Tech For Everyone #24: Linux Gaming Hurricane

Hello, my friends!

I hope you had a peaceful and family-filled holiday period. How’s 2022 been treating you? Despite some personal challenges to kick off the year, I have been wildly excited about one thing: gaming.

I’ve been devoouring 2 new books I got for Christmas (Blood Sweat and Pixels and the engrossing All Your Base Are Belong To Us), and enjoying new AAA releases like God of War, Age of Empires IV, and Final Fantasy VII Remake all on Linux.

Outside of gaming, it seems like every time I refresh my news feeds or open Twitter, I’m witnessing a (happy) onslaught of updated software, stories of people switching over to Linux for gaming, or so much Steam Deck news that I’m drooling all over my keyboard.

This gaming hurricane has inspired most of my writing this week, so let’s jump right into what matters.

Here’s a photo of Sony’s incomparable Shuhei Yoshida, playing a former PlayStation exclusive just ported to PC, on a Steam Deck running Linux.

This image alone made me stand up and squeal with unbridled excitement. And jealousy.

So obviously the excellent God of War will run on Linux, but @yosp’s photo drove me to fire up my Kubuntu 21.10 system and take God of War for my own test drive.

Since Sony thoughtfully baked in official AMD FSR upscaling support, I wanted to publish a few screenshot comparisons, too. Can you spot the differences? Will it run with Proton out of the box, no tweaking required? What kind of FPS boost will you see when switching on AMD FSR?

I don’t write about (or use) open-source game manager Lutris as much I should, but I’m vowing to change that.

Lutris was already a smart solution for collecting and playing your Humble Bundle, Steam, Epic Games and GOG.com libraries. But now the developers are adding both Origin and Ubisoft Connect integration in upcoming updates.

The changes aren’t live yet, but the code has been added to the project’s GitHub development area. Once the integrations make it into a future Lutris version, this will be one of the most well-rounded and fully-featured clients out there for Linux gamers.

Liam at GamingOnLinux has the full reports:

Whether you consider it more Linus-proofing or simply a thoughtful gesture for a growing Linux gaming audience, an updated Ubuntu Budgie Welcome app will make it easier than ever for gamers to start playing out of the box!

I am so excited about this that I’ve been testing the development version and giving feedback to the devs. The new gaming menu will add quick and easy simultaneous installations for Steam, Lutris, and RetroArch. You can also get quick access to Discord and OBS Studio.

Where it truly shines is offering various tools that deliver richer gaming experiences, including MangoHUD, CoreCtrl, Polychromatic, and OpenRGB.

The team’s currently deciding whether to add additional utilities like GreenWithEnvy and enhanced checks and functionality in future versions. (Imagine the Welcome app recommending the automatic installation of gaming-specific libraries, or OpenRazer if it detects Razer peripherals.)

On a very related note is a fresh update for Ubuntu-based gamers.

Late last year, young developer Rudra Saraswat gifted Ubuntu gamers with a great GUI tool. The cleverly-named “Gamebuntu” utility was effectively a bash script that automatically installed a veritable kitchen sink of gaming tools and then used a convenient overlay for finding and launching things like Steam, VLC, OBS, Twitch, Lutris, Discord, and others. But this week, Rudra announced a completely new version that takes Gamebuntu in a different, and more elegant, direction.

And yep, I’ve got the full story for you here:

I cannot wait to see what Rudra accomplishes for the Linux ecosystem in the next few years. He’s also the creator of Ubuntu Unity Remix and Ubuntu Education Remix, among several other great projects.

Thanks as always for being here, and remember to follow me on Twitter for all kinds of tech, gaming, music, and Linux conversations.

Until next time, take care! And take care of each other.