan 2026 at 3:10 pm UTC

@soulsource how much difference is there between a cloud platform and, say, a Linux PC? Besides the scale of the cloud. Is it possible to reuse the software designed for a cloud and run it on a conventional x86_64 Linux device with perhaps minimal changes to the game client so it can locate the custom server? Same for Arm64 Linux, I don't know which one is more popular on cloud
The big difference is the software. Which is owned by the cloud platform providers and not available to the game developers. Of course it can be mocked (as TheShEEEP pointed out), but that's work too, that needs to be paid for.

I, as a player, would rather prefer that games will never be designed around an ingame store anymore.
As a gamedev: I wished so too. However, often the options a publisher gives are "live support title with in-game store", or "the project won't happen". Since it isn't easy to find game project funding at the moment, the second option might very well mean having to fire people, or even closing the studio, so it's about as much a choice as the Patrician's offer of "freedom" in Going Postal.

News - GOG job listing for a Senior Software Engineer notes "Linux is the next major frontier"
By Pyrate, 27 Jan 2026 at 3:08 pm UTC

Quoting: RussianNeuroMancer
Quoting: PyrateAffinity Studio teasing Linux support
Could you please provide a link where they did so?
https://techcentral.co.za/affinity-for-linux-canvas-next-big-move-could-reshape-the-desktop-software-market/274861/

News - UK lawsuit against Valve given the go-ahead, Steam owner facing up to £656 million in damages
By ShabbyX, 27 Jan 2026 at 3:08 pm UTC

Say this fine is paid, where does the money go? I highly doubt to the consumers the suit claims to protect. Does it go to the UK government? To the people filing the suit (in which case, why do they deserve this money?)?

News - The modular Linux handheld Mecha Comet is up on Kickstarter
By Arehandoro, 27 Jan 2026 at 3:00 pm UTC

I'd like Kickstarter to make statements of the projects that put a very low pledge goal, like this one at just 50K, so we know if the low goal is because they already have a lot of backing behind or if it's so they reach the goal and get to keep the money independently of finalising the project.

News - The popular Arch-based distro CachyOS gets a new release with a significantly reworked installer
By Jarmer, 27 Jan 2026 at 2:59 pm UTC

very nice! At some point this winter / spring I'll probably wipe my system and start over with a fresh cosmic install of Cachy. I'm on gnome Cachy now and love it, but really want to use the cosmic de, and now that it's out of beta I think it'll be a good time to do so.

News - GOG job listing for a Senior Software Engineer notes "Linux is the next major frontier"
By Arehandoro, 27 Jan 2026 at 2:54 pm UTC

[quote=mindedie]
Quoting: Arehandoro
Quoting: ShadowXeldronhad been estimated in 8 or 9 months of work.
Quite common to hear same or similar lines, decade after decade, specially from corporate/proprietary software side... and some hobbyist programmer do same or better in weekend, while playing quake, scratching backside or something...
Gaming side full of that too... modders fixing crap, adding stuff without having access to source code, documentation, etc., in hours, after yet another buggy and broken releases/patch.
While I agree with you, in this case the person that did the estimate is the same that did the work in one day 😅

News - UK lawsuit against Valve given the go-ahead, Steam owner facing up to £656 million in damages
By TheSHEEEP, 27 Jan 2026 at 2:51 pm UTC

Seems partly reasonable to me.

I've always said that Valve's cut is undeniably too large. I just don't see any legal grounds to lower it - but hey, who knows.
And that their practices especially for charging with in-game purchases are double dipping in many cases is also quite clear.

I'm not too sure about the PPO stuff, I've read too many conflicting statements here.

News - UK lawsuit against Valve given the go-ahead, Steam owner facing up to £656 million in damages
By SlayerTheChikken, 27 Jan 2026 at 2:48 pm UTC

Even if Valve survives this if it's successful, this will set legal standards and they'll be forced to change the amount of money they get from publishers.

News - Heroic Games Launcher v2.19 released adding ZOOM Platform, AppImage updates and more
By rcrit, 27 Jan 2026 at 2:41 pm UTC

They recommend the flatpak but by default the locations in the flatpak are different from the shipped binary. I didn't look at the details yet but the flatpak isn't a drop-in replacement for me.

