I have to give them credit for a made-in-USA , FOSS-focused enthusiast mechanical keyboard. Lots of nice points here. I would consider that in many ways it would be a competitor for the Glorious GMMK Pro, with each having some features or benefits the other does not have. I can really commend them for taking this step, though between the GMMK Pro and the Launch I'm not sure which I'd choose. They certainly took some chances with the Launch, notably its layout style; I wonder how easy it will be to find after-market keycaps to fit with its spacing. The reasonable prices (all things considered) for both models is also a major step forward in a market that tends to do a lot of work predicated on group buys, long wait times, and very high prices.

While the GMMK Pro and Launch are great options for those who want a 75% keyboard layout on a single board, I've found lots of benefit in split ergonomic boards. There are quite a few out there, but I've found that the best around (both being fully FOSS firmware and config software, including Linux friendly clients) are the ZSA Moonlander and Dygma Raise. The Moonlander is the next generation of the ErgoDox EZ with full lighting and slightly different keycap styles/layout, but its certainly one of the nicest ortholinear split ergos. The Dygma Raise is fantastic because it can be used as a joined 60% standard keyboard or split ergo, splits the space bar into 4 to act as macro keys plus an under-row of 4 low profile switch keys, and has a lot of great features including built in wrist/palm rests. The Dygma Raise will soon have a "tilt / tent" kit available for those that prefer it and will work with all existing keyboards. Ultimately it comes down to slightly different layouts and if you wish ortholinear or not, but either the Dygma Raise or Moonlander are excellent ergonomic split options.

The Launch is an excellent step forward for libre enthusiast mechanical keyboards and for made in the USA manufacturing on behalf of System76. I can only hope that they will be selling some of the other components such as their libre control boards and their Thelio cases (ideally modified for after market liquid and air cooling capability) a la carte, whereas at the moment they are only part of full PC builds.!

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It seems to be more of the 8-bit aesthetic (ie looking at the color pallet and overall style) compared to 16-bit, but I grant some of the complexity makes it seems somewhere in the middle - which is fine, it need not be a perfect "we need to run it on actual NES or SNES hardware via cart" style title and both in terms of visual style and gameplay features acting as a homage is worth it over being confined exclusively to tradition.

Have been waiting for this one for quite some time. Everything about it is so entirely in my wheelhouse that so long as it offers a Linux client and is priced reasonably, I'm definitely onboard with a purchase at/by release.

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Its worth noting that users of some emulators, particularly newer branches of Cemu (WiiU, planned open source), Yuzu (Switch, open source currently), Citra (3DS, open source currently), RPCS3 (PS3, Open source currently) etc.. sometimes depend on the special Vulkan drivers if you're going to make use of the latest Vulkan features. They'll usually stipulate this if necessary, but its just worth keeping an eye open.

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Looks potentially interesting. I'm generally appreciative of System76 pushing hardware and software/firmware alike towards usable and high quality FOSS. That said, there's already a pretty comprehensive custom keyboard community out there and they''ll have to get a lot of things "right" to be worth it. Lots of keyboard projects are free/libre all the way down, with config and firmware alone being open source. Atop that, tons of different form factors (ie from full size all the way down to 40% scale), mechanical key switches, keycap types, cases, backlighting, and more.

I should mention that regarding ergonomic keyboards, there are a handful of them. They typically fall into either standard or ortholinear layouts. On the ortholinear side, the ErgoDox layout is typically used. There are lots of keyboards using some or all of its layout from the Dactyl Manuform kits to the original old ErgoDox Infinity to the newer ErgoDox EZ (which is sort of the flag carrier of the ergodox lineage for those that don't want to build themselves.

For those who want a split ergo setup but something closer to a standard layout, check out the awesome Dygma Raise . I backed in production and it works very very well. It can be used connected together where it looks like a lot of high end custom 60% style layouts excepting its palm/wrist pad area (removable, washable etc. However you can also separate it entirely to how you are comfortable. System76 noting they were splitting the spacebar is neat, but Dygma actually made it one of their best features. They replace the space bar with 4 keys that you can bind as you wish, plus put a "sub-row" of 4 keys below it that use the low-profile mechanical keyswitches so they don't get in the way - one of the first "hotkey" setups that is actually usable as opposed to being way the heck over on the side like many gaming boards. I should mention they're currently developing the tilting/tenting addon which will work with all existing boards when it is ready; I'm eager to check it out. Also, those behind the company seem to be really helpful and accessible everytime I've spoken with them so that's also a plus

Finally, I'd be remiss not to mention the absolute brand new "Moonlander" from ZSA, the same people who make the Ergodox EZ. It uses a modified variant of the ErgoDox layout, but it seems they took a lot of inspiration from the Dygma Raise as well. I'm thinking of getting one to compare them!

