One we don't cover or hear about too often is SuperTux, a free and open source platformer that's been around for some time now and it's getting a Steam release.

"Run and jump through SuperTux, the sidescrolling 2D platformer starring Tux, the Linux mascot. Squish and knock out enemies, collect powerups, and solve platforming puzzles throughout the Icy Island and the Rooted Forest, as Tux tries to save his beloved Penny from her kidnapper, Nolok!"

Watch video on YouTube.com

Game Features:

• Platforming gameplay similar to original Super Mario games, with some unique abilities such as backflipping and dynamic swimming
• Lovingly hand-crafted graphics contributed by a variety of artists, alongside engaging and catchy music
• Engaging levels designed with casual gameplay, puzzling and speedrunning in mind
• Weird, quirky and some not-so-adorable enemies that might be too cute to kill
• Two full worlds packed with unique and challenging levels, castles, and boss fights
• Other contrib levels, including seasonal worlds, storyless bonus islands, and downloadable Add-ons, which feature new and unique stories and levels
• Simple, flexible Level Editor, which allows for the creation and sharing of levels of any complexity

Follow on Steam or grab it from the official site / Flathub .

Joshua Strobl, who was Experience Lead for the Solus Linux distribution, has officially quit but work on the Budgie desktop environment continues.

Announcing the departure on Twitter , Strobl linked to a longer statement that went over some rather vague issues that probably won't make much sense to anyone who isn't close to Strobl or the project. These include problems "which affect the ability to contribute to Solus, both from myself and others in the community".

The good news is the fancy Budgie desktop environment will live on as an independent project. Budgie now has a new home on GitHub , under the "Buddies of Budgie" organisation. Strobl mentioned the intention to invite developers from Ubuntu Budgie, Endeavour and more to contribute to it.

Solus itself will also continue on , with it being mentioned that the hand-over between Strobl and others will be "graceful".

This isn't the first major blow for Solus, since they also had to deal with the original creator Ikey Doherty quitting a few years ago. Seems like there's some wider problems they need to deal with if they're to keep Solus going. Strobl also mentioned a plan to join up with Doherty on SerpentOS .

Do you love retro games (or just retro-styled) and you're a fan of dungeon crawling? Check out the recent release of Not Actually A DOS Game for your latest fix.

Taking the visuals of classics like Rogue, it spices things up a bit to make the style a little more approachable with a slightly more modern interface and some small effects. The result is a game that should appeal to classic roguelike fans while giving some nice quality-of-life adjustments like tooltips, stat comparisons and more. Overall it certainly seems like a solid entry.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Game Features:

• A core of classic roguelike gameplay. Descend the dungeon, collect items and kill monsters and bosses.
• Kill enemies or explore the dungeon to gain floor progress.  Filling up the progress meter spawns a portal to the next floor.
• 37 pieces of equipment for 13 equipment slots with tooltips and stat comparisons.
• 11 Spells with multiple combo chains, gained through leveling and new equipment.
• Discover campfires in the dungeon to cook higher quality foods and upgrade stats.
• 3 dungeon tile sets.  Forest, Desert and Tundra.
• A graveyard which grows as the number of your deaths do.

Available to buy on itch.io .

While the GOG Winter Sale shall be ending soon, they have one last freebie for you with the rather good turn-based tactical roguelike RPG Iratus: Lord of the Dead .

How to claim the latest free game: head to the GOG.com website and scroll down a bit to find the giveaway banner. The giveaway ends January 5th at 2 PM UTC.

As a reminder of some of the big lists GOG have for their Winter Sale:

• Local gift guides - region-based recommendations from their Community Managers
• Warm and cozy - delightful adventures to brighten any day
• Roach's recommendations - Geralt's trusty horse's own selection apparently
• Timeless Classics - come back to the roots with a page full of good old games
• Best Sellers - those that speak for themselves
• New arrivals - need I say more?
• GOG Exclusives
• Paradox Essentials Bundle - save more when you buy more

GOG also have a TVGHF Support Pack containing Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate and Darklands, with purchases going towards helping the Video Game History Foundation . They're a non-profit with an aim to preserve, celebrate and teach the history of video games. Sounds like a cause I can get in with.

Controlling all your fancy RGB lighting on Linux can sometimes be a hassle but OpenRGB thankfully can reduce that pain and a new release is out now with OpenRGB 0.7 . Since every vendor decides to have their own applications, usually proprietary and Windows-only, OpenRGB is becoming something of an essential item if you want to control your hardware on Linux since it's vendor agnostic.