News - GOG job listing for a Senior Software Engineer notes "Linux is the next major frontier"
By mindedie, 27 Jan 2026 at 2:40 pm UTC

[quote=Arehandoro]
Quoting: ShadowXeldronhad been estimated in 8 or 9 months of work.
Quite common to hear same or similar lines, decade after decade, specially from corporate/proprietary software side... and some hobbyist programmer do same or better in weekend, while playing quake, scratching backside or something...
Gaming side full of that too... modders fixing crap, adding stuff without having access to source code, documentation, etc., in hours, after yet another buggy and broken releases/patch.

News - UK lawsuit against Valve given the go-ahead, Steam owner facing up to £656 million in damages
By williamjcm, 27 Jan 2026 at 2:26 pm UTC

Quoting: ArdjeAnd all because of these "protect the children" fake organizations that clearly have a second agenda, and it is not about protecting the children. [...]
The "second agenda" is actually the first and only one. Children are just used as an excuse, just like how governments are using it as an excuse to implement mass surveillance on the internet through ID verification, message scanning, and other measures.

Quoting: LinasWhat a load of bull... To summarize the claim even more: I want to use Steam infrastructure, but I don't want to pay for it.
Pretty much. And I wouldn't be surprised if Epic was behind the whole movement, because Tim Sweeney was the first to claim platforms charge their 30% cut *on top* of the price set by developers/publishers (even though it's not the case at all, because you don't see games be cheaper on the EGS despite the 12% cut, or on Itch.io despite the 10% cut, or become cheaper on Steam as they reach revenue milestones that make them eligible for the lower cuts).

News - The popular Arch-based distro CachyOS gets a new release with a significantly reworked installer
By fenglengshun, 27 Jan 2026 at 2:01 pm UTC

For anyone having issues installing (for me on ROG Ally with the handheld edition) I managed to work it out here: https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/cachyos-january-2026-release-changelog/21783/68

Preliminary opinion is that it is blazing fast. I know I'm coming from a jank NixOS with cobbled together Jovian (Game Mode) and nix-cachyos-kernel, but even compared to Bazzite it still feels very fast. I like a lot of the included or easily-installable gaming packages as well - `proton-cachyos-slr` offering a Proton that is managed by the package manager.

There are still a lot of things for me to go through. Their wiki do assume a decent level of familiarity with Linux though. See [here](https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/why_cachyos/), [here](https://wiki.cachyos.org/configuration/gaming/), and [here](https://wiki.cachyos.org/installation/installation_on_root/). This really isn't a Manjaro, Garuda, or Endeavour style of "baby's first Arch-based install", it's more of "Okay, we assume you know the basics - here is what we offer and you may make a value judgement based on it." For the most part? It seems to offer some great stuff.
Quoting: scaineI suppose the performance thing is cool, but the bit of CachyOS I love is that it integrates snapper into grub seamlessly, so if you break your system (say, an aberrant Arch update), you just reboot into an earlier snapshot and you've learned your lesson. Takes all the pressure off the fact it's Arch. Or being an idiot like me and constantly experimenting with stuff and breaking things.

I'd like them to include ChaoticAUR by default, like Garuda does, but it's straightforward enough to add manually. If you haven't used ChaoticAUR before, it's a precompiled version of the AUR - very fast, because it acts like any other Arch source. No waiting around for AUR compiles.

My next challenge with CachyOS is integrating the boot with TPM, so I don't have to manually unlock my disks at startup. If that's successful, I don't think I'll be distro-hopping for a long, long time.
Yes, the installer is kinda ehh. Coming from Bazzite that sets everything up for you, I had chosen to just forgo encryption setup because I can't be arsed to manually set it up.

I liked Chaotic AUR, but it requires trusting someone else to build the AUR packages correctly and without any bad intention. I personally trust the team, but should a distro maintainer make that judgement for their users? Also, what happens if it gets abandoned a la their [Chaotic Nyx](https://www.nyx.chaotic.cx/) project?

