The ending of another week is just about here, ready to begin anew. Before Monday comes knocking, it's time for the usual GOL community chat post.

For us over here at GOL, there's been plenty of Left 4 Dead 2 while we wait for the upcoming community expansion with The Last Stand . Our streamer Sin has been doing a bunch live on our Twitch Channel and it's been absolutely hilarious. Left 4 Dead 2 released around 11 years ago and it holds up incredibly well. Still hugely popular overall too, with it regularly pulling in close to around 20K players each day.

Personally, I've been torn between a few titles lately. Colmen's Quest turned out to be a pretty great turn-based RPG that sucked me in but looking after the bees in APICO has been absolute joy that I'm seriously excited to see what the developers do with further development to APICO. I've also attempted to learn some game development with GDevelop , which is a surprisingly versatile tool. You can really get going quickly with 2D games on it. I'm also personally very much looking forward to seeing Songs of Syx release in just over a week on September 21, bringing in another interesting city-builder with some grand strategy elements.

Over to you in the comments: what have you been playing? Is it good, is it terrible? Unload your thoughts.

We'll Meet Again, in real life!

This time, we will enjoy socialising and talking about this and that and XMPP. We meet in Biergarten Jockel. We will keep as much of physical distance as possible and use cloth face masks when entering.

When? Wednesday, 2020-09-09 18:00 CEST (always 2ⁿᵈ Wednesday of every month)

Where?Biergarten Jockel, only some hundred metres from the place, where the computer has been invented.

See you then!

Or join our non-physical room (xmpp:berlin-meetup@conference.conversations.im?join)!

#xmpp #community #berlin #meetup #chat #federation

Another week full of game updates, new releases and plenty still to come. Time for another of our weekly chats about all the wonderful gaming we've been doing.

This week saw some interesting releases for Linux including Desperados III , A Long Way Down , Crusader Kings III , a new set of Stadia Pro games and plenty of upcoming releases mentioned like The Jackbox Party Pack 7 , BOY BEATS WORLD , art of rally , Tenderfoot Tactics , Songs of Syx and plenty more from our Gamescom round-up . Certainly no shortage and that's only off the top of my head from this last week.

My current love that I keep going back to is Super Bomberman R Online, which is currently a time-limited exclusive on Stadia . If you have Stadia Pro, it's free to claim until November 30 (and Stadia Pro still gives a month free on sign-up) and it seems there's plenty of players on it, I've had no troubles finding matches.

I've never been that big of a Bomberman fan but something about having 64 people running around various arenas is hilarious. The way it's done is very much like a Battle Royale, a little Fall Guys even. You're initially split into many arenas, with each round having a few taken away so you need to run across to another. It's frantic and brilliant fun.

I'm also mourning the loss of my trusty Logitech F310 gamepad, it had a good 5+ year run but it's time to wave goodbye as it has decided that it no longer wishes to stay connected for more than a few seconds (tested across multiple machines).

Opening it reveals no obvious fault that my total amateur tech mind can find to fix. So, it's time to shop for a new gamepad. While the Gioteck WX-4 Wireless I have still continues on, the PC/Linux support overall is still too lacking right now and as much as I still love the Steam Controller, and confessed much love before, there's times where a stick is just needed and for local multiplayer titles another is required. Sure would be nice if those older hints of a new Steam Controller came true don't you think?

So, do I go for another trusty Logitech F310? For the price, the F310 is still one of the best PC gamepads around. Perhaps the wireless F710? Or one of those fancy units from 8BitDo? Although the last 8BitDo I had needed some manual repair only a few months after picking, with a button acting like it was always being pressed, so their build quality doesn't feel too great overall.

Feel free to give over your gamepad suggestions for Linux gaming in the comments this week. What are you using, what's your favourite with great game support? Other than that — over to you in the comments: what have you been gaming on Linux lately?

Time to brew a cup of your favourite and chat in the comments, let's see what GOL readers have been enjoying on their Linux boxes recently.

This week we saw Children of Morta gain official Linux support and wow—what absolutely stunning artwork it has. I'm constantly finding myself just appreciating the detail that went into it. Children of Morta could quite easily be my biggest surprise of this year. Not only that, the introduction with the narration is simply incredible.

Pictured: actual in-game Children of Morta shot on Linux.

I will no doubt have more to say about it in the coming days/weeks. We're also going to have our livestreamer take a look too, so be sure to follow us on Twitch .

