We'll Meet Again, in real life!

This time, we will enjoy socialising and talking about this and that and XMPP. We meet outside of xHain using their chairs on the pavement. We will keep 2 meters of physical distance and use cloth face masks when entering xHain.

When? Wednesday, 2020-07-08 18:00 CEST (always 2ⁿᵈ Wednesday of every month)

Where? Pavement in front of xHain hack+makespace, Grünberger Str. 16, 10243 Berlin (as formerly)

Please respect the xHain "house rules"!

See you then!

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

#xmpp #community #xhain #freesoftware #berlin #meetup #federation #fediverse

Ah Sunday, that special day that's a calm before the storm of another week and a time for a community chat here on GOL. Today, it's our birthday! If you didn't see the post earlier this week , GamingOnLinux as of today has hit the big 11 years old! Oh how time sure flies by.

Onto the subject of gaming on Linux: honestly, the majority of my personal game time has been taken up by Into the Breach . It's so gorgeously streamlined, accessible, fun and it's also ridiculously complex at the same time. Tiny maps that require a huge amount of forward thinking, as you weigh up each movement decision against any possible downsides. It's like playing chess, only with big mecha fighting off aliens trying to take down buildings.

It's quite surprising how much room there is for coming up with a strategy, as the game continues surprising me many hours later with what's possible. Made by the same team behind FTL, Into the Breach reminds me of the same feeling I got when first discovering FTL and having that nagging need in the back of my mind calling me back to play more. Fantastic game.

I've also been quite disappointed in Crayta on Stadia , as it so far hasn't lived up to even my smallest expectations for the game maker. It just seems so half-baked, with poor/stiff animations and a lack of any meaningful content to start with. I'll be checking back on it in a few months but for now it's just not fun.

Over to you in the comments: what games have been taking up your time over the last week? Let us know what you've found to be particularly interesting.

It's coming to the end of another week on planet Earth. More games have released, tons have seen updates and it's time for another chit-chat.

You might laugh but a lot of my time has been spent playing Troll Patrol , I've actually found myself somewhat hooked by it. The simplicity of match-3 gameplay with a dash of RPG elements makes for quite a fun brew. I'm genuinely surprised by how fun it actually is and it seems the PC release has gone firmly under the radar with only one single user review on Steam.

I will also fully admit that Planetary Annihilation: TITANS has pulled me back in too. While the addition of a Unicorn commander was a little amusing, I found myself wanting to go back and throw an entire moon at someone. Such a huge RTS, the scale of it is crazy and it's really wonderful to see the newer developer (Planetary Annihilation Inc took over from Uber Ent) keep polishing the experience.

There's also a fair bit of Titanfall 2 . I can't tell you how happy I am that it works so well on Linux with Steam Play Proton. It seems the Steam release has given the 2016 shooter an entirely new life, who would have thought? It's repeatedly breaking new player records too with over 11 thousand online in it right now.

Over to you in the comments again: what have you been playing and what are you clicking on across the weekend?

It's Sunday and another week has flown by, in part thanks to all the wonderful limited-time demos that have been available for a few days during the Steam Game Festival.

Thanks to the Steam festival, the choice of gaming available has been tougher than ever. Do you jump through your vast backlog of titles or wet your taste-buds with one of the demos? Choices, choices. Here's a reminder of some recent interesting new releases for Linux:

• Alwa's Legacy
• ATOM RPG Trudograd
• Attentat 1942
• Burning Knight
• Megaquarium: Freshwater Frenzy
• Poly Bridge 2
• Resolutiion
• shapez.io

Admittedly, my own time has been spread across a great many titles. Although, thanks to Titanfall 2 now working well on Linux with Steam Play Proton I will admit to having the need to go and play a lot more. Apart from that, I've also been feeling the ARPG call from Last Epoch , now that it's up to date and working very nicely, a proper gem in the rough and could be quite big once fully released. So many skills to master, loot coming out of everything you can fashion into a pocket and so many different types of enemies. Last Epoch is really one that action RPG fans need to take a look into.

Over to you in the comments section: what have you been playing recently?

It's the weekend and hopefully some of you will find the time to relax and play some games. There's been a lot of new releases lately too!

For me, I'm a little torn.

The new Stoneshard update is really good, filled full of new content to play through and a lot of new weapons to try out. The brutal combat and setting certainly takes getting used to, along with the health system. I've lost count on the amount of times I've died in it over the last few days.

I also want to play a whole lot more Burning Knight simply because it's so incredibly fun to blast through. So much insane action when you manage to build up a list of items. Just look at how ridiculous it can be!

You know what? I'm clicking Play on Burning Knight as soon as this goes up…

Over to you: what will you be clicking on across this weekend and into next week? Let us know in the comments and suggest some good picks for your fellow GOL reader.

Kiwi’s Guide to: ACTIVISM

Another week down, plenty of new games have released or been updated and we're about to begin another cycle. Let's have a chat.

With the recent huge Stellaris 2.7 update , we were going to be diving into a fresh multiplayer game with excitement to look at all the new visuals. Sadly though, it appears the latest update has numerous problems that caused all sorts of lag and sync issues. Thankfully, Paradox keep around older versions on Steam you can opt into with the 2.6.x series still working well. Issues aside, Stellaris is such a fantastic RTS overall to sink a great many hours into.

Into the Breach has also been sucking up more time lately, as a small and focused strategy game it's pretty close to perfection. I'm really not surprised it has review so well. Subset Games also continue to tweak the Linux build to ensure it's running smoothly.

Across today though I've been quite sick, so thanks to Stadia I've been able to just sit back and relax with a flawless Assassin's Creed Odyssey experience to just zone-out with. It's nice to have another option if your net is good enough. The developer of firefighting game Embr also sent over a pre-release Stadia key to us, and it's quite amusing. Something to look forward to when it arrives in Early Access next week (no Linux desktop release for now).

I'm also highly jealous of everyone who has a VR kit now that Half-Life: Alyx is available on Linux . Hopefully it's working well, it looks pretty incredible and sounds like Valve did a really fantastic job on it. Half-Life: Alyx has now passed twenty-five thousand user reviews on Steam too!

Quick tip for parents: currently on Steam the LEGO NINJAGO game is 100% off making it free to keep, seems to work well in Steam Play proton.

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

XMPP helping businesses

This time, we will enjoy a remote talk of Sonny who is a long-time XMPP user and developer about how the XMPP ecosystem (ejabberd, PubSub, xmpp.js, ...) is helping businesses and why as well as how to write XMPP applications with JavaScript.

MIX in Kaidan

We will also have the pleasure to see the implementation of the new MIX group-chat functionality in the cross-platform client Kaidan.

Furthermore we would like to mention, that there was a meet up in April, but we haven't been able to announce it here.

When? Wednesday, 2020-05-13 18:00 CEST (always 2ⁿᵈ Wednesday of every month)

Where? this time online at https://meet.dbjr.org/berlin-meetup

See you then!

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

#xmpp #community #freesoftware #berlin #meetup #xmppjs #xmppecosystem #MIX #Kaidan