Intel was already a pretty high backer of the free and open source 3D creation suite Blender but now they're going in for even more as a Corporate Patron. ICYMI : recently Blender 3.0 was release .

Previously down as a Corporate Gold member, this increase will see Intel give at least €120K a year to the Blender Foundation to better support one of the biggest and most important FOSS projects around. This means Intel joins the ranks of AMD, NVIDIA, AWS, Epic MegaGrants, Unity, Facebook and Decentraland at the same level (with many more in lower funding levels).

From the press release:

“Intel is extending its collaboration and commitment to the Blender open-source community. We are already incorporating the oneAPI cross-architecture, CPU- and GPU-driven features and performance of Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit libraries into Blender to benefit creators of all kinds. We share the Blender Foundation’s mindset to make world-class visual technologies available to everyone through open-source software and open standards.” said Raja Koduri, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) Group.

See more about Blender funding on their website .

elementary OS is easily one of the best looking Linux distributions around, with such an incredible attention to the finer details and a big new release is up now. With elementary OS 6.1 the developers focused on addressing feedback from the previous release, new and more useful office productivity features and expanding compatibility with a larger range of hardware.

elementary OS 6.1 Jólnir takes the same foundation as OS 6 Odin and elevates it to a new level of polish. Thanks to some great new tooling and release management processes at elementary, we’ve been able to make larger strides in less time than ever before. This release represents the sum of our work over the last several months as a single major update to the OS 6 series—and we believe there’s enough great new stuff here that this release deserves its own name and identity.

Danielle Foré, Founder & CEO

Pictured - elementary OS 6.1

Looks like a fair amount of work went into improving their AppCenter now they've done their switch over from Debian packages into Flatpak it was time to continue improvements there. Making much better use of spacing, along with giving more details about each application right away, it definitely looks like a big improvement. To make things clearer, they've also now separated the category views between paid, free and non-curated apps (third-party Flatpak repos like Flathub). Big improvements also came for those who do add a third-party repo, so you no longer have to restart for example to have applications from them show up in the AppCenter.

Across the desktop itself there's been some pretty big changes too, like the ALT+TAB switcher getting a redesign, expanded options for the File Chooser dialog, improvements to the Dark Style preference, the Applications Menu will let you find bookmarked folders and locations and absolutely tons of other smaller improvements.

See all that and more in their announcement post .

You can download it from the official website using a pay what you want model.

Check out a video our friend Nick did to go over some of what's new:

NFTs, they're freaking everywhere and NFT bros have become some of the most annoying people on the planet and so of course there's now a Doom mod to mock them. ICYMI : Valve banned NFT games on Steam .

It's not a particularly fleshed-out mod, with the main aim of it just being pure mockery. You get to run around with your trusty camera, taking snaps of everything. Like running around and right click -> saving on images that would be NFTs. Released by modder "Ultra Boi" last week, it's certainly been turning some heads across the internet, especially because of just how toxic things have become around the NFT community.

Pictured - NFT Doom mod, my testing.

It's all very meta and the game is basically a meme but a good one. NFT fans seem to really hate the jokes aimed at them in regards to ownership. It's all completely ridiculous and every day there's more and more reports on artwork being stolen from the original artist, turned into a ridiculous NFT and then sold to someone else.

Things have gotten so ridiculous, that popular art website DeviantArt implemented a system to notify people if their work is detected as an NFT in their DeviantArt Protect software.

NFT Doom is available to download on Mod DB . It works just fine with GZDoom and Doom II.

The developer also recently put up a video of it in action:

Valve has put out another small upgrade to Proton Experimental, with it focused on improving a couple of popular games. What is Proton? It's a compatibility layer designed to run Windows games from Steam on Linux. See more about it in our full guide .

The release that went up on December 20 fixed up the Xbox login window behaviour for Forza Horizon 5, worked around a bunch of graphical glitching in DEATHLOOP and also fixed Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord occasionally getting stuck in a loop displaying errors.

Not only that though, this release should also speed up the "wind-down" of Proton after you exit a game. So that should make the whole experience a fair bit smoother. Update : an additional fix was added on December 21 to "Fix the new Rockstar Launcher crashing".

See the Proton Experimental changelog to see all the current differences to the normal Proton releases.

Need to know how to actually use Proton Experimental? Here's a simple HOWTO (as it's not complicated!). Make sure it's installed by searching for it in your Steam Library, then select it from the Compatibility menu in the Properties section of a game. See our quick video below:

For an explainer in text form:

1. Search for Proton Experimental and install if not already.
2. Right click any game on Steam and go to Properties.
3. Select the Compatibility menu on the right side.
4. Ensure the "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" is ticked.
5. From the dropdown box that appears select Proton Experimental.

Little bit of good news to start Tuesday, as the excellent livestreaming and recording software OBS Studio got another good donation recently, this time from Red Hat.

Red Hat certainly aren't the first big company to help fund OBS development, software that has become essential for so many different uses. Nice to see a bigger Linux and open source company jump in though with the confirmation of the $10,000 donation on Twitter .

This actually puts Red Hat in the top 5 of companies who have donated to OBS via their OpenCollective campaign.