We've also been doing a little extra of Drink More Glurp , because it's honestly just hilarious. You control a funny little character, with each stick on a gamepad being an arm and you need to progress through randomized events. Playing it with others is pure joy, as you're all laughing away at how ridiculous it is, which is aplified by it being a hot-seat game so you're all watching or being watched. Do check it out, brilliant game.

I've also done the great distro-hop of 2020, moving over from Manjaro to EndeavourOS . Not only that, I've also moved from the KDE Plasma desktop environment to MATE, so it's been quite a disruptive day. Sometimes, change is just needed. This brings me that little bit closer to a standard Arch Linux install, although I do like my easy install options so EndeavorOS made that quite simple. A little NVIDIA headache aside (nomodeset in GRUB was needed), it's running smoothly now.

Thanks to the Ventoy app , doing it was super simple too since I could just download the ISO and dump it right onto the USB and reboot without any fuss.

MATE is far less flashy than KDE Plasma, but also runs a lot smoother, especially on NVIDIA where Plasma has a lot of rough edges and random slow downs and occasional momentary freezes. As a side effect of the move, it seems my keyboard is also no longer randomly disconnecting so that's a bonus.

Anyway, that's enough Linux distribution talk…

Stuck for something this weekend? There's plenty of deals going on:

• Humble Stores's End of Summer Sale
• GOG's Harvest Sale
• Two Point Hospital free to try for 1 more day, big discount

Over to you in the comments: what have you been gaming on Linux lately? Give over your suggestions on what's hot.

As another week comes to a close it's time to have a chat with the GOL readership about what you're all playing lately, come and let us know.

This week saw the release of the absolutely magical Spiritfarer . I can't get over how wonderful a game it is, fully deserving of all the praise it has been receiving. Taking care of spirits, while doing a little building and crafting on your fancy boat while also giving out hugs to those spirits that need it. Absolute joy.

Spiritfarer is just so lovely, we're going to need Sin to livestream it I think. Keep an eye on our Twitch Channel for that. Although, with 7 Days to Die Alpha 19 being out it's going to be difficult to tear Sin away from it.

Quite a bit of my own personal time has also been testing out NVIDIA GeForce NOW. It's another game streaming service, which recently opened up to Chromebooks / ChromeOS in the browser so it works on Linux too . You can see a video of Fortnite running here as another example. It's certainly an interesting service but I still personally much prefer Stadia technically speaking, as I find it just works much better overall but I won't deny how good NVIDA did the game access side of things by it using existing accounts for people. Over the next many years, it will be very interesting to see all these cloud services fight for users.

I've also personally continued playing Orcs Must Die! 3 on Stadia with a partner, the huge battleground battles are just so much fun it's ridiculous. Getting to launch catapults at hundreds of Orcs, while another is running around hacking away at them is quite a sight.

As a reminder of some deals going:

• Humble Headup Games Band Boost Bundle - Vambrace: Cold Soul, Dead End Job and more
• There's also a Humble Killing Floor Bundle going
• Steam 0451 sale - celebrating Ray Bradbury's 100th birthday with games that reference the iconic Fahrenheit 451
• GOG Weekend Sale - save on games where you only live once
• HITMAN titles cheap on Humble Store

Over to you in the comments: what have you been gaming on Linux lately?

Another week has dragged on and here we are, the weekend. It's time to go over a few little bits and find out what our readers have been playing this week.

For me, I've been playing rather a lot of DRAG , the fancy new racer from Orontes Games. As pretty as it is and how smooth the performance is, the game itself might be the most frustrated I've been with a racing game—ever. Not the kind of frustration to put me off because of technical issues, more at my own inability to keep the damn car from sliding about everywhere and then smashing into a tiny little tree and losing a precious wheel.

Have you ever had a game truly give you stress-sweats? It's not just because it's ridiculously warm in the GOL office, DRAG is nail-biting edge of your seat tough . It took me over 4 hours to beat the first set of time trials on the "Wood" medal (the lowest). 4 hours, split across a few levels that take ~30 seconds to beat most. Who set these crazy times? Orontes we need words. Challenging physics aside, DRAG is a great entry into the racing genre that I hope goes on to become a success. It's been a while since I was properly excited to see a racing game evolve and DRAG has such an impressive start. I did at least get a few good runs in like this on video .

Now how about a little round-up of some interesting recent news?

As for game engines, the cross-platform and open source Godot Engine is changing how it will provide rendering options with Godot 4.0 when it gains Vulkan support. Instead of a high-end and a low-end renderer, they will instead have a single renderer that is efficient for multiple uses. You can read more about that here . Additionally, Godot is getting a Volumetric fog implementation which is merged in ready for release (shots below).