New features includes:

• Improved plugin architecture - Plugins can now be easily installed from Settings and are versioned to ensure compatibility.
  • Plugins include effects engine, E1.31 receiver, visual map editor, and more.
• Settings tabs for various configurable features so you don't have to manually edit settings file
  • E1.31 Devices
  • Serial Devices
  • QMK OpenRGB Protocol
  • Philips Hue
  • Philips Wiz
  • Yeelight
• Log console
  • Log console can be enabled in settings, allows to view the log in the GUI under Information
• Save To Device
  • On supported controllers, the Save To Device button allows you to save the selected mode and color configuration to device internal memory
• Brightness Control
  • On supported controllers, you can adjust the brightness with the Brightness slider
• Autostart Settings
  • Configure OpenRGB to automatically start on login in the Settings tab
  • Configure auto-start options such as start server, load profile, and more
• Zone resize dialog prompts users to resize uninitialized zero-size zones

There's a big list of new / improved hardware support too as of this release including:

• Additional GPUs added to detection list from Gigabyte, ASUS, MSI, EVGA, Sapphire, and more
• Additional MSI Mystic Light motherboards tested and added
• Logitech mouse issues from 0.6 have been fixed
• Logitech G213 keyboard modes
• Philips Hue (normal and Entertainment mode) support
• Corsair Commander Core
• HyperX Alloy Origins Core
• Alienware G5 SE
• ASUS ROG Pugio and general improvements for ASUS mice
• ASUS ROG Throne headset stand
• ASUS ROG Strix Scope
• Additional Razer devices added to Razer Controller
• Obinslab Anne Pro 2
• ASUS Aura SMBus controller renamed to ENE SMBus controller and expanded
  • Conflict with Crucial DRAM fixed
  • ASUS 3xxx GPU support added, these GPUs use an ENE controller
  • XPG Spectrix S40G NVMe SSD (ENE controller), requires running as Administrator/root
• HP Omen 30L
• Cooler Master RGB Controller
• Cooler Master ARGB Controller direct mode
• Wooting keyboard improvements
• Blinkinlabs BlinkyTape
• Alienware AW510K Keyboard
• Corsair K100 keyboard
• SteelSeries Rival 600
• SteelSeries Rival 7x0
• Logitech G915, G915 TKL
• Logitech G Pro
• Sinowealth 0016 keyboard
• Fix HyperX device flickering, especially HyperX FPS RGB
• Re-enable all Crucial DRAM addresses, should fix missing Crucial detection
• Gigabyte RGB Fusion 2 GPUs
• EVGA 3xxx GPUs
• EVGA KINGPIN 1080Ti and 1080 FTW2
• ASUS Strix Evolve mouse
• MSI GPU direct mode

As of this release, it's also now available as a Flatpak from Flathub for cross-distro support.

Ending 2021 with quite the bang, the unofficial Epic Games Store app Heroic Games Launcher put up a big new release improving lots of features.

One of the major annoyances previously was the login system, that used an external browser and needed some copy / pasting to actually get in. That's been replaced with a new system that directly interfaces with the Epic Store making it much simpler to get going. There's also a new design for the app, with it using a sidebar instead of a navbar along the top which does look quite a bit nicer.

Some of the other improvements include:

• The Store will auto-login if you use the new login system (won't do it if you already logged in on Heroic. Also, if you want to log out from Heroic, log out of the Store first, otherwise Heroic will log in again using your credentials on the store since both pages use the same cookies.
• Changed how games are installed. Now both the Game page and the game card will open the same Installation Dialog with the path to choose where to install or a button to import a game.
• Unreal marketplace is hidden by default now, there is a toggle in the settings to show it. (don't do that if you have a big selection of assets, right now Heroic freezes if you have 2000 assets or more, if this happens, edit the config file manually and set the option to false then restart Heroic.
• Game Logs now will contain system information (hardware, SO, etc) and the game settings.
• Added buttons to Clear Heroic Cache and Reset Heroic completely.
• Adds Estonian, Finnish, Bulgarian and Farsi languages.
• [MacOSX] Support for Native games installation. With a new platform filter.
• [Windows] Support for Game Shortcuts
• [Linux] Added Wine prefix selection on game install
• Improved accessibility to navigate the interface with only a keyboard
• Legendary updated to v0.20.22
• Several refactors, improvements, and optimizations lead Heroic to consume fewer resources like CPU and RAM. On Linux, Heroic consumes around 100MB or ram while on Windows it uses around 200MB.

You can download from the GitHub page .

According to the main developer on Twitter , getting Flatpak supported for Heroic installs is planned.

It seems Canonical, creator of Ubuntu, is finally looking to get serious and improve Ubuntu gaming with a new Desktop Gaming Product Manager job waiting to pull someone in.

