It seems that Kodera Software continue to impressed by the level of Linux sales on Steam for their space mining sim ΔV: Rings of Saturn. Be sure to also check out our previous interview with the developer.

What is it? A physics-based mining sim, set in the thickest debris field in Sol. Every action has a reaction, lasers are invisible without a medium, and your thrust is a potent weapon. Find trade, adapt your equipment to your playstyle, hire a crew to help. Unravel the mysteries of the rings, or just get rich.

Developed with Godot Engine , the developer has announced a few times how sales have been going across different platforms and they recently gave another update on Twitter to see if things had changed. They included a chart showing some pretty reasonable looking sales for Linux:

According to the Twitter post, the game has had a recently surge in popularity so it's really interesting to see that the Linux numbers have held up for it.

You can buy ΔV: Rings of Saturn on Steam and itch.io .

Never seen it? Check out some recent gameplay below:

Do you love watching Twitch livestreams? I bet there's plenty amongst our readers! Well, it seems Mozilla are looking into making it better with Firefox.

Writing on Reddit , jrmuizel a Gfx team Engineer at Mozilla said: "Over the past while, I've noticed quite a few reports of people complaining that Twitch has worse performance in Firefox vs Chrome/Edge. I'm hoping to spend some more time on fixing this over the next little while and am looking for more specifics on how and when it's worse for people.

If anyone sees this (or uses Twitch and doesn't see it) please respond with some details including what kind of computer you're using, and how to reproduce the problem."

The only problem I usually have is certain areas seemingly at random fail to load, with an error message of "Failed to load module", which usually goes away with a refresh. It's quite a nuisance though.

Have you had issues with Twitch and Firefox? Might be time to speak up and let your problems be known, and who knows a future Firefox release might fix it. Head over to the Reddit post to let the developer know.

Another month is here and so is the next Humble Choice with a fresh selection of games to pick from. Here you pay for whatever tier you feel is the best value to get access to the Humble Trove (a ton of DRM-free games), a discount at the Humble Store and the ability to claim Steam keys (sometimes GOG keys) for multiple titles - the amount of which depends on what tier you buy into.

Here's a roundup of how they all work on Linux either natively or with Steam Play Proton . Proton GE refers to the community-built custom version of Proton.

• Rebel Cops - Linux native
• Midnight Protocol - Linux native
• Mafia: Definitive Edition - works well with Proton GE
• Iron Harvest - works well with Proton GE
• Project Winter - works with Proton
• Rustler - works with Proton
• The Henry Stickmin Collection - works with Proton
• Farmer's Dynasty - works with Proton
• Between the Stars - Works with Proton
• Retrowave - Works with Proton

If any interest you, head over to Humble Choice .

Developed as a modern reincarnation of the original Master of Orion, the free and open source Remnants of the Precursors is officially out now. It's been in development for somewhere around 6 years, with the big 1.0 landing on December 25.

Master of Orion is an absolute classic, and the sequel is one of the games that firmly cemented my absolute love of video games so seeing the genre live on in such a way is awesome. According to the developer "ROTP takes that original award-winning formula and adds high quality artwork, writing, graphical design and AI development to recreate the authentic experience of the original game. There is arguably more quality artwork and writing in ROTP than in almost any space 4X game currently on the market".

Watch video on YouTube.com

The developer further mentioned that "Each of the ten races has personalized dialogue that aligns with their racial tendencies to bring them to life in a way not possible in MOO1. Which race you choose to play really makes a difference in your tactics, and knowing who your neighbors are and what they care about is an important part of playing well." — and also that — "The technology tree is variable each game and has a real effect on how you design your ships. You can't research every tech, so you will often need to resort to diplomacy, espionage or even war to acquire technologies you desire. Ship combat is turn-based, allowing you to directly command your fleet against the enemy or some of the dangerous space monsters. There is no "blob vs blob" ship combat in ROTP".

Sounds like a huge amount of effort and attention to detail went into this.

Available free / pay what you want from itch.io and the source is up on GitHub . There's a few different licenses depending on the code / artwork but it's looking good.

Want to reduce latency? There's now a free and open source way with LatencyFleX, that gives a vendor and game agnostic latency reduction middleware that you can try out.

This can be used as an alternative to NVIDIA Reflex, for Windows games running through Proton that have it implemented directly, plus certain Linux builds of Unreal Engine 4 games and as a plugin / hook for Unity games too. An advantage of course is that you don't need an NVIDIA GPU, with the developer mentioning one of the motivations for creating it being only having an AMD GPU.

Plans also include to enable developers to integrate it into their game engines too. Overall it sounds like a really fantastic project and could be fun to try out.

An example of LatencyFleX in action, credit to Tatsuyuki Ishi.

For a little more behind the scenes, you can check out the introduction blog post .

The project is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. Use at your own risk, especially games that have some form of anti-cheat.

KDE developer Nate Graham continues blogging about how KDE and Plasma are evolving and there's been some great improvements recently, along with some huge plans for 2022.

