Mostly what I do here at PC Gamer is wait for my colleagues to post about their tech issues in Slack and tell them to install Linux in response. Webcam broken? Linux. Frame drops? Linux. Distant relationship with your father? Linux can fix that. I am unfathomably, incandescently popular and no one wants me to be quiet.

A common response to my implorations goes something like this: "I'm waiting for SteamOS." Well, stop waiting for SteamOS. SteamOS is here. Amid the hubbub of yesterday's Steam Machine hardware announcements, Valve slipped in a surreptitious little software note too: as of SteamOS 3.8, you can now officially stick Valve's Linux distro on whatever hardware you want, with the caveat that it's gotta be running an AMD GPU, at least for now.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

This was not, to be clear, a rank impossibility before yesterday. In fact, our Dave James stuck an older version of SteamOS onto a Framework laptop last year. But now you've got Valve's actual, official blessing, and hopefully a slightly easier time of it.

The notice was tucked in at the end of the Steam Machine's FAQ, where Valve writes, "we are continuing to work toward enabling SteamOS to be used on more hardware than just ours. In fact, with the newly-released SteamOS 3.8, you can run the same code and operating system as Steam Machine on your own living-room PC using whatever PC parts you want… Right now, only AMD GPUs are supported, but we're working on expanding support for the future." Valve's working on support for additional GPUs, though, but I suspect we might have a while to wait.

As any Nvidia owner on Linux (hello, that is me) will know, team green drivers can be a bit of a faff. Where pretty much every AMD owner on Linux will default to using the very good, open-source Mesa drivers—you usually don't even have to do anything; they'll just install by default—Nvidia's driver situation for its modern cards is a hybrid of open-source and proprietary tech. While there are totally open-source Nvidia drivers out there—the Nouveau project—they're not up to snuff for games.

The short and tall of which is that I and my RTX 4080 are gonna have to wait to take SteamOS for a test run (you can always install Bazzite, with its out-of-the-box Nvidia support, for a similar experience), but hey—if you're an AMD user, you can check out Valve's guide to installing SteamOS right now, and embrace the sunlit uplands of Linux on the desktop.

You can now sign up for a chance to buy a Steam Machine. Yes, a mere chance, not a preorder, as Valve is doing something different with the launch of its Linux-powered cube. Rather than forming an orderly queue, it's taking names, throwing them in a hat, and drawing them out at random to decide who gets a reservation and who gets lumped on the waitlist.

The Steam Machine starts at $1,049 for the 512 GB model, and if you're still interested in purchasing one after hearing the price, you're going to want to take heed of the new reservation process. It's different to what Valve has done in the past, and for good reason.

"In an effort to improve the purchase experience and limit resellers, we're implementing a reservation system," Valve says.

• Starting right now, you can sign up for the Steam Machine model/bundle you're interested in.
• If you're busy now, no problem: You can sign up anytime before Thursday June 25th at 10 a.m. Pacific.
• At that time, we will close signups and do a one-time randomization to determine the reservation order.

"Based on the reservation order, you will receive an email on June 25th indicating one of two things:"

• You've been added to the reservation queue and a Steam Machine has been reserved in your name.
• You've been added to the waitlist and we'll let you know when more units become available.

In theory, this deters bots from hammering the reservations faster than any real human and securing units for resellers to sell at inflated prices. It also means that it's become a lottery for all involved.

By signing up on June 25, you give yourself the best chance of purchasing one before the end of the year. Those lucky enough to make it into the reservation queue will begin receiving emails asking them to make their purchase from June 29.

If you miss this date, you'll be added to the back of the waitlist and presumably in for a long wait.

Valve has said it intends to get through the reservation queue by the end of 2026. That means those on the waitlist are unlikely to be able to purchase a Steam Machine before 2027—unless people drop out of the queue without purchasing one, in which case the offer extends to whomever is next in line. Those offered a unit will have 72 hours from receiving their notification email to checkout before Valve passes it onto the next person in the queue.

What you need

To make your initial sign up, you have to have a few things in order:

• a Steam account in good standing
• made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27, 2026.

There's also a limit of one per household. Valve says it will check payment information, shipping address, and other information to remove duplicate entries. So if you're in shared accommodation with a bunch of fellow PC gamers, looks like you'll have to share your Steam Machine, too.

Each region has its own sign-up list. These are North America, United Kingdom, European Union, and Australia, which Valve is organising directly. Valve's official distributor, Komodo, will be dealing with orders in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

So, why the new system? Why not just do what it did with the Steam Deck and have a first-come, first-serve system?

Valve says it's both because of resellers and lower availability than it would have liked for components used in the Steam Machine.

"Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components… the overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable," Valve says in an FAQ.

"Price wasn't the only thing impacted by all of this: availability was as well. We found we couldn't source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this impacted our launch quantity."

We've heard this before: memory chips are a precious commodity right now and they're being sucked out of the market before ever reaching us consumers by big businesses with even bigger bank accounts. Even the biggest companies are feeling the heat. Valve is no small fry, but it's nowhere close to the size of OEMs like Dell, HP, or similar. Everyone's scrambling for whatever the major memory manufacturers can give them, which isn't enough.

When a manufacturer is this honest about availability concerns from the get-go, that usually means things really are tough out there. This launch is going to be a very long, drawn out affair from the sounds of things. Make sure you're there before June 25 for the best chance at a Linux console this year, or be prepared to be patient. Heck, as Valve points out in its FAQ, you could always build your own Steam Machine with SteamOS 3.8 as a shortcut.

Good luck.

Valve has announced the price of a Steam Machine, its new SteamOS-powered gaming PC. There are a few options available—two storage capacities and with/without a Steam Controller—and if you're still interested after seeing the price, you can sign up for a chance to buy one from today.

• 512 GB: $1,049 USD / 1,509 CAD / 1,039 EUR / 879 GBP / 1,609 AUD / 4,389 PLN
• 2 TB: $1,349 USD / 1,919 CAD / 1,359 EUR / 1,149 GBP / 2,109 AUD / 5,739 PLN

• 512 GB w/ Controller: $1,128 USD / 1,628 CAD / 1,108 EUR / 938 GBP / 1,728 AUD / 4,698 PLN
• 2 TB w/ Controller: $1,428 USD / 2,038 CAD / 1,428 EUR / 1,208 GBP / 2,228 AUD / 6,048 PLN

Both 2 TB models come with two additional faceplates, red fabric and solid walnut, which are attached with magnets. Though you could as easily make your own, as Valve tells us it will be releasing the CAD files.

The bundle with a Steam Controller is better value than buying one separately: it costs $99 on its own, but adds only $79 here. Not to mention availability of the Steam Controller is shaky, and you may end up having to wait until 2027 to purchase one individually.

Availability for the Steam Machine is also likely to be quite poor. Due to the ongoing memory crisis, Valve admits that some components it had originally intended to use in the PC have increased in price. Furthermore, some were altogether unavailable to purchase "at any price".

"More than anything else, this impacted our launch quantity," Valve says.

To deal with this limited launch quantity and to avoid a system which "tends to reward bots", Valve is rolling out a randomised reservation system for the Steam Machine. Similar to those for the Steam Deck and Steam Controller, wherein a user registers their interest in the product to purchase at a later date, where the Steam Machine reservations differ is in how the queue is formed.

Here's Valve's explanation:

• Starting right now, you can sign up for the Steam Machine model/bundle you're interested in
• If you're busy now, no problem: You can sign up anytime before Thursday June 25th at 10 a.m. Pacific.
• At that time, we will close signups and do a one-time randomization to determine the reservation order

After that one-time randomisation, Valve will let you know whether you successfully reserved a unit or were put into the waitlist for further units down the line. Valve hopes to have got through the reservation queue by the end of the year, which means those on the waitlist may be waiting a very long time indeed, likely into 2027 and beyond.

Valve explains that it felt it had a "good understanding" of how costs might change over time when it first started sourcing parts in 2023. This all changed with the memory crisis.

"Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components," Valve says. "There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we're sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price the components as we've secured them over the past 6 months."

It's that final line that gives me pause. Most PC gamers will likely have experienced price hikes for components and systems over the past eight months or so, especially with RAM but increasingly SSDs, too. Manufacturers have since warned of further sticker shock to come, as stockpiles of components dwindle and they are forced to buy new parts at further inflated prices. If Valve is delivering a price that's based on stock over the past six months, should the next six months be any worse, I think this leaves the door open to a price rise later on.

Valve recently increased the price of the Steam Deck due to increased component costs and 'global logistical challenges'.

We've heard mixed reports on RAM and SSD availability. There's been some suggestion that RAM prices may have levelled off since earlier in the year, but SSDs are still going up, but also reports from those in the know that prices are likely still to rise yet.

Valve also explains why it isn't "subsidizing" the price of the Steam Machine, ie putting some of that sweet, sweet Steam cash into making an affordable PC—profits be damned. The company's answer, it's not what PC gaming is about.

"When companies sell their hardware under cost for competitive advantage, or buy exclusive content for it, they're doing that to build a more closed system, one where you don't get to choose what software you want to use.

"We don't want that for PC hardware, and we don't think you should want it either. You shouldn't feel like you have to buy Valve hardware; you should be able to view it as just one option alongside all the devices for playing games, and select the one that makes sense for you."

For now, your best shot at a Steam Machine in 2026 is to sign up for that reservation system before June 25. Then cross your fingers and toes for an email landing you in the right queue and not on the waitlist.

If you've never endured a corporate cybersecurity training session, here's the gist: every USB stick is a gift from god. If you find one, errant in the street, it's your solemn duty to slam that thing into the nearest available port with such enthusiasm it fractures your wrist. If that USB stick is labelled "From North Korea"? Even moreso, probably. It's travelled a ways to get here.

I have been playing with RedStar OS 3.0, a homegrown national Linux distro of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (though plenty of machines in the country stick to various versions of Windows). In what security experts are calling "A really good idea, Josh," I have been tinkering with it in a virtual machine—or several—on my PC. It's all very normal and fine and not worth bothering the IT department about.

You might be thinking "Haven't you done this before?" in which case I salute your memory. Yes, I have mucked about with RedStar OS, all the way back in December 2022, when I investigated which pariah state OS is best for gaming.

What led me back? Two things. The first, I am not running vanilla RedStar OS this time. I'm running RedStar OS 3.5 (or trying to—more on that later), a, uh, fan mod of base RedStar that claims to hack out the spyware, more easily switches the OS to root, quickly turns most of the GUI English, and—notionally—adds "a new 64bit kernel, new compiler, new 64bit libraries, and a lot more."

Which is quite a big deal, really; RedStar 3.0 is long in the tooth. It's based on Fedora 15 (for reference, Fedora's most recent release is 44) from 2011, and in its default mode runs using a 2.6 version of the Linux kernel. RedStar 3.5 promises to cram a 5.something kernel in there, alongside various other more recent gubbins, which I thought might ease the process of playing games on the thing. Or, indeed, using it.

Which leads me to my second reason to return to RedStar: I know what all that means, now. When I first touched RedStar back in 2022, Linux was mostly a mystery to me. Now? I'm a loyal openSUSE Tumbleweed user, familiar with at least the basics of running a Linux system. I felt that these two factors, combined, would make my return to RedStar OS much, much smoother sailing than it was four years ago.