And snapper function isn't unique to CachyOS - I think Manjaro already have it since 3 or more years ago (if you installed with btrfs filesystem) and before then I used Garuda with it as well. But yes, it should be standard in all Arch and Arch-based install IMO, saved my butt multiple times before (though there was nothing it could do if the issue was bootloader or you messed up a nofail fstab entry).
Quoting: Curupira
Quoting: Liam DaweI'm not too clued up on it, but it seems it was done differently before. Direct from their blog post "bootloader selection has been moved directly into the installer".

Oh yeah, the bootloader selection screen appeared before the installer. Now it makes sense, thanks.
In the previous version, it asks you which ones you want to choose BEFORE the Calamares installer starts (see Mutahar's video [here](https://youtu.be/DsTlxRKkPyY?t=744)).

That's because for each of the different bootloader you want, it seems a different Calamares package is called. So there are four Calamares packages. I'd imagine that's a bit complicated and fragile (judging by the links in my link above, there has been a noted installation issues with mirrorlist and Calamares versions since October 2025).

And Limine seems interesting. I'd love it if they use it and offers an automated/simple encryption setup a la Bazzite and touchscreen support like rEFInd apparently does, while maintaining the current stated speed of it.

News - UK lawsuit against Valve given the go-ahead, Steam owner facing up to £656 million in damages
By Linas, 27 Jan 2026 at 1:55 pm UTC

What a load of bull... To summarize the claim even more: I want to use Steam infrastructure, but I don't want to pay for it.

News - GOG job listing for a Senior Software Engineer notes "Linux is the next major frontier"
By Sakuretsu, 27 Jan 2026 at 1:32 pm UTC

Quoting: Pyrate
Will 2026 truly be the real year of Linux gaming on the desktop?
Between this, and Adobe Photoshop getting a Wine fix, Affinity Studio teasing Linux support, and the new Vulkan extension that will apparently fix the performance loss on Novidia..

Yeah, I'd say this is the year 😁.
We memed so much about for so many years that the Linux Gods (a.k.a. Gabe and Linus) are using their mystical power to pull it off in order to make us shut up about it for good.

News - The popular Arch-based distro CachyOS gets a new release with a significantly reworked installer
By Dirge, 27 Jan 2026 at 1:24 pm UTC

Quoting: scaine
Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: Curupira
a significantly reworked installer, which also now includes bootloader selection

I can vouch that CachyOS installer included a bootloader selection screen since I've first tried it (more than a year ago). Maybe even earlier. :)
I'm not too clued up on it, but it seems it was done differently before. Direct from their blog post "bootloader selection has been moved directly into the installer".
Yeah, it's weird. When I fist installed this, about 8 months back, it asks if you want Grub, SystemD-boot or a couple of others. So it's technically been there for a while. I wonder how it's changed that warrants that update message?
The bootloader selection was updated to offer summaries of the choices to better help people choose, but most importantly the default selection was shifted from systemd-boot to Limine. This means that bootable snapshot integration will be available to the people that don't know enough to select something other than the default. Prior to this, new users just going with systemd-boot were at a pretty big disadvantage to those who selected Limine or Grub.

News - The popular Arch-based distro CachyOS gets a new release with a significantly reworked installer
By Curupira, 27 Jan 2026 at 1:11 pm UTC

Quoting: Liam DaweI'm not too clued up on it, but it seems it was done differently before. Direct from their blog post "bootloader selection has been moved directly into the installer".

Oh yeah, the bootloader selection screen appeared before the installer. Now it makes sense, thanks.

News - The popular Arch-based distro CachyOS gets a new release with a significantly reworked installer
By scaine, 27 Jan 2026 at 1:10 pm UTC

Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: Curupira
a significantly reworked installer, which also now includes bootloader selection

I can vouch that CachyOS installer included a bootloader selection screen since I've first tried it (more than a year ago). Maybe even earlier. :)
I'm not too clued up on it, but it seems it was done differently before. Direct from their blog post "bootloader selection has been moved directly into the installer".
Yeah, it's weird. When I fist installed this, about 8 months back, it asks if you want Grub, SystemD-boot or a couple of others. So it's technically been there for a while. I wonder how it's changed that warrants that update message?