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Anti-cheat systems are a major issue of contention for Linux gaming and especially for the use of Proton/Wine Perhaps even more so than invasive anti-tamper DRM, this equally invasive modern generation of anti-cheat software can often be the singular thing keeping certain games from working on Linux, natively or via Proton/Wine. I can recall reading how Apex Legends, the popular battle royale, rendered and performed perfectly using Proton, but the game was still unplayable thanks to its use of Easy Anti-Cheat and EAC would treat Proton's "weirdness" as hostile, disconnecting the player and/or possibly flagging their account as attempted cheating.

Apex is by no means the only game to run into this or a similar problem, nor the software responsible the only one of concern, but Easy Anti-Cheat is at the moment the biggest impediment. Affecting many titles including popular AAA, it remains the most prominent aggressive anti-cheat (at least regarding Western titles) that has not to date embraced active support - or at least passive acceptance - of both native Linux and play via Wine/Proton. There are some developers who made this a priority long ago, from the expected such as Valve who's "VAC" and other Steam/Steamworks components are Linux and Wine/Proton friendly to those such as Blizzard. Despite Blizzard's lack of direct Linux support, even years before Proton the developer took the time to respond to concerns of their in-depth self built anti-cheat system, Warden, would negatively flag players of World of Warcraft and other Blizz titles. Updating Warden to be compatible with Wine made the Linux preferring WoW community (and later, other Blizz games using the same/similar system) able to have a parity experience again.

The frustration that Easy Anti-Cheat stands as such an impediment at this point is inflamed thanks to its current ownership - Epic Games. I stand in vehement opposition to just about all of their policies since the arrival of the Epic Store, especially bringing by-contract 3rd party exclusivity to PC gaming. However, their abysmal support of Linux has been another point of friction, made even worse by the fact they seem to do the bare minimum to claim to "support" in some cases such as their Unreal Engine, while at others appearing either openly (Sweeney's quotes) or tacitly hostile in others. Atop its considerable lit of other ills, Epic doesn't support Linux on its own games (ie Fortnite) nor on the Epic Store, neither the client itself nor the games within. Worse, some titles such as "Slime Rancher" that offer Linux support via Steam are not also granted that, even by direct download or some such, if purchased on Epic! Imagine if these games came first to EGS, much less if they signed a deal for timed/exclusivity , it would greatly diminish the chance that the titles would be developed in a Linux friendly manner and any port would come much later, if ever!

Thus, I can't feel too confident that Tim Sweeney would be "supportive" of efforts to help EAC become compatible with Linux , including via Wine/Proton. Positioning it as a hypothetical that "Well, we WOULD do it but don't ya know, it could lead to unchecked cheating everywhere!" isn't inspiring. At best it asks people to prove a negative with incredibly high burden, so if someone gets a workaround or whatnot they can clamp down easily with a "Well, see... we saw an increase in cheating attempts so we just can't allow this to continue"; any amount of hypothetical cheating they can see correlate somehow with Wine/Proton/Linux will be justification. Worse, it isn't like there's no data on this within the industry. Epic could ask Blizzard and Valve for instance, how they've been able to support Linux, including Proton/Wine, without it resulting in a massive influx of uncontrolled cheaters. Clearly, others have done it and continue to do so therefore seeing lots of Epic concern for the outcome could appear to be little more than excuse.

I admit that I am pessimistic regarding Epic's interest and sincerity with regard to Linux in any fashion, including EAC. There were numerous steps they could have taken since they bought the project to ensure that EAC would not treat Linux as potentially hostile, be it native or via Wine/Proton. Steps that would have improved the product itself, expanded potential player bases and make it a more attractive solution to developers. Steps that have been taken by other AAA anti-cheat developers before without making related games vulnerable to cheater incursions. But they haven't, and that doesn't surprise me one bit when it comes to Epic. I'd love to see a real change but even if they can just manage to let others work stand (such as developers from Codeweavers or Valve who find and implement compatibility workarounds/fixes) that would at least be pragmatically a step in the right direction.