A horrible nightmare from which there is no escape

The first riddle with which RedStar OS presents you is running it. Back in 2022, this was agony—a process of booting and rebooting a virtual machine until it inexplicably didn't crash at launch.

This time? A little easier. Installation proceeded smoothly using Virtual Machine Manager. Alarmingly easy, really. The VM booted from the .iso, the installer ran fine—presenting me with three possible timezones to choose from in the DPRK, Japan, or Russia—and the VM seamlessly rebooted into a full RedStar OS session. Briefly.

Issue one: I could not login. I really wanted to login. I'd set up a user account during the install process and everything. But during the boot process RedStar would, invariably, crash as soon as it got to its login manager, glitching out into a green/blue mess that did little except remind me of the proud nation of Sierra Leone.

But it's fine, right? I'm a Linux guy now. If the GUI login manager was crashing, I knew I could probably force the machine to kick me to the tty—the purest form of the command line, completely free of modern graphical nonsense—by holding Shift, Alt, and randomly pawing at function keys.

This… worked? This worked! RedStar booted me to the CLI like it had never even heard of a graphical user interface. Then, uh… then what? What was the plan from there, Josh?

It wasn't completely stupid. My original plan was to login via the tty then get back into the graphical desktop environment—basically taking a detour around the suicidal login manager—using the 'startx' command. Except that didn't work. Startx told me in no uncertain terms that I could sod off with that sort of low trickery, leaving me logged in but graphics-less.

This was a problem because I was not, at this point, actually using RedStar OS's modified version. The modifications that hack out the spyware run after you successfully login the first time, meaning I was A) not even as far as I managed to get back in 2022 and B) potentially faxing the entire contents of my SSD to an office in Pyongyang.

RedStar OS has a documented feature of rapaciously watermarking media files that are in any way exposed to it—documents, images, audio and the like The reason for this, presumably, is to easily trace media within the DPRK itself. If someone has media they shouldn't have, you can trace it to the machine that originally produced it, and possibly any other machines it touched along the way.

Which, hey, my computer already has the eyes of my own government and probably yours (if you are from the US) on it, so the notion of the Kim family knowing I have an .mkv of War and Peace in my Downloads folder doesn't concern me overmuch. Maybe you can put so much spyware on your machine that they all get in each other's way, like the diseases in Mr Burns' body.

But it didn't thrill me, either, and I was anyway eager to see what a modified RedStar ran like, regardless of whether the unmodified version was stitching a Josh Wolens nametag into my Steam version of Desperados. This led me on quite a long and winding road which concluded with me attempting to hack myself root access in the CLI before I realised I had comprehensively lost my mind.

I turned to the official RedStar OS 3.5 Discord, where after some searching I found out that my problem was the QEMU-based virtualisation of my VM software, upon encountering which it seems RedStar's login manager immediately executes itself.

I tried again, this time with VirtualBox.

Into the fire

The good news: it worked! Whatever Ellison-based blood magic Oracle injected into its VM software made RedStar's login software very happy, and it was a mere jiffy before I was sat happily in the glow of its familiar green desktop.

The bad news: it worked! My travails with RedStar did not end after the login screen. Mercifully, the first stage of the 3.5 modifications—the ones that strip out the spyware and grant you the root access necessary to start getting real weird with the system—kicked off faultlessly. The 3.5 iso is, on top of being the installation media for base RedStar 3.0, also the host for the mod files, and all you have to do to make them work is disconnect and reconnect your VM's disc drive.

But the second stage? Harder. This is the one that's meant to comprehensively remodel the OS, adding in the 64-bit kernel and libraries that might, possibly, have made my quest to play a game on the damn thing a little bit easier.

I tried. I really did. The second-stage mods take a long time—we're talking hours, and the three separate times I tried to get them working (which probably cost me six hours, all told) all crashed at the same point, leaving me with a spyware-free but still deeply archaic OS.

Making matters harder is the fact that RedStar essentially can't connect to the 2026 internet. In its default form, it's designed exclusively to work with the DPRK's nationwide intranet, the Kwangmyong, and trying to point it at addresses outside of that confuses the hell out of it. An advantage of the first-stage 3.5 mods is that they automatically scrub its usual IP tables, making it able to chat to the global internet.

But it can only do that via certain internet-facing terminal commands (like 'wget') and its built-in Naenara—Korean for 'our country'—browser, which is based on an ancient version of Firefox. Do you want to use Google? Buddy, you're in luck, because that's the only website that Naenara can load in 2026. Anything else throws an error.

My aged and inert OS was at least in English, thanks to the mods, but it was otherwise dead in the water. Even the built-in yum package manager—which I could perhaps have used to install extra stuff to grease my way to playable videogames—only spoke to a single, very limited software repository, which was in Korean, strangely enough.

I still made a valiant effort. I downloaded an ancient version of Tux Racer, wrote its files to an .iso, and loaded into my RedStar VM, but the damn thing's Makefile—which should have prepped a playable version of the game—refused to play ball, even after I installed a thick wedge of new libraries with yum (not entirely sure where those even came from, I must admit, and prefer not to think about it).

All I was left with was RedStar's default library of apps: a songbook/music notation program, a reskin of GIMP called Hwansang, and various others, including a version of Korean chess, which is the closest I got to running games on this thing.

Things got bad enough that I even turned to Google Gemini—I know, I know—to see if a data centre the size of Houston could help me out. The data centre the size of Houston could not, and seemed to have remarkably little data on running videogames on North Korean operating systems. So much for the future.

Without a break

My attempts to finagle RedStar 3.5 into working ended as a damp squib, I'm sorry to say, and as much I'd like to conclude this piece with something climactic. I am deeply, profoundly in love with the idea of a version of RedStar OS that has been aggressively retrofitted to more-or-less function on modern machines, and I will be keeping my eye on the RedStar OS 3.5 project as it goes on. Come hell or high water, we're gonna get The Witcher 3 running on this thing somehow.

As for its current version? Well, I think Linux is good enough to replace Windows now, but against all expectations I do not think a 2011 version of North Korea's domestic OS is the version of Linux to do it. I'll say this, though: back in 2022, my struggles with RedStar were as much due to my own unfamiliarity with Linux as they were due to the peccadilloes of the operating system itself.

Today, I'm pretty comfortable saying that absolutely nothing is my fault. In general, but also as regards RedStar. I've come a long way since 2022, and Linux has come a long way since 2011. It might have eaten an entire day of my life, but I'm glad RedStar reminded me of that.

We managed to get hands-on experience with Framework's new "MacBook Pro for Linux users" just last week, and we were mighty impressed with it. If you, too, were impressed and placed your preorders for its June release, I have some bad news. It's now going to be released one month later.

In an email sent to PC Gamer and those who have preordered the device, Framework says it has discovered two issues that have made the company push back the release from late June to late July.

The first issue is with the haptic touchpad. Supposedly, Framework engineers spotted a bug with the touchpad where it would "rarely" reset itself after repeated clicking. An investigation discovered that this is partly caused by an electrical issue in the PCB, so now Framework are awaiting the testing period of the new PCB to make sure it is ready to ship en masse.

The second issue is with the display. Framework says that the 13.5-inch 2880x1920 custom display ran into a bug with the current panel, which took a firmware update to solve. Should you want to buy the display by itself, that has also been delayed until July.

One thing that hasn't been delayed is the 13 Pro Mainboard shipments. You can still buy both the Ultra Series 3 and Ryzen AI 300 variants, and if you already have a preorder, you can expect that to arrive by June. Unfortunately, though, Framework clarifies that press reviews of the laptop will go live in July, so those who have preordered mainboards won't be able to catch full reviews before it's in their hands.

The Framework 13 Pro can be selected from Framework with either Windows or Linux, is designed to give strong battery life, has a full CNC aluminium chassis, and has a "power-optimised" display with touch support. The haptic trackpad, as we were told last week, is supposedly a bridge gap for Mac users looking to make the swap. Our Dave said, "They [Mac users] want to be able to touch any part of the trackpad to actuate a click and that's exactly what the new trackpad enables."

Notably, the Linux pre-loaded version of the laptop was actually outselling the Windows configuration when we spoke to CEO Nirav Patel last week. On one hand, that's a good sign of how far Linux has come recently. On the other hand, Framework devices do tend to be a bit more involved due to their breadth of customisation options, so the ultra casual Windows users might not have the 'Framework MacBook Pro' on their wishlist.

We'll have to get even more hands-on time with the 13 Pro to see if the wait and cost are worth it, but we've certainly been pretty into what we've seen so far.

In the midst of the RAMpocalypse and the billions of dollars being thrown at AI, it's easy to become blind to the fact that the use of machine learning can be highly beneficial in lots of different scenarios. Case in point: an update to an old AMD GPU Linux driver was created with the help of Microsoft's Copilot.

As reported by Phoronix, the driver is R600 Gallium3D, an open-source package for Mesa, that's exclusively for AMD's Terascale architecture GPUs. These first appeared in 2007, with the Radeon HD 2000-series, before bowing out with the HD 6000-series three years later (though a variety of rebadged chips continued to appear in later Radeon models).

Since AMD no longer offers any kind of official support or updates for this driver set, it's down to the coding community to keep these alive, and Gert Wolny seems to be one of the very few coders working on the R600 drivers these days. Since it's obviously not a full-time, paid job, you'd naturally expect anyone in this situation to be getting help from any source available.

That's precisely what's happened in this instance, where Wolny has leaned on GitHub Copilot to help out with tidying up the shader compiler code. This process is called refactoring, and it essentially irons out hiccups, bloated code, duplication, and so on without changing what it all fundamentally does.

This is something that AI is quite good at, as it can quickly spot things among the vast sea of code lines that the human brain could potentially miss. Microsoft has a short tutorial on Copilot refactoring if you're interested in learning more about what it can do.

Admittedly, none of this is likely to be noteworthy to most PC gamers, because it's only for old hardware that can't be used to run any of the latest games. But if you do have a penchant for vintage hardware, running on Linux to avoid having to deal with Windows spitting the dummy out over drivers, then it's surely good news for you.

One question worth considering is how long it will be before AI is used to handle the whole process of keeping older hardware alive and kicking, rather than just doing a spot of code spring cleaning. Given how rapidly we've gone from AI simply being a topic of academic interest to now defining today's world of computing, the answer is likely to be 'not very long at all.'

As anyone who's endured hearing me talk about Linux (which is cool) will know, one of my favourite things about the sunlit uplands of free and open-source (FOSS) software is Luxtorpeda, a compatibility tool that will automatically download and install open-source engine reimplementations—and other mods—for supported games you run with it. For instance, fire up a copy of Morrowind on Linux using Luxtorpeda, and it'll have OpenMW up and running for you in a jiffy.

Well, Luxtorpeda is moving home. It's become the latest in a line of projects to grow so weary of Microsoft's antics over at GitHub that it's picking up sticks. In a post on the Luxtorpeda website, dev d10sfan wrote, "The luxtorpeda project has completed a migration to codeberg! This is mainly from the latest issues with github, from stability, AI, and where they are putting their focus".

GitHub has been a mecca of open-source development for a very long time, and even Microsoft acquiring it in 2018 didn't shake loose most of its devs despite some controversy. But the site has recently come under fire, on the one hand because Microsoft simply cannot keep its AI tendrils to itself—training its LLMs on data hosted on the site and constantly badgering devs to use Copilot—and because it also can't seem to keep GitHub running consistently of late.