In other OBS related news, it seems they're going to be moving their official Linux packages over to Flatpak rather than just having an official PPA for Ubuntu. This is fantastic news, as it means all the proper service integration will be easily available to all Linux users.

We still remember trying to livestream on Linux before OBS Studio came along, what a complete pain that was. OBS is another incredible project that really shows the power of open source. Super useful for other uses too because of all the easy to use plugins from podcasts to plain video content creation.

Working with Virtual Reality and Linux just got a lot more interesting, with the clever hackers at Collabora announcing their new standalone Wayland compositor for xrdesktop called wxrd.

For those that didn't see our previous coverage on it: xrdesktop is a way to turn your desktop into a VR space, allowing you to interact with windows and do some pretty cool stuff with a VR HMD. It does this with patches and integrations for window managers like the defaults of GNOME and KDE Kwin but "suffers several drawbacks" and isn't then an option for others. It gets messier with all the different versions across different Linux distributions.

Their new solution is wxrd, "a standalone client based on wlroots and the wxrc compositor". It differs from other solutions as "xrdesktop's tech stack is focused on a small footprint. Instead of depending on large frameworks and libraries, xrdesktop with wxrd focuses on minimal dependencies and a manageable scope". It works differently to plain xrdesktop as it doesn't mirror your desktop applications, instead shows only what has been started on it.

It comes with a lot of advantages including standalone devices, the ability to display both Wayland and X11 applications in VR, stuff rendered runs at the refresh rate of the HMD not the desktop and more. There's drawbacks too though like it not working (yet) for NVIDIA. See their example video below:

Perhaps this might end up being something Valve might use in a future VR headset, as the previous hints did seem like it would have a standalone mode.

Melding together elements of a fast-paced action game with the tactics of a tower defence game, Sky Fleet is officially out now. Taking place in the clouds, you speed around various floating islands as you battle for supremacy while also grabbing some resources.

Watch video on YouTube.com

"Sky Fleet takes solid classic tower defense strategy with friends into the clouds,” said Dan Phillips, Founder, Enno Games. “Adapt and experience the co-op mode with anyone in the world who thinks they can outplay you. Suit up and make your buddy put his airship where their mouth is!"

It's a solid entry into the competitive strategy market that's absolutely worth a look if you're a fan of real-time strategy games. Having direct control over one main upgradable unit is a nice touch, that does help to keep it feeling very different from any traditional RTS or tower defence game. It plays out much more like a top-down shooter, with a few strategy elements to keep your mind ticking constantly.

Available to buy on Steam .

Indoorlands is a pretty unique game when it comes to building up a theme park and the developer just put up the biggest and most interesting Early Access update yet.

"The indoor park management simulator where you can create your rides from scratch, control them and freely design your halls. Manage, expand and develop your own park to inspire your visitors. Satisfy your visitors' needs by unlocking and researching new buildings, rides, transportation and more!"

With the latest update, they've enabled a new ride editor that had previously been in public experimental testing. This editor allows you to actually build you own ride from parts. This even came with Steam Workshop integration to upload and download creations.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Playing your way is also a lot easier now too, with the introduction of a Sandbox mode that allows you to tweak all sorts of settings like giving infinite money so you can go wild and just build whatever the heck you feel like.

The size of parks has been increased massively too. The game is based on big halls, since the whole idea is that it's all inside in these massive spaces. The amount you can build to place attractions in has gone from 7 to 16 which is huge. On top of that there's also some Christmas themed content, performance improvements and other general upgrades.

You can buy Indoorlands on Steam .

Sandwalkers is a roguelike turn-based exploration game from Goblinz Studio, who've developed and published a number of games now like Legend of Keepers, Sigma Theory, As Far As The Eye, Neurodeck and more.

Due out in 2022, it sees you build up a team and guide a caravan across an ever-changing landscape full of dangers. Check out their latest teaser that was shown off during Gamescom which we missed:

Watch video on YouTube.com

"Every decade, the Mka tribe sends caravans of adventurers into the Phithi, the meteorological chaos that keeps the Uwando tribes isolated from each other and makes life outside the refuges almost impossible.

Their mission: to establish diplomatic and trade relations, to explore and reclaim the lands left to the mercy of monsters and pirates, and, most importantly, to plant a new tree city that can become a refuge for the Mka and their allies. Regardless of the success or failure of their mission, the caravans must send the memories they have gained back to the capital, using the crystospheres carried by traveling beetles."

Game Features:

• Guide a caravan of adventurers through ever-changing landscapes.
• Fight and survive in the face of acid rain, sandstorms and heat waves.
• Tame hostile creatures, rescue refugees, seek allies for mutual aid, or follow the blood path and loot everything you can.
• Seek rich arable soil to plant a new tree city for your people.
• Progress by passing on your knowledge to a new caravan.
• Repair the broken climate, and put an end to centuries of wandering.
• Make choices that will affect your future expeditions.
• Each character has a different job that greatly influences the gameplay. It's up to you to explore mythical ruins as an Archeologist, or track down huge beasts as a Hunter.
• Don't underestimate the weather! It influences the movements of the characters and the outcomes of confrontations.

You can follow it on Steam .