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Very nice to see the continual support for The Long Dark. It is one of the truly unique and exceptional single-player focused "survival" games, taking its place alongside Subnautica (and the upcoming Below Zero stand alone expansion), 7 Days To Die, The Forest, Don't Starve / Don't Starve Together, and a few others. Some like The Long Dark is a purely single player experience while others offer multiplayer as an option, but I like to delineate these sorts of titles vs multiplayer focused survival titles such as the very popular ARK: Survival Evolved, Rust, and perhaps best of all Conan Exiles.

Between its in-depth and semi-realistic approach, its Northern setting, and innovative mechanics The Long Dark really feels like a unique challenge where you're far more likely to succumb to the cold, exhaustion, lack of food/water etc.. than you are to die by way of hostile wildlife, though the latter can certainly happen. The long term support for the title is impressive, adding to the main story Campaign (probably the best for new players, currently chapters 1-3 are now available), the open ended Survival mode (where you simply survive as long as you can, though there are achievements to acquire ) and the Scenarios where are somewhere in the middle (each offering an ultimate goal and noting its relative difficulty - from traversing over a mountain ahead of a blizzard, visiting a whole host of landmarks, to an adrenaline-filled 2-parter where you're being hunted by a near invincible bear and must cross a sprawling expanse to procure a weapon capable of putting it down for good!)

These updates often benefit all game modes in one way or another and the developers don't shy away from going back and updating their older work, as evidenced by the "Redux" update to the early chapters of the Wintermute Campaign late last year, remaking them with new features at parity with the (at the time) newly released Chapter 3. The fact that The Long Dark has always offered native Linux support completes the picture that developers Hinterland Studio care a lot about their project and providing an excellent player experience.

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This is certainly another step in the right direction and I'll have to take some time to test out the newer features.

I do wish they'd give some attention to Wishlisting though, which I feel is in more dire need of modernization; specifically, multiple Wishlists with user-defined titles, as well as both user/community and official tags/attributes. Right now I have a 200+ entry Wishlist, with varying different reasons for any given title to be upon it, which is frankly a mess. If implemented correctly this could have significant benefits for Linux, if publishers/devs could see many Steam users had their game on a Wishlist with a "Waiting for native Linux support is promised/released etc" or "Waiting until compatibility with Proton improves", among others.

Regardless, it is nice with this Search update / QOL to see Steam continuing to iterate upon new features that better the experience for the users ; a sharp contrast to many of the other storefronts/platforms/launchers that seem to operate as a fiefdom predicated on exclusivity and minimal actual features/improvements.

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Those who pick this title up, especially by Humble Choice Feb2020, it doesn't hurt to check out their Steam forums and thank them for supporting Linux! This is always a nice idea, but this title in specific added Linux support post-launch very close to their Humble Choice debut, so letting them know it is appreciated holds even more value.

I should also mention that Humble Choice's info/selection window for the title did not, as of yesterday, showcase the fact the game now supports Linux (only showing the Windows icon). Informing the devs, they were grateful and said they'd be in contact with Humble to correct the issue, so it will likely change ASAP.

Edit: As of this posting it looks like Humble has been receptive and diligent, as the Choice display properly shows the MacOSX and Linux icons now!

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I can understand some of the concerns here, but I have to ask - don't people just "reorder" their list? There are buttons that allow you to drag/reorder your list ranking and there are others that automatically send a title to the top (and then you can still reorder it from there). I don't see the point of deletions really in regards to the Steam sale? From a dev perspective, does it particularly matter what order/rank a user has wishlisted a game? Last I checked it did not.

Steam needs a massive overhaul of the Wishlist feature. At the moment I have Wishlist of no less than 230 games! Now, not all of these are games that I know I want badly, or that I want to have gifted to me - even the "ranked order" feature is hopelessly useless at such volume and the way I use the list. I wishlist titles for many reasons from general interest, to waiting for something like Linux support, to actually planning to buy, to waiting for discounts etc.