Popular terminal emulator Ghostty announced it would leave the site last month, writing that the instability had grown so bad that "I've kept a journal where I put an 'X' next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work. Almost every day has an X. On the day I am writing this post, I've been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage. This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day."

Similarly, the popular (and notoriously complex) Linux distro Gentoo also announced it was beginning a long march away from GitHub earlier this year, though that was mostly due to "the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories".

Gentoo is moving to Codeberg—a German non-profit—which is also where you can now find Luxtorpeda. The original Luxtorpeda GitHub project, meanwhile, is now archived.

If you ask me—which you didn't, but nevertheless—this is a positive trend. The dominance of big tech firms has had a suffocating effect on computers and the internet the past decade-plus, and if those firms' greed and complacency is now acting as a surfactant that's breaking things down—at least a little—into smaller and more open chunks? I'm happy to see it.

While I personally find the cynicism of Cyberpunk 2077's world wearying, I can't deny Night City has got style. A number of nerdy clothing lines have attempted to recreate V's iconic Samurai jacket, but the standing, light-up collar presents an obvious practical challenge to realise. One YouTuber has decided they're up to the task.

Hardware creator and cosplayer Zibartas has already crafted several Cyberpunk 2077 props, including motorised mantis arm blades and an Arasaka helmet. They've also made the yellow bomber jacket featured in the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime, incorporating LEDs into the standing collar to create the light-up effect. However, Zibartas has now remade the jacket with a significant hardware upgrade: a flexible OLED collar (via Hackaday).

Zibartas set their sights on recreating the rare black and white variant of V's bomber jacket, the NUSA infiltrator jacket seen in the Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty expansion. In-game, the inner collar features an animated display, so the creator set to work creating a collar lined with flexible OLEDs, though this was far from straightforward.

"My idea is to get a few of these panels and make a full wraparound screen and hide the hardware and the lining. They're mostly made for flagship phones and tablets, so the sizes are limited and they're quite expensive," they explain.

"I paid around $300 for one panel, and I need four for the entire collar. Ouch."

Then there was the issue of getting even just two of the flexible OLEDs to play synchronised video. Wearable projects like this favour tiny Raspberry Pi computers for practicality's sake, but this features a single hardware decoder that can only play one video smoothly, causing the image to stutter across multiple devices.

Zibartas downgraded to the older but "less restricted" Raspberry Pi 4, allowing them to create a workaround that would enable the single decoder to work smoothly across two screens. This alone took a week's worth of work.

Constructing the base of the collar out of fabric and EVA foam appeared to go much more smoothly until it came time to do a test fitting with one of the flexible OLEDs. Though this tech is billed as 'flexible,' they're actually very fragile and cannot withstand being twisted. Zibartas went with a sandwich design for the collar base, aiming to simply slide the OLEDs into place—unfortunately, this led to "a sad and an expensive setback."

"While the screens are flexible, the conductors running to them are not as much. And my sandwich design expected them to survive a bend that they were not meant to," the cosplay creator explains.

After many more weeks of iteration, Zibartas created a "semi-rigid understructure" that is flexible but resistant to twisting. The flexible OLEDs are slid into place along a track, before hard end caps are carefully applied to protect the delicate conductors that broke last time.

As the flexible OLED screens are Linux and HDMI-compatible, Zibartas can even play Cyberpunk 2077 via the collar of the jacket. After this understructure is applied to the EVA foam base, that just leaves the rest of the jacket.

Hand-crafting clothes is no easy feat, especially if you're not working from a pre-existing pattern, but Zibartas tackles this part of the project with a software solution. "I designed the patterns from scratch in Clo 3D based on the in-game mesh and some screenshots," The cosplayer explains.

They designed the jacket's angular patches in Autodesk Fusion, ironing these heat-transfer designs onto black fabric before sewing the patches onto the jacket.

"Getting to do more sewing was actually quite nice," Zibartas continues, "Of course, it's delicate work, but at least you will not fail so hard that you need to throw out absolutely everything and start from scratch."

I have pretty mixed feelings about Cyberpunk 2077 itself (reviewing the game at launch on a PS4 Pro will do that—Harvey and Ted had the right idea by waiting a few years before playing it on PC). My feelings about textiles and technology coming together for cosplay recreations like this are much less complicated: This is rad, and I can't wait to see what Zibartas stitches together in the future.

It's gratifying to know that 84% of PC Gamer readers are sensible folk who would never allow their operating system desktop get into the sort of state you can see in the image above. And it's more gratifying still to know that a third of you are in the zen club where you have have a completely clear, clutter free desktop with nothing on it. This is the right choice. This is the way.

Though I will admit I'm a lazy member of the zen club and don't actually clear my desktop, I just click that button in the Windows context menu which hides all the icons from my desktop. I'm comfortable with the knowledge there's a viper's nest of writhing icons and folders under there, just so long as I don't have to look at it.

Yes, this past week we asked you lovely PC Gamer readers: How do you organise your operating system desktop? Because we're obviously convinced that a clean desktop is a clean mind, but wanted to know about how everyone else organises their systems.

How do you organise your operating system desktop?

Votes (%)

I remove everything from my desktop

26

I have only a few regularly used icons on the desktop

24

I neatly organise them in specific areas and folder

20

I just let the files and shortcuts fall where they may

16

I just hide the desktop icons, sweeping them under the rug

7

I use an animated wallpaper, so keep it clear of icons

4

I use third-party software to organise them

3

Votes (%) Data

Product	Value
I remove everything from my desktop	26
I have only a few regularly used icons on the desktop	24
I neatly organise them in specific areas and folder	20
I just let the files and shortcuts fall where they may	16
I just hide the desktop icons, sweeping them under the rug	7
I use an animated wallpaper, so keep it clear of icons	4
I use third-party software to organise them	3

Adding it all up, a hefty 84% of you are pursuing good desktop hygiene and either clearing it entirely, or at least managing the volume or layout of icons littering your screen.

Though I will say, more concerning is that 16%—a worrying number of you dear readers—are leaving the clutter unchecked. Maybe it's my own moderately fastidious nature, but I thought fewer people would leave their desktops open to the whims of app installers and assorted downloaded files. But then I look at the physical desktop of my own workspace in PC Gamer Towers, and I probably shouldn't be that surprised when I've got random courier invoices on my desk from years ago and random parts of coolers and PCs that have long since gone to the great recycle bin in the sky.

So, okay, maybe I'm a monster in my own way, too. What about the rest of you, how do you organise your desktop? Do you keep it clean and clear or are you free and easy about what happens behind the various windows on your screen? Or do you have tips to share with the rest of us?

This week I want to go back to the recycle bin again, and I'm asking when you last cleared it out.

In the world of software, it's common knowledge that Linus Torvalds isn't one to mince his words, and in a post about the latest kernel release candidate on the Linux mailing list archive, he was critical about people using AI tools to find bugs or other issues. Not because they used AI in the first place, but because countless people are essentially submitting messages that basically just say, 'here's a bug.'

The missive in question (via The Register) starts with a note about how new drivers make up roughly half of the kernel update, especially GPU ones, with the rest of the changes covering "networking, core kernel, filesystems, and arch updates."

From there, Torvalds turns his attention to documentation updates, or rather, one very specific element of it: "The continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools."

Linux's creator explains that the use of AI tools isn't the issue: it's just that it is something that numerous other people are also doing, and the constant influx of messages that are effectively nothing more than 'I used AI and it found this bug' is just wasting everyone's time and effort to process.

Torvalds has no problem with the use of AI in software development, and for many engineers and full-time coders, LLMs are a great way of offloading some of the drudgery of the job or for testing out ideas before committing to a task. The problem here is that almost anyone can use a large language model to scan through millions of lines of code and find an issue or two somewhere.

"If you found a bug using AI tools, the chances are somebody else found it too," Torvalds notes. "If you actually want to add value, read the documentation, create a patch too, and add some real value on *top* of what the AI did."

It wouldn't surprise me if the Linux team ultimately end up creating a tool that automatically filters all such submissions, rejecting those that don't offer code solutions to the problems that AI has found.

And if that tool just so happens to be an AI-based one, then so much the better.

In my performance analysis of the PC version of Forza Horizon 6, I found that the game ran very well on a wide range of PCs, with nary a bug or glitch. However, these were all using Windows, and many Linux gamers are finding that the game has considerable problems on that platform. Fortunately, the maker of the software that translates Windows game code to work on Linux has perhaps discovered the root cause of the issues.

As spotted by GamingOnLinux, Hans-Kristian Arntzen has recently submitted a whole bunch of tweaks for merging with the latest version of VKD3D-Proton. This bit of software is called a translation layer, and is akin to someone converting instructions from French to English. In this instance, it's translating the Direct3D 12 into Vulkan, so that games using the API can run on PCs using Linux.

But along with the code, Arntzen has offered one or two thoughts on Forza Horizon 6's coding, starting with a fairly damning overview: "This game is extremely broken."

To the average PC enthusiast, a lot of what the developer is criticising won't mean anything, because it's all related to the very deep levels of code and processes that the game's engine is doing. One thing did stand out to me, though: "There are also bugs with 'use-before-alloc' where the application allocates resources after submit and writing descriptors pointing to them to the descriptor heap while GPU is in flight."

In the world of Direct3D 12, allocating resources, writing everything required into them, and then telling the GPU it's all ready is an absolute must for avoiding odd behaviours, rendering glitches, or full-blown crashes. You absolutely don't want to be flinging out a command list to the GPU before or during that whole process, because it could be requesting the wrong data or a resource that isn't even there yet.

A lot of the issues also seem to relate directly to code for AMD RDNA 2 or newer GPUs, though it turns out that GeForce RTX GPUs have issues too. Nvidia is aware of this and has said that it will release a fix in "an upcoming driver release."

Linux gamers have been reporting numerous problems with the game via ProtonDB, though interestingly, the handful of comments from Steam Deck owners are mostly quite positive. This latter point is important because if Xbox Games Studio never intended for Forza Horizon 6 to run on devices using a translation layer, it wouldn't have bothered working with Valve to achieve Steam Deck verification.

Using Proton Experimental and disabling ray-tracing in FH6 seems to help quite a bit, and given just how popular the game is right now, I dare say that Valve and Arntzen will eventually get on top of things. How much Xbox Games Studio will chip in is anyone's guess, though, given that it's their mess in the first place.

In a nice bit of news for True Linux Patriots everywhere, Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency has dedicated €1.3 million of its Sovereign Tech Fund (about $1.5 million / £1.1 million) to the KDE free and open-source (FOSS) software community (via Phoronix).

If you know KDE for anything, you likely know it for its Plasma desktop environment, one of what I think of as the Big Two Linux desktop environments alongside GNOME (GNOME, by the by, also got a €1 million injection from the same fund in recent years).

Plasma comes as the default desktop option on Steam Deck and is a first-class citizen on distros like Fedora, Bazzite, CachyOS, Kubuntu, openSUSE, and, uh, KDE Linux. Naturally. But the KDE community makes a whole lotta stuff: the Dolphin file manager, the Kdenlive video editor, Krita art studio, the Discover software store, and most importantly: KMines. Along with a billion other things. Precisely the kind of thing Germany—and Europe—would like to encourage, especially given recent moves by the bloc to escape the embrace of US tech firms.