News - The popular Arch-based distro CachyOS gets a new release with a significantly reworked installer
By Liam Dawe, 27 Jan 2026 at 1:08 pm UTC

Quoting: Curupira
a significantly reworked installer, which also now includes bootloader selection

I can vouch that CachyOS installer included a bootloader selection screen since I've first tried it (more than a year ago). Maybe even earlier. :)
I'm not too clued up on it, but it seems it was done differently before. Direct from their blog post "bootloader selection has been moved directly into the installer".

News - UK lawsuit against Valve given the go-ahead, Steam owner facing up to £656 million in damages
By scaine, 27 Jan 2026 at 1:06 pm UTC

Legal gears slowly grinding, huh? Two years to get to the point of "yeah, let's review this".

I wish this was a case against Amazon for Kindle Unlimited, instead of Valve for Steam game pricing, but there we go.

News - The popular Arch-based distro CachyOS gets a new release with a significantly reworked installer
By Curupira, 27 Jan 2026 at 1:06 pm UTC

a significantly reworked installer, which also now includes bootloader selection

I can vouch that CachyOS installer included a bootloader selection screen since I've first tried it (more than a year ago). Maybe even earlier. :)

News - UK lawsuit against Valve given the go-ahead, Steam owner facing up to £656 million in damages
By Ardje, 27 Jan 2026 at 1:02 pm UTC

The UK continues to target consumers and make it bad for their own citizens... And all because of these "protect the children" fake organizations that clearly have a second agenda, and it is not about protecting the children. I wish these organizations would be sued for abusing the state of abused children for their own gain.

News - GOG job listing for a Senior Software Engineer notes "Linux is the next major frontier"
By Szkodnix, 27 Jan 2026 at 12:58 pm UTC

If they are really taking into consideration Linux, at least one engineer with knowledge about Wine/Proton would also be necessary. Or they should consider closer cooperation with other known Wine engineers (for example GloriousEggroll or folks from The Dawn Winery, those who do custom Proton builds for gachas like Genshin).

Not all games work well and some still have some Linux specific bugs (for example Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood with a laggy cursor - recent Wine builds fixed it only partially).

News - Plague Inc: Evolved gets a "vastly improved playing experience on Steam Deck"
By scaine, 27 Jan 2026 at 12:50 pm UTC

Wow, it's consistently had 800-1500 players every month for it's (considerable) shelf life!

News - The popular Arch-based distro CachyOS gets a new release with a significantly reworked installer
By scaine, 27 Jan 2026 at 12:44 pm UTC

I suppose the performance thing is cool, but the bit of CachyOS I love is that it integrates snapper into grub seamlessly, so if you break your system (say, an aberrant Arch update), you just reboot into an earlier snapshot and you've learned your lesson. Takes all the pressure off the fact it's Arch. Or being an idiot like me and constantly experimenting with stuff and breaking things.

I'd like them to include ChaoticAUR by default, like Garuda does, but it's straightforward enough to add manually. If you haven't used ChaoticAUR before, it's a precompiled version of the AUR - very fast, because it acts like any other Arch source. No waiting around for AUR compiles.

My next challenge with CachyOS is integrating the boot with TPM, so I don't have to manually unlock my disks at startup. If that's successful, I don't think I'll be distro-hopping for a long, long time.

News - GOG job listing for a Senior Software Engineer notes "Linux is the next major frontier"
By RussianNeuroMancer, 27 Jan 2026 at 12:02 pm UTC

Quoting: PyrateAffinity Studio teasing Linux support
Could you please provide a link where they did so?

News - Heroic Games Launcher v2.19 released adding ZOOM Platform, AppImage updates and more
By Pyrate, 27 Jan 2026 at 11:59 am UTC

Quoting: MinoscerebI guess it goes to show how seldom I actually play anything on EGS.
I was exactly the same, and it turns out that not having to deal with a shitty launcher does lead to wanting to play those free games. Give it a shot, you might end up like me, actually choosing to play those freebies because of the much much better UX.