Additionally, a normal Fog system is also back in for Godot 4.0 that's less complex than the system in the 3.x series that should look good with "less effort". The Godot team is also looking for help funding to hire more developers which you can do so on Patreon . If you're a game developer reading, I do urge you to look into using Godot.

This week we also had the KDE August 2020 application updates bringing with it improvements to the Dolphin file manager with lots of usability improvements, like improvements to how it cuts the filenames when they're too long and a new "Copy Location" option. This Copy Location ability was also added to Konsole, KDE's terminal app and there's plenty more updates across KDE apps. Digikam especially got a big upgrade with Digikam 7.0.0 with much better facial recognition.

Something very concerning is what's happening over at Mozilla. There's been some conflicting reports but they're definitely changing and letting go of 250 staff members. MDN (Mozilla Developer Network), practically one of the go-to places for reading up on web tech and standards also had its team gutted and they're trying to find a way forwards. Hopefully it's not all as bad as it sounds. It's alarming since they make Firefox, and it would be really bad if we ended up with just Chromium sticking around. Open source still sure, but Google pretty firmly control it. The somewhat good news, is that Mozilla has now managed to sign a new deal with Google for funding, which makes up the majority of their incoming monies.

Deals Reminder:

• Killing Floor Humble Bundle
• Humble Store - Racing Games Sale
• Dying Light - 66% off (Steam) - just had a new DLC
• The Traditional Roguelikes Bundle (Steam) - save on Caves of Qud, Sword of the Stars and more
• PAYDAY 2 (Steam) big anniversary sale - 50% off
• GOG have a sale on Automation games , with some great Zachtronics in there like Opus Magnum

Over to you in the comments: what have you been gaming on Linux lately and what are you clicking on this weekend?

We'll Meet Again, in real life!

This time, we will enjoy socialising and talking about this and that and XMPP. We meet in Biergarten Golgatha. We will keep as much of physical distance as possible and use cloth face masks when entering.

When? Wednesday, 2020-08-12 18:00 CEST (always 2ⁿᵈ Wednesday of every month)

Where?Biergarten Golgatha, only some hundred metres from the place, where the computer has been invented.

See you then!

Or join our non-physical room (xmpp:berlin-meetup@conference.conversations.im?join)!

#xmpp #community #berlin #meetup #chat #federation #fediverse

What's that? It's the weekend? It can't be already can it? Yes. It's time for the weekend chat about what we've been playing and what you've been playing.

There's been so many good Linux supported releases lately I've been a bit spoilt for choice including these just in the last week: DemonCrawl , UnderMine , The Battle of Polytopia , Littlewood , Monster Crown , Core Defense and Hellpoint (plus plenty more I've missed).

Recently though, I've been having masses of fun in Orcs Must Die! 3 on Stadia with a co-op partner. Getting to test out all the different trap combinations, it's genuinely good fun. It was fun enough by myself but now with a partner, it's far more amusing especially trying the later difficulties. Good manic entertainment.

As for actual Linux-desktop games, Jupiter Hell sucked me right in once more. Jupiter Hell is the spritual successor to DRL (D**m, the Roguelike) and it's one of the most furious roguelikes I've ever played. While turn-based, it's so streamlined and fluid it feels almost realtime. It's also quite gorgeous in places. Jupiter Hell has evolved quite nicely during Early Access and it's easily worth a look.

I also spoke to the developer of Haque , a rather fantastic glitch fantasy roguelike from 2017. As great as it is, the Steam build had a bug where a file was named "Haque_Text.zip" but the game was looking for "haque_text.zip". Linux case-sensitivity strikes again. They mentioned they will fix it as soon as possible.

Additionally: it appears that there's another big CPU security issue , this time not just affecting Intel. According to the paper it should affect Intel, ARM, IBM, and AMD CPUs.

Lastly, NVIDIA put up a new Vulkan Beta Driver 450.56.06 with the sole change listed as new support for the VK_EXT_4444_formats extension that landed with Vulkan API spec 1.2.149 that we reported on here .

Deals Reminder:

• F1 2018 is free on Humble Store
• Humble Choice giving away all 12 games this month for the Premium/Classic subs
• Valve's QuakeCon Sale has plenty of games that work with Proton - GOG also has a QuakeCon Sale
• Humble Raw Fury 2020 Bundle - 3 days left
• Humble Double Fine 20th Anniversary Bundle - 5 days left
• Humble  also has a Game Design & Animation book bundle for anyone interested in that side of things

Over to you in the comments: what have you been gaming on Linux lately and what are you looking forward to the most across this year?