The new funds are earmarked for specific tasks, named by KDE on social media. They are:

• Improving KDE Plasma & KDE Linux QA Infrastructure
• Improving KDE Plasma’s Recoverability Mechanisms
• Implementing Factory Reset Functionality for KDE Linux
• Improving Security Infrastructure for Organisational Usage across KDE Plasma
• Improving Data Backup and Restore Systems
• Strengthening Configuration Management as Core Desktop Infrastructure
• Improving Network Shares Experience
• Building KDE PIM QA Infrastructure and an End-to-End Testing for IMAP4 and WebDAV
• Supporting IMAP4rev2
• Supporting WebDAV Push Notifications
• Standardising Account Configuration
• Improving KDE PIM Suite Desktop Integration with Flatpak-Based Delivery

Nothing about making kernel-level anticheat work in there. Weird. I guess the German government probably forgot to write it in their notes to the team.

KDE is, as you might expect, rather chuffed to get €1.3 million in the post, and in its announcement wrote that "the world is beginning to turn away from expensive and insecure spyware-riddled software imposed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, et al.

"KDE offers the world a better way. For 30 years, KDE has been providing the free and open-source software essential for digital sovereignty in personal, corporate, and public infrastructures." No doubt this is at least partially what Germany and Europe writ large like about it.

Plus, any leaps KDE makes as a result of this funding will be usable by anyone: "KDE’s software is competitive, publicly auditable, and freely available. It can be maintained, adapted, and improved in-house or by local software companies. And modifications (along with their source code) can be freely distributed to all users and departments within an organization… There are no subscriptions, no spying on users, no disclosure or resale of data that users choose to voluntarily share with KDE, and no secret training of AI models with said data."

It's an interesting time on the computer, folks. Are we all bound for the sunlit uplands of a fully FOSS future? Well, probably not: Windows is still quite widely used, I'm led to believe. But you're certainly hearing a lot more about Linux than you used to. Onwards Linux century.

There's a sadness in the technosphere right now, ain't there? This overwhelming disappointment that sort of lingers at the back of your mind like unkempt cable management. Enough journalists have called out the enshittification of PC gaming (or platform decay as us sophisticated lot call it), I'm certainly not the first in that regard. But back in January of this year, I finally had enough of it in Windows, and sacked off the legendary operating system entirely in favour of Pop! and that's a big bloody deal for me.

I've been using Windows since around 1998. At the age of seven, it was my first insight into the world of PC gaming. Since then, I've navigated the trials and tribulations of Microsoft's best efforts day-in, day-out. From Win 98 all the way up to modern-era 11 and every service pack in between.

I've gamed for hours beyond count, crafted all manner of UIs, websites, and programs with it, finished my degree thanks to it, and it's been a critical part of my time in tech journalism. Without it, I wouldn't have been able to become editor of Maximum PC magazine, or even gotten a job there to begin with. Yet through all the ups and downs, and the best efforts of my Linux-touting colleagues trying to push me to the big open source OS in the sky, I just refused to try any of the open source distros out. At least that is until recently.

Let's face it, modern-day Windows is just a bit crap. You fork out all this money for an official license, one that's meant to provide you with complete access to a clean, fast, modern-day OS, without issue (and it's not cheap, for the "official" non-OEM one), and yet what you get is an excessively degraded experience compared to what it once was. One that honestly feels like it's just continually getting worse, no matter how many times you reinstall it.

From over-eager back-end telemetry forever pinging Microsoft's servers on your use habits, to the aggressive Copilot AI integration that may or may not be reading your card data, or all of the other intrusive ads begging you to sign up to Microsoft 365, Teams, Candy Crush, or some other madness, there's always something to disrupt your flow. And that's not even mentioning the constant stream of Windows Updates rammed down your throat every three and a half seconds, that could potentially brick your entire rig at a moment's notice. So yes, I felt it was time for a change. Finally. After 28 years.

And the thing is, Linux now has so many distros dedicated to gaming, to privacy, to Nvidia compatibility, to productivity, that there's a flavor for everyone. And better yet, they're built from the ground up to not only be efficient, but to minimize that friction that often comes with being a Windows refugee. You're not going to be sat in terminal for 22 hours a day, pretending you've travelled back in time to 1988.

So then. Pop! OS. Why? How? What are the drawbacks? That's what I'm here to explain, very specifically, my experience with it. I'll be clear, I'm not a huge Linux expert, I haven't tried all the distros. I'm very new to the world of open-source OS's, but I chose Pop! as it feels like a good middle-ground between the lot of them. It's mature, the Cosmic UI is beautiful, and with the Steam Deck really normalizing Proton now, making gaming far smoother, it really is the perfect time to give it a go with an OS that kinda holds your hand a bit.

The setup

The good news is you can just try this out. You don't need to fully commit and fry your entire Windows install to give it a whirl. Instead, we can use Dual Boot to effectively dabble with both, the only compromise being you'll need to shrink an SSD and get a bit of partition space back. Admittedly a bit of a commodity these days, but y'know.

My advice? Back up anything you consider mission-critical, and make sure Windows is fully up-to-date first. Then you'll need to identify what hardware you're running. With Pop! OS, System76, (the devs behind it) has a wide variety of ISOs available, depending on if your GPU is AMD or Nvidia. If you're running Big Red, grab the standard "Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS" ISO from its download page system76.com/pop/download/ or if you've got a big ol' green GTX 16 series or above, nab the "Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with NVIDIA" variant instead. Then, and because I'm getting bored of these wee paragraphs, you'll need to do the following:

• Download the Rufus bootable USB stick utility, ready to create your bootable media.
• Grab an 8 GB USB stick (it will get wiped, so do bear that in mind).
• Flash the correct ISO to your USB, and leave Rufus to use its default settings.
• Go into disk management on Windows, and shrink down one of your partitions, ideally by 250 GB or so. Leave it unformatted (Pop! OS actually uses a different file system to Windows ext4 vs NTFS).
• Ensure Fast Startup and BitLocker is disabled so your drives aren't encrypted.
• Head into BIOS, find secure boot, and change it to "Other OS". If Fast Startup is located here, turn that off too.
• Then boot from your Pop! OS Installer USB
• Follow the installer, choose Custom Install, and create a partition from your empty space.
• Let the magic happen, and finish the installation process.
• Then once you've logged in to the full desktop, open Terminal (Windows key + t) and type in:sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -yIt'll ask you for your login password, type that in (you won't see the input), hit enter, and then Pop! OS should perform a full update, including drivers, apps, the lot. Huzzah, that's it.

Life of Pop!

Using Pop! OS is such a breath of fresh air. It feels so clean, responsive, and low latency compared to Windows; it's uncanny. It's actually one of the few things that makes Dual Boot challenging to stick to. Spend half your day in Pop!, then switch back to Windows for work, and everything almost feels laggy in comparison. Even the mouse. And that's with a Ryzen 9 9900X, RTX 5080, 64 GB of DDR5, and a WD SN8100 at my disposal.

Most of this is due to how these operating systems are built. A very simplified explanation is that, effectively, Windows has decades of compatibility layers piled on top of one another to get it to work. Explorer, for instance, is critically interwoven with the shell and the OS, whereas Cosmic just sits on top of the OS, almost like an extrapolation layer. You could remove it or swap it out entirely for an alternative like KDE or Gnome, and the OS just doesn't care. Try to do the same with Windows, and the whole thing comes crumbling down.

File systems, too, are massively different, with Linux opting for ext4 over NTFS, which is excellent at rapid file ops (predominantly what operating systems tend to live and die on). There's zero back-end telemetry involved too, and updates don't affect the entire OS just to get things running properly. It's remarkable the difference that makes in day-to-day use.

Customization is a godsend as well. You can alter the UI directly by changing the style, edges, fonts, colors, border size, all sorts. And all the mod cons and window snapping are built in here, along with window stacking (at least with Cosmic, which Windows still lacks). There's also an impressively built-out app store, with an ungodly number of apps you can directly install. Or alternatively, you can download .deb packages from official sites and install them like you would an .exe, or just direct download through the terminal with the right command. You can sandbox them too, installing them as Flatpaks. If you don't want that program to have access to your entire system, effectively limiting what permissions you decide it has access to. Even VPNs are built in. Once you've got something like NordVPN installed, it lives in the networking tab as its own thing.

It's not all smooth sailing, though. The biggest issue by far is ironically still that app availability. Despite Linux's popularity increasing quite dramatically in recent months, there's a whole host of apps that just don't exist here, and never will. Adobe, Affinity, Battle.net, Office 365, iTunes, Notion, all conspicuous in their absence. And then there's the RGB element too. There's no Corsair iCUE or Logitech, Razer, Armoury Crate, NZXT Cam, Elgato software, none existent. The list is honestly quite large, and mostly because the marketplace here on Linux is still remarkably small.

That said, there are alternatives out there: GIMP, Krita, OpenRGB, LibreOffice, as a huge army of dedicated volunteers keep the software alternatives up and ticking. Plus for software with a web interface, like Tidal or Google Drive, you can install them directly from your browser as PWA apps anyway, so they sit there on your desktop behaving pretty much identically to any modern program anyway, so it's not quite as bad as it sounds.

And that's not to say it's impossible to get those programs working theoretically, either. You can use software to do that through translation and compatibility layers. Things like Lutris and Wine effectively translate Windows API calls into their Linux equivalents on the fly; you can get Lutris to effectively run Affinity and Battle.net, too, but the implementation is quite clunky to get right and it can break, particularly with authentication.

Valve's spent a lot of time and energy working on Proton as well (its own fork of Wine designed to translate DirectX to Vulkan), which is by far the biggest contributor to modern gaming on Linux, even being possible.

Nvidia sucks, all hail DLSS

The biggest issue for the longest time with Linux has been Nvidia compatibility. Linus Torvalds has "spoken" about this in-depth, but effectively, on the gaming side (not the enterprise side, because you know data centers run Linux practically exclusively), all of the GPU drivers were closed-source. Despite AMD and Intel moving to open source variants near decades ago.

In 2022, finally, Nvidia launched its open-source kernel modules for the GTX 16/RTX 20 series and above, and after a bit of a bumpy start, it's at last matured into something that's beginning to compete with its Windows counterparts.

Gaming results

Windows 1080p / 4K

• Cyberpunk 2077 RT Ultra No DLSS - 92.91 / 31.66
• Cyberpunk 2077 RT Ultra DLSS Quality - 111.35 / 53.03
• Total War: Warhammer 3 Battle Benchmark - 219.4 / 93.4
• Black Myth Wukong RT Off DLSS - 88 / 44

Linux 1080p / 4K

• Cyberpunk 2077 RT Ultra No DLSS - 81.29 / 28.18
• Cyberpunk 2077 RT Ultra DLSS Quality - 127.25 / 50.12
• Total War: Warhammer 3 Battle Benchmark - 173.1 / 70.5
• Black Myth Wukong RT Off DLSS - 73 / 37

Performance as a result of those open-source drivers is a bit of a mixed bag. So I took three games effectively and ran them through four testing scenarios.