Making things easier for users is important and the KDE team are clearly taking on a lot of feedback. A major new feature is that Dolphin, and anything that hooks into KIO, can now create, move, copy, trash, and delete files in non-user-owned locations. Instead of just giving you a warning and not letting you do anything, it should now ask for a password and let you do what you need to without resorting to a terminal window. Nice. This change should land in KDE Frameworks 5.91.

Wayland improvements also came in recently like supporting greater than 8-bit colour, the ability to open the current directory or any other folder you right-click on in any app, not just the file manager with Konsole.

As for their 2022 plans , which aren't set in stone, more of a guide - there's a lot!

One of the big things for 2022 is to have Wayland at a stage for KDE where it can completely replace the X11 session. Another I'm particularly interested in is improvements to multi-monitor support, modernizing Breeze icons and a big focus on what they're calling the "15 minute bug" initiative - to clean up issues that appear within the first 15 minutes of loading into Plasma.

Sounds like KDE and Plasma are going places in 2022. This is going to be good news for the Steam Deck too, since the desktop session uses Plasma.

Even more Vulkan goodness came recently with OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) releasing Ogre-Next 2.3.0 Deadalus just before Christmas.

While this isn't something us normal consumers will use, it's another bit of great free and open source tech and having it continue to advance is great. Vulkan is gradually starting to replace OpenGL in more places for gaming, which is good news for Linux.

Ogre-Next 2.3.0 considers its Vulkan support as "stable" and ready to go! They do mention that currently a known issue is integration with Qt, which they will get around to looking into and fixing up.

Are there any notable games using it? Quite a few actually including Scrap Mechanic, Kenshi, Torchlight, RUNNING WITH RIFLES, Hob, The Book of Unwritten Tales and a good number more you can see for yourself on SteamDB .

See the full release notes on the official site .

Stepping slightly out of my comfort zone recently to try something different, I picked up a copy of Bloons TD 6 and I think I now may need help to tear myself away from it. Note: played with Steam Play Proton .

I'm a huge fan of strategy games but I usually go for the more base-building RTS types, with Tower Defense not something I go for often. Based on how it looks, Bloons TD 6 is a game I would say you could easily pass up and not think anything of it. I honestly thought it looked a bit, dare I say it, overly childish. Oh how I was wrong. Bloons TD 6 is a monster of a game but family friendly for sure.

Bloons TD 6 is, in a word, fantastic. It's not a new game, released originally back in December 2018 and so I'm a bit late to the game on this one but gosh it's good. Who would have thought that Monkeys popping balloons would make for a good Tower Defense game? I didn't, obviously. However, I can't be the only one who enjoys the simple pleasure of popping balloons in real life? Bloons TD 6 offers that in the hundreds and thousands of wow it sure is satisfying watching hundreds of balloons float around getting popped.

Not only can you blast through hundreds of hours by yourself but you can bring a friend too - or a few, as it has 4 player co-op. So I did and cross-platform multiplayer works exceptionally well even between a Linux machine running it through Proton and someone else on Windows (tested both joining / hosting). Simply beautiful.

There is only a small learning curve to Bloons TD 6 too, mainly requiring you to pay attention to the types of balloons coming and keeping an eye on the wave number, to be ready for special Bloons that appear on later waves that you need a few special upgraded Monkeys to overcome.

The only part I'm not keen on are the micro-transactions. However, you can get everything simply by paying and it's not even remotely difficult to unlock things (which you do constantly) so it has a reasonable balance there overall.

If you enjoy Tower Defense games, go grab it. Bloons TD 6 might possibly be one of the best TD games ever made. Steam reviews back it up too with well over 100,000 user reviews and an Overwhelmingly Positive rating, so you really don't need to just take my word for it. Constant updates too that add new features, new Monkeys, new maps and more.

The developer was also quite responsive when an issue appeared with Proton, submitting their own bug report to Valve that ended up getting fixed.

Available to buy on Steam .

Love local multiplayer action games? Do check out Steelbreakers, a free 2D top-down multiplayer arena fighter.

In Steelbreakers you hack, slash, shoot and run to defeat your opponents and emerge victorious, or team up to defeat monsters and survive. Inspired by many different retro games it features different game modes and various maps to fight through.

With the latest release there's new maps to check out including:

• Snow Day
  • A snow-themed map with little snowmen you can push around and pick up, as well as a drawbridge across a small lake that divides the lower portion of themap.
• Volcanic Depths
  • A fiery map with many traps littered throughout the ground and some gates you can open and close with switches.
• Remote Oasis
  • A desert map with many hills scattered throughout that slow you down. Also has a small building you can access with a golden key in the opposite corner.
• Wokako Wood
  • A jungle map with many pressure plate arrow traps scattered around. As you destroy the obstacles around the map, you are more likely to get hit by these sneaky shooters!

You will also find new lighting effects in older maps, new music and some other minor adjustments.

It's pretty fun to run around with a friend, although it is local multiplayer only.

Free / pay what you want on itch.io .