Steam needs to dramatically change the Wishlist system with a couple things in mind. First of all, to allow users to create MULTIPLE lists, named/flagged as they like. I'd easily split my list into 5+ categories if I could. Next, while I applaud that Steam users can flag their OSes of preference globally, they have to update the system. Last I checked, only those whole SOLELY choose "Linux/SteamOS" as their ONLY checked OS preference will "count" for developers being able to see how many "Linux people" have wishlisted a title for Linux or whatnot. Also anything dealing with heuristics, including top sales/popular/suggested/ etc.. will ONLY be shown for currently available Linux games. This is pretty much useless in my opinion. To the contrary, if a user checks multiple boxes (ie Windows + Linux) I'm not sure what happens; you "see" Windows titles shown in heuristics-related lists again, but apparently your Wishlists are flagged as "Windows people" perhaps? They need to update that feature and separate it out into "Show me and use metrics/heuristics for games with X, Y, or Z OS" versus "Have my OS preference COUNT for sales, wishlists etc... as X, or X AND Y OS". I'd love to say "Show me the standard bevy of Windows + Linux everything titles, but have all my purchases / wishlists / etc COUNT as Linux".

Regarding the sale itself I think its an overall good idea - I like that Steam comes up with a new mechanic for every major sale, while the underlying discounts are still there all the time; giveaways are always nice too. I think earning various rewards by playing games you own and/or are freely available can be a nice touch. For this particular sale I do think they made one mistake in the racing teams - yes, at least as of right now one team is way ahead. It was the one I joined on day 1, but I think one reason its way ahead is because of Valve's "failure to account for memes".

There are 5 "racing teams' named after animals - Hare (understandable name, F1 style car icon), Tortoise (understandable name, van style car icon ), Cockatiel (unusual name, racecar style car icon ), Pig (even more unusual name; offputting outside of Asia, semi-truck style car icon ) and finally Corgi ( Internet meme friendly dog breed perhaps second only to the Shiba Inu, futuristic race car ). Someone should have known that picking "Corgi" over something more generic like "Dog", and not including a "Cat" of any kind in the list means that a lot of people are going to pick it. Corgis are meme-able - they're the dog associated with the Queen of England, Ein from Cowboy Bebop, and there are multiple Corgi battlepets with names like Corgnelius in World of Warcraft. As I said, it could only be made worse if they called it "Shibe / Doge" instead! The other teams really aren't going to compete for member interest! We'll see how things develop as there are many days left in the sale of course, but I think they would have been better off with something like "Tortoise, Hare, Cheetah, Corgi, Unicorn" to get a wider spread of team interest.

Regarding the sale itself and indie games, this is at least for me a great time for indie titles. Games that are often not for sale via legit keysellers (ie greenmangaming, or Humble etc) may be on sale here, along with things like DLC. I buy a lot of indies and whatnot during major Steam sales and I'll often go to my huge 200+ Wishlist and sort it by Discount, checking out what discounts there are and weighing it against the normal price of the game/DLC, how often the game goes on sale, Linux support, and other factors.

Finally, I would urge the staff of GOL to try to avoid giving Epic Games any potential power, especially given it is unearned. I can't imagine them being more desirable than long standing stores like Humble or even GOG (I'm not a huge fan of GOG given their lack of real Linux support. The whole DRM-free thing is more or less a smokescreen in that the games that release on GOG, often also release on Steam - which truly supports Linux and has many other features - and have no more DRM there than they did on GOG!). I certainly hope indie developers will not give up on Steam - that is pretty much the only "platform" for which I buy games thanks to their Linux support and other ethical elements (be it sales by proxy or direct). Epic Store has a lot of money to throw around for their unscrupulous garbage and they ham-up the illusion of "visibility" to indie developers, but its just the illusion of a "small pond", one filled with toxic waste offset by continuous chemical dumping to make it appear blue and clear.

This is not to say Steam can't improve (the Wishlist issues I described above are one start), but I would not like to see developers start dealing with the ethically and technically flaming garbage platform, choosing short term ill-gotten gains for things like exclusivity and whatnot. Calling attention to them is fine, as it will help to light a fire under Steam to improve, but when it comes right down to it I don't want to have to worry about the Linux future of games or things like exclusivity because people start focusing on the Epic store or consoles etc.

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Definitely some great games here and a fantastic value for $13!

I should also mention that Party Hard 2's developer has stated Linux support is planned, but (like Mac) there hasn't been a particular timetable or recent update on progress. Given that the first title delivered Linux support, I expect the second will come even if it takes awhile While I look forward to it, it would be nice if future Proton builds allow full compatibility including story/videos.

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