Now it is worth saying straight-up that these benchmarks are completely isolated compared to the way we usually do things here at PC Gamer. Typically, we use Nvidia FrameView on Windows to analyze performance, as it registers the frame rate pushed to the screen, rather than the frame rate the in-game benchmark tools/game engine reports. Unfortunately, (or unsurprisingly), there's no support for it on Linux, so for comparison's sake, we're forced to use the in-game engines instead for consistent results and a fair frame of reference.

I've also only listed average fps here, just to keep things simple, and they're tested in identical conditions across both platforms. Cyberpunk 2077 on the Ray Tracing Ultra preset, with DLSS switched off, and then set to Quality. Total War: Warhammer 3, on the Ultra preset, and Black Myth Wukong, set to Very High, with Ray Tracing off, and the upscaling quality slider set to 100 (using DLSS). All games were tested for three runs, and then averages were taken from there, with results at 1080p and 4K.

What's fascinating from these figures is that, on the whole, despite Proton effectively acting as a bit of a middleman and potential bottleneck, translating those DirectX API calls to Vulkan, the overall fps loss across all titles technically isn't that high, and certainly not noticeable from an actual gameplay perspective, at least in two of the titles.

At 1080p, the performance drop is around 11.1% across all four scenarios, and 16.3% at 4K. There's a couple of outliers here that need pulling, too. The biggest being Cyberpunk with DLSS at 1080p, where Pop! OS actually beat Windows, pulling an average fps score of 127 versus 111. That's not bad by any means. It's hard to know why that's happening; my best theory is that Windows is facing a bit of a CPU bottleneck here, which Linux somehow jumps over, thanks to lower resource usage on the overall system. Or there's some DLSS shenanigans going on with Proton that we can't quite explain.

And then there's Total War. Or as I like to call it, "oh god oh god why?" Compared to the other benchmarks here, it lost out to its Windows counterpart by a staggering 21% at 1080p and 25% at 4K. If you actually remove that from the results, the average difference drops to just 3.7% at 1080p, and 10.4% at 4K. Again, this seems to be a major API/CPU bottleneck predominantly, so if you're a big strat gamer, Linux might not be the right answer for you. At least if you're using CA's game engines anyway, which are a bit notorious for API calls anyway.

Marry, kiss, format partition?

My time with Linux has been eye-opening, genuinely. Pop! OS is such a beautiful place to be. There was never a day when I got back to the office that I wasn't looking forward to booting up my PC and getting to do some work in the Cosmic environment. It just runs so seamlessly. Yeah, I did have the odd bug here and there, but it wasn't anything a quick Google search or terminal command couldn't fix.

But, and here's the annoying part, specifically for me, so much of my current work is dependent on apps and programs that only exist in Windows and not Pop!. Affinity and benchmarking software, in particular, and other programs like that, kinda forces me back into Microsoft's clutches. The backwards compatibility that makes Windows so bulky, and grotesque, and inefficient at times, gives it such versatility that it's quite hard to ignore that as a positive in a weird roundabout way.

I would say the performance drop concerns me a bit (particularly as I've got about 2,000 hours in the Total War franchise), but there are alternative distros out there that are far more adept at gaming than Pop! Is, particularly in terms of CPU performance. Pop! is effectively designed as this handholding Goldilocks build, almost perfect for a bit of everything and easy to manage, but if you want the absolute best performance, you can get, certainly in-game, something more advanced like CachyOS, or Bazzite, or even Nobara, might be a better fit.

I'm not done with Linux yet. Not by a long shot. Those cutting-edge performance distros have got my interest piqued, and I need to get my fingers dug in there too, but sadly, for the time being, I've just gotta stick with the burgeoning old beast that is Windows 11, if only to keep those bills paid. I suppose we should be thankful that at least we've got Chris Titus Tech's WinUtil to get most of the crud out of the thing, but until major developers get their crap together, it looks like I'm stuck here until then.

If you've ever felt anxious about the security of your machine while you wait for a solution to some vulnerability, a proposed change to the Linux kernel may interest you. Pitched by Nvidia staff Sasha Levin, it's effectively a killswitch that could shut down some functions while waiting for a more official solution.

As spotted by The Information, Levin writes, "Killswitch lets a privileged operator make a chosen kernel function return a fixed value without executing its body, as a temporary mitigation for a security bug while a real fix is being prepared"

Levin notes that when a security issue becomes public, many users of Linux are technically made more vulnerable until the patch is sent out into the world. You would naturally have to stay more vigilant and use the killswitch manually when issues are made known, but it gives some extra agency over your rig. Though the main focus are the commercial users that are most vulnerable, not your everyday Linux user.

Levine continues, "For most users, the cost of 'this socket family stops working for the day' is

much smaller than the cost of running a known vulnerable kernel until the fix lands."

This killswitch was suggested just a week after researchers caught a root exploit called "Copyfail". Effectively, this exploit can escalate user privileges by replacing code, and that user can exploit escalated user privileges to attack machines. Over on the Cybersecurity Reddit, one user says, "That script is stupidly easy to run and gain root."

There was a period of time in between Copyfail being spotted and patches rolling out where users were left more vulnerable than before, and this is the perfect use case for the likes of this killswitch.

It's naturally not the most elegant solution to problems, given it simply shuts down parts of the machine, but that level of granular control could be a good thing, especially in the hands of the already rather granular Linux community.

Not everyone is fully on board with it, though, and understandably so. One Reddit user, with over 100 upvotes, argues it is "Useful as a last-resort mitigation, but scary if people treat it like a patch. Easy to imagine this breaking production in creative ways."

Even more negatively, another argues it's a "security feature that may be worse than the vulnerability."

Some believe the 'nuclear option' is far too extreme, and even when it works, it could incentivise some to simply lock down functions rather than actually patching their machine. And that's before mentioning users could shut down processes they probably shouldn't with it. It seems like the nuclear option could be good or bad, depending on who has the button.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has confirmed that services are back up and running following a major DDoS attack that left some of its infrastructure, including websites and repos, unavailable for five days.

DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attacks are intended to disrupt the everyday operation of servers and networks. They're often quite effective, too, leveraging a flood of requests from IP addresses that are tough to distinguish from genuine ones, with the intention of overwhelming a system. That's what Canonical has been dealing with over the past five days, only recently confirming that it has restored services.

"At this stage, we have implemented mitigations and restored services affected by the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack," Canonical says.

Though some services may still be affected as they spin back up: "You may experience partially degraded performance on some of the services as we continue to work diligently on resolving the situation."

Canonical's status page now notes all components as operational. Though it couldn't have been an easy fix, as the attack was first reported on May 1, perhaps beginning as early as April 30, and it wasn't until May 6 that Canonical announced it had largely mitigated the attack.

The attack reportedly knocked out key repos, including those for security updates, for Ubuntu. That puts users of the operating system, such as myself, in a tricky spot. Local mirrors offered some way to access key updates, however, and not all services were down at all times. Such is often the case with a DDoS attack.

The reason for the attack is not clear. Some suggest a group by the name of The Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq claimed the attack, reportedly taking to Telegram to announce its action. Though it's not clear from Canonical if that was the case, nor did the group suggest why it was attacking the open-source operating system. Presumably, there are bigger fish to extort than a Linux distro, even if it is one of the largest and most popular.

Gaming on Linux has never been better—but that doesn't mean your distros are free from security threats. Case in point is a severe vulnerability nicknamed 'Copy Fail,' which allows a local user to dig into the guts of the OS and give themselves root privileges merely by writing four bytes of controlled data into the page cache of any readable file.

The security research team at Theori disclosed the vulnerability last Wednesday, though CISA reports that threat actors have since been observed using the exploit in the wild. The security flaw has been given the designation CVE-2026-31431 and marked with a high severity score of 7.8 (via Bleeping Computer).

This is because Copy Fail could potentially leave a large number of Linux users exposed—if you've not updated your kernel in a hot minute, now would be the time. Theori puts it succinctly in its write-up, summarising, "A single 732-byte Python script can [be used to] obtain root on essentially all Linux distributions shipped since 2017."

As such, CISA added the vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog. In accordance with 'Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01', this move in turn requires Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies based throughout the USA to update their systems by May 15 in order to protect their systems against this active threat.

CISA warns, "This type of vulnerability is a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and poses significant risks to the federal enterprise."

Cybersecurity firm Theori also offers a more digestible Copy Fail guide. This includes the security research team's original Proof of Concept script so "defenders can verify their own systems and validate vendor patches." It's worth clarifying that this script requires local access to a machine running Linux, and that the security vulnerability is not an example of remote code execution.

The team found the same script works in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Amazon Linux 2023, RHEL 10.1, and SUSE 16, but obviously, plenty of other Linux distros are also affected.

This news follows claims made last week by Canonical—the company that created Ubuntu—that its web infrastructure was under a "sustained, cross-border attack". Though the Copy Fail vulnerability was disclosed by Theori around the same time, the exploit may not be to blame. Canonical has yet to provide an update after its X post on May 1st.

If you hang around with cool enough people, you might have heard it's the year of Linux on the desktop. But you heard wrong. It's the century of Linux on the desktop—it's apparent to anyone who can read the auguries: dads are becoming Linux-pilled, you can make HDR work now, and Framework says more people are buying the Ubuntu version of its latest laptop than the Windows one. Ignore that big Copy Fail vulnerability that got unearthed (and which many distros have since patched) recently. That's… look, no one's perfect, okay?

Anyway, here's another portent of Linux's inevitable ascent: Discord has finally made it less tedious to update its app on your distro of choice. In the bad old days—that is, the 11 years between Discord's first release and yesterday's patch notes—Linux users whose desktop Discord client needed updating would be confronted with a pop-up but no way to actually conduct the update quickly.

Where Windows users could hit a button and have Discord update itself, Linux users who weren't using the official Flatpak pretty much had to reinstall the whole app to get the latest version. Which was not great.

But no more. Quoth Discord: "Are you a Linux user? If so, are you sick of that lovely modal we made to tell you that there’s an update you need to go manually install? IF SO, boy do I have good news for you. We’ve ported our Rust-based updater to Linux, allowing Linux to update itself just like on Windows."

Great news for anyone who hasn't already swapped the official app out for Vesktop. In addition to parity with Windows insofar as updates are concerned, Discord has also made the app easier to install across distros. The website now offers an .rpm package for users of Fedora, openSUSE, and other distros that, uh, use .rpm packages, as well as .pkg.tar.zst for users on Arch-y distros.

I'm an excitable sort who is prone to read too much into things, but still, I can't help but find this focus on Linux—even giving it an entry in the patch notes' highlights section (which isn't the first time Linux has been there, but still)—a bit promising, particularly in light of Linux recently hitting relatively big numbers in the Steam hardware survey. Slowly but surely, it's becoming big enough for consumers that major software developers can't afford to ignore it. Bring it on, I say.

Canonical, the company behind the most popular Linux distro, says its web infrastructure is currently under a "sustained, cross-border attack."

Affected sites and services seem to run across the entire Ubuntu gamut, from its website to its blog and even potentially its repos. According to what user reports I could gleam from online forums—given official status pages are down—the problems have been ongoing for hours even if Canonical only officially commented on it recently.