Currently, Ubuntu is still the most popular Linux distribution on Steam, but the likes of Manjaro have been creeping up towards it pretty closely so perhaps with moves like this Canonical can keep Ubuntu on top. Not only that, but more and more people are recommending users install something else often Pop!_OS and even Valve moved away from a Debian base for SteamOS 3 with it being based on Arch Linux and so they suggest developers go with Manjaro.

According to the job advert, Canonical want to "make Ubuntu the best Linux desktop for gaming" and they "work with partners in the silicon world to ensure the latest graphics drivers and tweaks are built-in for optimal frame rates and latency, as well as with partners in the gaming industry to ensure that mechanisms such as anti-cheat capabilities are available to ensure fairness and product availability".

This role leads the product and go-to-market for gaming on Ubuntu Desktop. You will define product strategy as well as drive engagement and adoption. The role requires an analytical storyteller with a strong sense of message and a deep understanding of Linux graphics, gaming, and desktop technologies and communities. We prefer university-graduated professionals with software engineering and software engineering management experience who want to become business executives and entrepreneurs.

Key points of the job include:

• Lead desktop graphics choices in Ubuntu
• Drive partnerships in the graphics silicon, desktop, and gaming spheres
• Tell the story of Ubuntu for gamers
• Lead engineering design and development

It's a work from home job, so if you think you have what it takes, take a look at the job listing .

While you're here, what do you think Ubuntu can improve to make Linux gaming better? Let us know in the comments. Maybe a potential candidate will get some ideas.

Ready for 2022, the OBS team is preparing a major new release of the free and open source livestreaming and recording software OBS Studio.

OBS Studio 27.2 has two Beta versions out bringing in some major new features. For Linux users, it's a big one too as it brings along our previously reported plans for official Flatpak support. This means users of any Linux distribution will be able to grab the officially supported package with all the bells and whistles.

Some of what's new includes:

• Added AJA source for AJA devices [DDRBoxman/AJA Team]
• Added AJA output to tools menu for AJA devices [DDRBoxman/AJA Team]
• Added the ability to set different blend modes to sources via the source right-click context menu (similar to Photoshop’s layer blending for example) [jw0z96]
• Added AOM AV1 and SVT-AV1 encoders (note that these are currently considered experimental, work best with CPUs that have many cores, and are only accessible for recording in advanced output mode) [Jim]
• Added an OBS hotkey for browser sources to allow refreshing a browser source via that hotkey [gxalpha]
• Added hotkey filter search [furious]
• Added hotkey duplicate detection [furious/Jim]
• Added a warning dialog when switching profiles that have settings changes that require a restart [offthegrid-mike]
• Added a “Show active outputs warning on exit” option in advanced settings, which allows you to enable/disable the confirmation dialog on exit while recording/streaming [bobvandevijver]
• Added support for the RIST protocol [pkv]
• Added official Flatpak support for Linux [GeorgesStavracas]
• Added framework for future support of background hotkeys on Wayland [kkartaltepe]

Plenty of other smaller tweaks came with it like an upgrade to the CEF version used, the Window Capture on Linux is now sorted alphabetically, Twitch panels match the OBS theme for dark / light mode and more robust PipeWire Capture support for Linux.

See more on the GitHub and test from their Flatpak using these commands:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub-beta com.obsproject.Studio

Once it's out of Beta, installing will be easier as it will be on the main branch.

After 7 months of seeing the Linux user share on Steam continue to grow, December saw 2021 end with it dropping slightly. The results can be seen on our Steam Tracker , which shows some trends over time, taken from the official opt-in Steam Hardware Survey .

December 2021 saw the Linux user share at 1.11%.

Something we've seen a few times, is that when the number of Simplified Chinese language users rises on Steam, the Linux numbers drop and it appears to be what has happened once again this time. It's not always the case, as we have seen times where Linux has risen regardless but it is often the cause.

This year we do have the Steam Deck releasing, with the first batch of orders going live next month so we're very keen to see how this will affect the numbers. Hopefully they will be included in the survey, although it's possible Valve will separate them somehow.

According to Steam these are the most popular distributions with gamers on their platform:

• Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS 64 bit 17.90% +1.48%
• "Manjaro Linux" 64 bit 11.96% -0.98%
• "Arch Linux" 64 bit 11.42% -0.69%
• Linux Mint 20.2 64 bit 7.50% +0.46%
• Ubuntu 21.10 64 bit 6.31% +0.89%
• Pop!_OS 21.04 64 bit 5.54% -1.77%
• Other 39.38% +9.31%