Importantly, there are reports of the security repo servers at security.ubuntu.com being either slow or down for many users, and indeed when I tried the website it didn't load. Repositories are how Ubuntu users get their updates, and the security repo is, of course, a very important one, as it allows users to download and install important security updates and patches. It is worth noting, however, that updates should still be able to be installed from different mirror repos, which you can choose by selecting one in the 'Download from' dropdown in the Software & Updates tool.

Even the page that lists server statuses is disabled by Canonical. It instead reiterates the same message that Canonical posted to X.

All this follows the disclosure yesterday of a recently discovered vulnerability nicknamed "Copy Fail" which cybersecurity research firm Theori, on Xint.io, explains as meaning the discovery that a "single 732-byte Python script can edit a setuid binary and obtain root on essentially all Linux distributions shipped since 2017."

It's not known, however, whether this vulnerability has anything to do with the current attack. In fact, Canonical saying that it's a "sustained, cross-border attack" could imply it's not vulnerability-related attack but simply a wide-scale DDoS or something similar. If it is to do with Copy Fail, then perhaps it's only indirectly so—possibly to attempt to prevent some from installing updates that fix the vulnerability.

Cybersecurity company Vercert Analyzer claims that hacktivist group 'The Islamic Cyber ​​Resistance in Iraq – 313 Team' has claimed responsibility for the attack(s) and has sent an extortion message to the Ubuntu team. Though we can't confirm this ourselves and will be waiting for more word from Canonical itself.

In what's looking to be The Year of Linux (TM) as well as the year of the RAMpocalypse and future market uncertainty, it's perhaps not surprising that some would try to get their hands on a solid, performant, and most importantly modular and upgradeable laptop that plays well with Linux. Though I will admit to still being a little surprised to see that, according to Framework, those who are ordering the new Framework 13 Pro are buying more of the Ubuntu-flavoured version than the Windows ones.

The official Framework account posted on X:

"Framework Laptop 13 Pro is selling far above our forecast, and we've sold out of the first six batches already. Also nice validation of our approach, the Ubuntu configurations are outselling the Windows ones!"

The company describes the Framework 13 Pro as the "MacBook Pro for Linux users", and I can see why. Judging from the specs, it has a great screen that shines at up to 700 nits, has tons of battery life thanks to the Panther Lake chips and 74 Wh battery, and fits everything inside a sleek and premium aluminium chassis.

We've already seen lots of love for the laptop from the Linux community. GloriousEggRoll of Proton GE and Nobara Linux fame, for instance, said he's enjoying it and its "freakishly good battery life." CachyOS, too, posted that "it finally feels like a genuinely premium Framework."

Admittedly, there's likely to be a disproportionate weighting towards Linux lovers to begin with, at least compared to your average laptop, given Framework machines are known to have great out-of-the-box Linux compatibility. It also makes sense that Linux users, who tend to like having more control over their operating system than in Windows, would like the modular and upgradable Framework approach.

Setting aside the weighting towards Linux, that the Framework is apparently selling out in general might also be a little surprising given it's far from a cheap machine. But the market might have something to do with that. With PC, laptop, and component prices being so expensive and the future looking so uncertain, some might want to get in with a purchase as soon as possible, not willing to risk future price hikes or stock issues. We've already seen signs of this with PC purchases, for instance.

And if there were ever a safe bet to get in the world of laptops it would be a Framework machine which you can upgrade once all this shortage malarkey has blown over—in theory, anyway.

As a fan of gaming on the go—whether that be handhelds or yearning for the good old days when my ancient gaming laptop actually worked—I can tell you that the spectre of 'low battery' haunts me. So when modular laptop aficionados Framework announced the Framework 13 Pro earlier this week, touting both its battery life and gaming performance, I was cautiously optimistic.

The hardware team hasn't yet had the pleasure of going hands-on with what's pitched as a "MacBook Pro for Linux users," but the early word on the street is glowing. Red Hat engineer GloriousEggRoll shared on X that Framework sent them a unit to test, and that he's "Happy to report Nobara runs beautifully on it, and Kernel 7 runs great."

You might be familiar with that name if you're already into Linux gaming or use a Steam Deck, because that's the same GloriousEggRoll of Proton GE fame. For those who don't know, Proton GE often helps Steam games run better and more smoothly on Linux than they do using the default Proton versions.

Basically, this is the developer of the most popular unofficial Proton build for gamers, and he's also made the gaming-oriented distro Nobara Linux. In other words, when it comes to gaming on Linux, GloriousEggRoll knows his stuff.

When asked by another X user if he liked it enough to make it his main laptop, the engineer replies that he "already did." For Linux gamers, that's high praise indeed.

This isn't the only satisfied Linux user to date. The official X account for CachyOS, an Arch-based Linux distro, also praised the Framework 13 Pro laptop. Besides highlighting the machine's build quality, they also write that "battery life has been the biggest surprise."

GloriousEggRoll also praised the machine's "freakishly good battery life," but CachyOS goes on to make an astounding claim. The official account shares, "On CachyOS, after some extra tuning with Intel-LPMD, we’ve been getting around two days of normal work out of it—mostly programming, chatting, browser use, and terminal work. That’s honestly incredible."

'Incredible' is the word if these assessments are correct, though again I should reiterate that the Framework Pro 13's gaming endurance remains to be tested by us on the hardware team.

CachyOS shares that its own hardware humans "now reach for this over [the] MacBook Air for mobile work," before going on to conclude, "for the first time it really feels like Framework has combined its repairability and upgradeability with a properly premium experience."

While we wait with bated breath for the arrival of the Steam Machine, it appears another party has been busy developing its own competitor. The Playnix Console looks remarkably similar to a vinyl player (or the Xbox Series S) in terms of its 3D-printed chassis design, but it's in the specs sheet where the similarities to Valve's efforts really lie.

The Playnix Console comes from EmuDeck, a developer of emulation installers for the Steam Deck (via Videocardz). Underneath that funky chassis design lies a six-core, 65 W AMD Ryzen 5 5500 processor, a 512 GB SSD, 2x 8 GB sticks of DDR4-3200, and an RX 9060 XT 16 GB GPU.

That's for the most recent batch, as the previous version had a Ryzen 5 5600 CPU and a single 16 GB stick of DDR4-3600. The listing page states that each batch is adjusted "based on the price of components (especially RAM) at the time of manufacturing."

Which in this case is still a slightly eye-watering $1,139 before shipping. Looking further into the specs, though, you do get a controller to go with your PC/console-a-like—although it's an 8BitDo Ultimate 2 Wireless model rather than a fancy Steam Controller.

All of the hardware is upgradeable, too, which makes this much more of a mini PC build than your traditional console. A nice touch is the addition of Noctua and Thermalright fans to keep things chilled. The former makes some of our best gaming fan picks, don'tcha know.

As for the software, the Playnix Console uses a custom Arch Linux distro that makes use of a Steam Gaming Mode to connect "seamlessly" with your existing Steam library.

On paper, this all sounds very good indeed. YouTube channel Retro Game Corps has already tested an earlier model, and found it to deliver 55-58 fps average performance in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K High settings, with FSR Quality upscaling.

That's pretty impressive for an all-in-one box, and a testament to the surprising amount of grunt you can squeeze out of the RX 9060 XT 16 GB tucked inside. The Playnix Console is advertised as a 4K-capable machine, and while you'll need to tweak some settings to get smooth frame rates at that resolution, those claims don't seem entirely unreasonable.

All in all, it looks like a suitable Steam Machine alternative while we wait for Valve's efforts to finally arrive. And while the Steam Machine's SteamOS implementation, intriguing controller design, and semi-custom AMD internals might be worth waiting for in the end, it's certainly interesting to see other providers jumping on the PC/console hybrid bandwagon in the meantime.

I've been out of the office this week on dad-duty, hanging out with my boy while school's out for the Easter holidays. And honestly, it's a pleasure, because he's a little legend anyways, but also because he's now at the point where it's genuinely fun playing co-op games with him. Mostly.

I'm using that Newt-inspired caveat purely because of platform issues. Platform issues with Linux and the PC. Well. Microsoft specifically, but not exclusively.

I have been excitedly diving deep in the Linux waters over the past few months, having been a far more casual swimmer over my long PC gaming history. I have wholeheartedly flipped my main laptop, a prepper-themed Blade 14 machine, over to PopOS, and it's been a genuine joy. I've enjoyed the extra control I have over full-stack customisation, the ease of use now that I can simply shut the lid and be sure that it will go to sleep and not just randomly suck the battery dry for no discernible reason (why Windows, why?), and the fact that gaming is now super easy on Linux, thanks to solid GPU drivers—even on Nvidia—and all the work Valve has put into Proton, building on those Wine foundations.

I've even now switched my main gaming rig with its high-end hardware—something I'd always found an issue with many a Linux distribution—over to Nobara. And that's been largely a fantastic experience, too. Though, given this is where I do most of my serious PC gaming, I have hit some definite Linux-based stumbling blocks. Late to the party as ever, I've been jamming through The Last of Us Part 1, having bounced off it hard on PlayStation many years back. But as good as the PC port now is, after a lot of updates, it still is not a happy camper on Linux.

But that's not really an issue for playing games with my little boy. He's not really at an age where zombies can be anything other than a funny cartoon character on the TV, or the disguise of some disgruntled arcade owner in Scooby Doo. So, The Last of Us Part 1 has not been something we've been playing together.

I did, however, want to introduce him to the Lego Star Wars franchise, and with the Skywalker Saga installed on my laptop, with every character DLC going, I was excited for us to snuggle down on the sofa and stick it up on the big-screen projector in my front room. He's thoroughly resistant to movies, and so has rejected every attempt to indoctrinate him with the actual Lucasfilms, so I was hoping the games might be a worthy entry point for us.

Y'know, dad goals. Except…

"What's wrong, dad?" he asks for the fifth time as I sit there, crosslegged on the floor, quietly cursing the little laptop at my feet.

"I honestly don't know," I say, exasperated, looking at yet another forum post suggesting commands to enter into the terminal to try and get PopOS to give me access to the Bluetooth-enabled Xbox wireless controller in my hand.

"It's okay, dad, we don't have to play," the disappointment in his voice is cutting real deep into my heart after I'd foolishly hyped up the Star Wars experience without first making sure both the game and hardware would actually play ball with the setup I was trying out.

The flashing Xbox logo indicates we're still in pairing mode, while the PC says we're connected, and yet neither is really talking to the other. I know deep down it's a fixable issue. Nearly all of the gaming issues I've come across in the time I've been maining Linux have been, you just need a little patience, the right answer on the right forum, or a smart LLM having done the digging for you. In short, it's a time game.

(For a quick post script to that, I got the controllers fully set up in the half-time period of a Champions League match that night. I just needed 15 minutes and an Xbox console to sort out the firmware and get them to a state where the low latency Bluetooth handshake of PopOS was now being recognised.)

But one thing you do not have as the father of a small boy is the luxury of time. I cannot sit there troubleshooting the controller connection issue (and I am wilfully ignoring the fact the game itself is stuck 'synchronising cloud' despite there not being any cloud saves to speak of) when he's sat there getting increasingly fidgety about not being personally entertained and concerned about his dad's obvious growing frustration at technology just being a total *&%t.

So I turn my back on Linux and local gaming and turn to the tried and true gaming platform we've enjoyed together in the past—GeForce Now. Cloud gaming has been a super simple way for the two of us to play games together on the shared family big-screens. With the app running on the Nvidia Shield, and controllers easily connected to the li'l Android cylinder, he's had a blast on games from BeamNG, Forza Horizon 5, and Goat Simulator 3 to Moving Out and Overcooked. And this year we started Minecraft Dungeons because my brother and I were obsessed with Gauntlet on the Spectrum when we were kids, and he is already obsessed with Minecraft.

And we've had a great time, so I wasn't really that bothered in the end if we were just going to spend a few hours bouncing between that and San Angora. I was not, however, expecting to find my blood pressure spiking to dangerous levels again with Microsoft login issues keeping us away from our blocky goal.

With GeForce Now the constant need to login into your Microsoft account every time we want to play an Xbox Studios games has been a definite irritant, especially having to navigate the login screens with a controller and on-screen keyboard. But it's been surmountable, and forgotten once you're past it and actually into the game proper.

Not so this time, as despite logging in with my 100% correct credentials, which are accepted on my PC and email logins for my phone, Minecraft Dungeons tells me instantly I've logged in too many times with an incorrect username or password. There's no other way in, because it also won't send a code to my phone, either, and no amount of digging around online is coming up with a quick solution.

He sidles up close and puts his little arms around me as I ignore the futility of my actions and once more enter the password I know is correct. "It's okay, dad."

It's an uncomfortable reminder that PC gaming still has accessibility issues, and Linux doubly so. And that no matter how much we might think we own our games, we are still very much only playing them while the good graces of the controlling platform owners allow.

So many of our games, even if you've not picked them up on Steam—and often especially because you have—rely on separate launchers and validation layers and hoops to jump through just to play a game. And if something fails in that chain of store platform and publisher launchers and separate publisher accounts, well, then you're poop out of luck.

Squeezing him tightly, I shut off the TV and, smiling, I suggest we do something far more wholesome and go bake some cakes instead. Now, neither of us are natural bakers, and we learn some hard lessons about ingredient suitability that afternoon, too. But we at least end up with something to show for our efforts, even if the Yoda atop our Victoria Sponge does look a lot like it was made with pesto.

As reported by Gaming on Linux, a new bill brought before the US House would require operating systems like Windows, Linux, and MacOS to verify users' age for installation and, seemingly, regular use. The "Parents Decide Act" has been referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and is cosponsored by New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer and New York Republican Elise Stefanik.

The bill would "require any user of the operating system" to enter their date of birth to both "set up an account on the operating system and use the operating system."

OS providers would also have to "develop a system to allow an app developer to access any information as is necessary, collected by the operating system to carry out this section and any regulation promulgated under this section, to verify the date of birth of a user of an app of the app developer." In other words, any program on your PC would have access to the date you entered, which I don't like at all.

The method of age verification is probably the most critical information here in terms of privacy and data security, but that's being left to the Energy and Commerce Committee to decide after the bill has been passed⁠

It's not exactly clear if the law would simply require us to enter a date—just like how we all say we were born on 1/1/1900 when we want to look at an M-rated game—or if an actual verification step will be required. Some of the language in the bill heavily implies the latter, and, worryingly, that detail is seemingly one of a few that would only be figured out after the bill is passed—if it is passed.

"Not later than 180 days" after enacting the Parents Decide Act, the committee would determine the following:

• "How an operating system provider can verify the date of birth of a parent or legal guardian"—or, unmentioned in this entry but implied later, an adult user acting on their own behalf.
• "Data protection standards related to how an operating system provider shall ensure a date of birth collected by the operating system provider from a user, or the parent or legal guardian of the user … is collected in a secure manner to maintain the privacy of the user or the parent or legal guardian of the user; and is not stolen or breached."
• "Ensure an app developer can access information collected by the operating system provider to carry out this section …, to verify the date of birth of a user of an app of the app developer."

Now I'm just a simple country games journalist, but this certainly sounds like a vaguely-worded privacy nightmare that would require OSes to not only store sensitive personal information, but share it with whoever⁠—and you'll forgive me for not trusting some hastily drawn-up data protection scheme when these things always seem to fail, whether it's Discord immediately compromising IDs used in its own age verification, or some bush league people finder in Florida losing everyone's Social Security number.

That's not to mention that this bill seems to just assume that all operating systems are of corporate origin⁠—how is an open-source fork of Linux supposed to securely process personal information at installation, startup, and, seemingly, every time it interacts with a third-party application?

The simple answer would seem to be that it's not, and this bill would blithely wipe out an entire mode of personal computing in order to project the appearance that Congress cares about children's wellbeing. A further wrinkle pointed out by PCG US editor-in-chief Tyler Wilde: Would this also require internet access just to use a computer?

OS-level age verification is the latest development in the generalized first world drive to wipe out what little remains of digital privacy in a panicked response to parents letting their children fry their brains on the internet. The government of California has already passed a similar law, and it's driving open source software developers to the brink.

Though Microsoft claims it's actively working towards rebuilding user goodwill, many PC gamers are calling time on Windows. It helps that Linux is the best it's ever been for gaming, thanks to dedicated distros such as Bazzite. However, historic Steam survey results suggest the Big Switch is a ways off yet.

Redditor xVarrick compared Steam Hardware & Software Survey results from March 2024, March 2025, and March 2026. Their resulting bar graph simplifies the data by combining all OS versions and distros under unified banners, but still makes it pretty clear that the vast majority of Steam users have continued to stick with Windows; 92.33% of Steam's user base are using some version of Windows as of March 2026.

That said the Windows user base did shrink overall by 3.77% between March 2025 and March 2026. While that's not exactly eye-watering stuff, a correlational increase of 0.77% can be seen in macOS users. As you may already suspect, Linux enjoyed the greatest uptick, with an increase of 3% bringing it to a total 5.33% slice of the pie.

Steam's most recent all-time peak of concurrent users was 42,686,616 according to Steam.db. So even though 5.33% doesn't feel massive, just 5% of all concurrent Steam users still represents about 2,134,330 gamers who are playing on a Linux distro of some kind. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Steam's latest survey puts SteamOS Holo 64 bit top of that particular pile.

But back to Microsoft—as Nick observed last July, Windows 11 has been with us for almost five years and for three of those, it was never the OS of choice amongst Steam users. Comparing survey data from October 2021 to July 2025, Windows 11 only overtakes Windows 10's Steam user count in October 2024.

OS distribution in Steam from March 2024 to March 2026 from r/linux_gaming

Support for Windows 10 officially ended in October of last year (unless you either pay $30 for Extended Security Updates, or live in the European Economic Area, in which case you'll get those updates for free). So it's definitely an interesting wrinkle that 27.03% of gamers sticking with Microsoft are still using Windows 10 as of March 2026. Good luck to 'em, I say—though this particular group has also shrunk by a massive 14.57% from the month before.

Safe to say, many of those users likely upgraded to Windows 11, as that OS saw an uptick of 13.09%. However, strict system requirements mean that many with elderly Windows 10 machines are faced with either figuring out how to bypass these requirements via tools like Flyby 11 and Rufus or—dun dun dun—making the leap to Linux. While I'm not among this crowd, I must admit that Linux's customisability is making serious headway in eroding my loyalty to Windows.

For a long time, setting up any fresh Windows device would incur the time sink of installing all of the latest updates. Windows 11 has garnered a number of these over the last few years, so there's no choice but to go find something else to do for about 30 minutes (or more, depending on your internet connection), right? Well, a new feature now lets you delay that limbo.

Now when you boot up a Windows machine fresh out of the box, you'll be asked if you want to carry out all of those updates later (as first spotted by AriaUpdated on X). I've since checked this out myself, booting up a freshly factory reset Gigabyte Aero X16 gaming laptop to see if I'd have the option.

As you can see from my pictures, the option to 'update later' was available on this 2025 machine. Clicking this option takes you to a confirmation screen that requires you to either click 'update later' again, or 'Complete Updates Now.'

If you have the time to spare, it's always best to update a new desktop or laptop with the latest security and stability updates for Windows 11. If you skip these during setup, then obviously your Windows 11 machine won't enjoy up to date protection. Sitting through these updates is still time-consuming, but at least the installer offers games to pass the time, including Microsoft Edge's Surf. Still, it's a bit of a shame that it's not quite as easy to speedrun a Windows 11 install without 'skips' like it was for Windows 10.

Anyway, the option to skip this and do it at a time that suits you puts a bit more control back into the hands of users. It's the latest step in what Executive Vice President of Windows + Devices Pavan Davuluri described last month as part of a strategy to reduce "disruption from Windows Updates."

At the start of the year, Davuluri had also said, "You will see us focus on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows [throughout 2026]."

Skipping updates streamlines the first-time setup process significantly, bringing Windows 11 more in line with its speedier rivals such as ChromeOS and macOS. I'm sure the Linux crowd will tell me their distro of choice still leaves it in the dust, though. With custom lock screens like this possible in Linux, I could definitely be tempted to make the switch. But for now, I think I can spare the time to hang around and see if Windows is serious about rebuilding user goodwill.

Natalie Vock, a Linux developer for Valve, has recently taken to their GitHub with a simple fix allowing rigs with less VRAM to run games better. Turns out applications in Linux will hog all the resources they can get, though if you have an Arch-based distro with an 8 GB card, things are about to get better for you.

To put it simply, you will need to get "some kernel patches as well as additional utilities to make use of the kernel capabilities properly." Vock recommends using the Arch-based CachyOS and installing the packages "dmemcg-booster" and "plasma-foreground-booster." From here, your games should start to run better on graphics cards with 8 GB of VRAM.

As Vock explains it, during testing, their system tried to "use more VRAM than there was available at all, so something had to give. Instead of telling the app that memory allocation failed (which would mean a near-certain application crash), the kernel decides to kick some memory out of VRAM to make everything fit. This degrades performance."

Vock notes that, to the kernel driver, all memory looks the same. It doesn't necessarily differentiate what it should be focusing on and why, so this fix uses cgroups to 'protect' certain uses of memory and figures out "how relatively important GPU memory allocations are."

If you aren't on CachyOS, the package files are available in AUR, and can be installed with either the CachyOS kernel package on a non-CachyOS system with a repository, or by compiling your own kernel.

As Vock suggests, "Maybe wait a bit" if you don't use an Arch-based distro, going on to add, "Eventually, I’d expect this to trickle down into more distros." They've also clarified that they plan on updating the GitHub if/when other distros get the trick working.

With the memory crisis currently raging and threatening to continue raising the price of memory, storage, and GPUs, now would be a painful time to upgrade, so holding out with that slightly older card should be a tad easier if you are on Linux.

With the 8 GB Steam Machine still expected to launch in the future, and powered by Arch-based SteamOS, one can assume it will see benefits from this fix, too. It might be why a Valve developer was looking into it in the first place.

"Instead of performance slowly degrading over time, games should perform much more stable - as long as the game itself doesn’t use more VRAM than you actually have."

If there's one thing that's been consistent about Linux, it's that when there's a new release of the kernel, it's done without fanfare or fuss. The same is true about the version system used: We're up to version 7.0 now, but that doesn't mean it's a whole new thing, just an update of the last release, with a whole bunch of improvements and additions.

I say 'bunch', but what I really mean is a very comprehensive collection of changes. Far too many for me to list here, in fact, but if you want a detailed insight into the more significant things, head over to Phoronix for the lowdown.

But just to whet your appetite, you're getting things like an automatic self-healing system for XFS-formatted drives, better drive health monitoring and file system reporting, performance optimizations in how the kernel manages memory, plus support for future CPU and GPU architectures, including Intel's Nova Lake.

Popular Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora are in line to use v7.0 very shortly, but it probably won't be long before the vast collection of distros currently in use will incorporate the new kernel. It'll certainly be interesting to see if and when SteamOS integrates the release, though Steam Decks shouldn't expect to see their handhelds running any better as such.

If, like so many other PC users, you've become fed up with the state of Windows, you might be wondering whether switching to Linux is worth it. If you are, you'd be making a sound decision, as our Dave and Joshua would tell you, and if our recent poll on the matter is anything to go by, quite a few people are certainly considering it.

I'm unlikely to be one such person, partly because a raging masochist when it comes to technology, but it's mostly because I clash hard against change (and yes, I bounced off Windows 11 like a pebble off a mountain). My age and brain wiring both conspire to make Linux something that I admire from a distance, all while I'm cursing Windows for hiding a basic option.

But don't use me as a gauge for doing a Linux conversion. Countless PC enthusiasts and gamers have done it already, so give it a go. After all, when was the last time you heard someone proudly announce that they use Windows?

Part of my hardware fiend origin story involves watching the anime Serial Experiments Lain at far too young an age and being haunted by its prescience ever since. The total amelioration of digital and physical worlds aside, I still daydream about customising my login screen to look more like the fictitious OS from the show—though obviously that's much easier with Linux.

Case in point, one Redditor has made a slew of slick-looking Linux lock screens fashioned after a number of popular games. Whether you enjoy crunching blocks in Minecraft or Terraria, or would rather feel all philosophical staring at a NieR Automata-inspired login screen, Darkkal44 has got you covered with the appropriate Dotfiles over on their Github.

Built for use with Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM) or Quickshell in Linux, the project is called Qylock. The anime sickos like me are well-served here too, as a selection of the included lock screens mimic a number of gacha games that owe a huge debt to popular Japanese animation, such as Honkai: Star Rail, Genshin Impact, and even time-travelling strategy RPG Reverse: 1999.

For my sins, I am a Windows-user—especially after reading how Linux betrayed our Jacob at last year's Gamescom. To be fair, I don't really have the time or space to get into all the times Windows has done me dirty personally (though a highlight includes the time Puppy Linux helped me get at files on ye olde dead gaming laptop).

Customisation options like the aforementioned lock screens provide just one more nail in the already mostly sealed coffin of my commitment to Windows. Should I finally make the jump, Qylock also offers a Windows 7-style lock screen to make the move feel slightly more familiar (you may also remember our Wes wrote about how an entirely different mad lad recreating Windows 8's tiled UI in Linux earlier this year).

As some folks tell it, gaming is the best it's ever been on Linux. Besides a fresh Proton Experimental build earlier this week making it much easier to play a bunch of old Capcom games in your distro of choice, our Josh has written several times about his adventures with Bazzite. Notably, he praises this distro in particular as "tailor-made for gaming and also tailor-made to stop idiots (me) from doing something likely to detonate their boot drive."

That certainly sounds appealing to me—especially as Josh has since figured out how to get HDR to finally play ball with Bazzite thanks to the tool ScopeBuddy. For better and worse, Linux is a tinkerer's paradise. Unfortunately, I am very lazy and so I'll be rewatching Serial Experiments Lain while bemoaning everything I dislike about Windows for a little while longer.

In a seminar on April 8, a handful of groups from the French government got together to discuss digital sovereignty and "accelerating the reduction of its extra-European dependencies." One such act is to move away from Windows, the US-made operating system, entirely.

The solution? Linux.

As noted by Tom's Hardware, and detailed in a report, the French government has announced "its exit from Windows in favor of workstations running on the Linux operating system".

This is declared by the Directorate General for Enterprises (DINUM), alongside the Directorate General for Enterprises (DGE), the National Cybersecurity Agency of France (ANSSI) and the State Procurement Directorate (DAE).

Importantly, there are plenty of reasons to want to switch to Linux. Unlike Windows, this operating system is free and open-source, and it's popular for its customisability and efficiency. Traditionally, it's used by developers because of the granularity of control available to them.

As well as this, there are plenty who simply do not like Microsoft or Windows. Its constant introduction of AI tools (though it does appear to be rolling back Copilot branding and has even removed AI from the Snipping Tool), without or without encouragement, plus its role in geopolitics, certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

However, the French government isn't switching from Windows because of quabbles or efficiency. It is simply trying to move its tools over to ones not owned by other states. The nature of Linux means that one can easily set up their own distro with little outside interference and without being reliant on American companies.

The French government also plans on moving its 80,000 agents in the National Health Insurance Fund over to 'sovereign solutions', and it reportedly plans to do so by the end of 2026.

David Amiel, the Minister of Public Action and Accounts, says, "The State can no longer simply acknowledge its dependence; it must break free. We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny."

He continues, "We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure, and our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing, evolution, and risks we do not control."

If you are on Linux and are the type to play a game arguably hours too long just to finish off the achievements list, I've found the perfect thing for you / your worst nightmare. Sentinel is a new tool you can download on GitHub that will add an achievements system to your games, even if you play them on a storefront other than Steam.

In fact, the creator "m0rpheus23" on Reddit has shared that its major use is to specifically work with games downloaded outside of Steam. In concept, it's quite a simple bit of software, really. Once downloaded, you simply choose to use the Steam Web API or an external data source (like SteamHunters), and the tool will grab achievement data there.

From here, it monitors Steam saves and cross-references them with data gleaned from the achievement sources and awards the achievement when it thinks you've done so. A GIF is shown off in the GitHub of someone playing Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and unlocking an achievement the moment they shoot an arrow at a fire pit, so it does appear to work in real-time.

This does mean that if you are playing a game that doesn't have achievements online in some form, you won't be able to add them, but most games on Steam have achievements now, so it's a very wide pool of applicable games. Like traditional achievements, you will get notifications on your screen, and it even has tracking for multi-step achievements.

If you use the Steam API, it will also give global percentages, just like you get on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation. It also comes with custom notification sounds, should you prefer more of a ding to a ping.

Sentinel - An Achievement Watcher for Linux Proton Games from r/linux_gaming

Notably, Sentinel also doubles as a game tracking tool, combining your library alongside achievement progress. M0rpheus23 notes that it even works with launchers like Heroic, which means it can track your Epic Games Store games, even if you don't want to go through Epic directly.

If you are unaware of achievement hunters, they are a surprisingly vocal segment of the gaming market. Platforms like RetroAchievements add achievement tracking to retro games, and have been in operation for 14 years now, adding support for over 10,000 games, with just under 600,000 achievements total.

And I do get this. I don't hunt for achievements on Steam very often, but I do get a light endorphin rush when I hear the unmistakable ping of a PlayStation platinum trophy. If you are the same and playing on Linux, Sentinel could be worth a download. There are even plans to get it running on Steam Deck in the future, so you can achievement hunt from the comfort of your toilet even easier.

It's a given that the question "What's the oldest computer you can run modern Linux on?" would produce a more gratifying answer than "What's the oldest computer you can run modern Windows on?" given Windows 11's draconian hardware requirements. But I have to say I had no idea the answer to the former question dated back to the 1990s—or, depending on your perspective, the 1980s. Alas, all computers must eventually make their way to the great e-waste center in the sky, as Phoronix reports that the Linux kernel maintainers are beginning to phase out support for Intel's legendary 486 platform.

The i486 debuted in 1989, with some of the later chips in the line dramatically improving performance over the prior generation i386 despite still being measured in double-digit megahertz. The final desktop 486 CPUs were released in 1995 and ceased production in 1998, as Intel moved into the Pentium era. But Intel actually kept manufacturing 486 chips for embedded systems until 2007, technically making it merely 19 years past its true end-of-life.

That's still, uh, pretty old, which makes it hard to argue with the father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, when he says it's time to drop support for the 486. "I *really* don't think i486 class hardware is relevant any more," he wrote. "Yes, I'm sure it exists … but from a kernel development standpoint I don't think they are really relevant.

"At some point, people have them as museum pieces. They might as well run museum kernels."

Torvalds actually wrote that back in October 2022, but it took a few years for the kernel developers to get around to dropping it. But it's finally happening. A patch expected to be merged into Linux 7.1 will begin rooting out the remaining code dedicated to the i486, which developer Ingo Molnar says will be beneficial to future kernel development.

"We have various complicated hardware emulation facilities on x86-32 to support ancient 32-bit CPUs that very very few people are using with modern kernels. This compatibility glue is sometimes even causing problems that people spend time to resolve, which time could be spent on other things."

According to Molnar, this likely won't even affect a single Linux user, as there's "no recent [486-supporting] kernel package for any mainstream x86 32-bit distribution available" that he's been able to find.

That doesn't mean no one in the world is running Linux on a still-kickin' 486 PC; it just means that if they are, they're likely doing so on a much older version of the Linux kernel.

If you're still rocking a '90s or '00s Pentium, though, worry not—it seems likely the Linux kernel will still support that generation of chips for years to come. You don't belong in a museum just yet.

Linux is something that has been on our minds, and honestly on our gaming PCs quite extensively over the past few months. Since Valve dropped it into the Steam Deck, and Proton became the way forward for gaming on Linux distros the world over, there has been increased interest in the open source operating system. Is it a viable alternative to Windows, can it actually cope with gaming on high-end hardware, will you be stuck copy and pasting random code into a terminal from here until the end of time?

Yes, yes, and probably.

But there are other questions, the most pertinent is one that we put to the you, our dear readers over the past week: Would you, will you, are you making the switch to PC gaming on Linux?

For the hard of peeping among you, the results from that frustratingly ill-compressed image are as follows: 29% of the responders to the week's poll said they had already made the switch over to gaming on Linux; 26% said they actually don't mind Windows after all, and 14% said they planned to make the switch this year.

Then 10% of respondents each said they were either waiting for better multiplayer game support—Linux still suffers from being locked out of any game that has kernel-level anti-cheat support—or they were waiting for the Steam Machine to come out. Bon chance waiting on that.

Bringing up the rear, so to speak, we've got 6% saying that no, they don't like change, with 5% of respdonents saying they've been there already and got burned. Hey, me too, and I still went back.

It is obviously worth noting that the respondents add up to a grand total of 2,333 people, so the sample size is limited. Which means it behooves you to jump into the comments and make a noise about where you stand on this great debate.

We did have another quiz running last week, too, asking the question: Could Nvidia convince you to use DLSS 5? I'll give you the results to that soon enough, but I think you can probably guess how that one went already...

This week we want to know what resolution you game at. Are you a 4:3 Counter-Strike sicko, have you stuck resolutely to 1080p, or are you all in on ultrawides? Let us know.

I am not a prepper per se. But I certainly have prepper sympathies. Maybe the sort where, if I thought I could get it past my partner, I could see myself spending many thousands digging out a bunker in the back garden and filling it with canned goods and a year's supply of drinking water, fuel, and toilet roll. And a toilet. Of course.

But I am also a damned computer nerd, so when I saw Project NOMAD pop up I knew I had to get in on it. Project NOMAD (Node for Offline Media, Archives, and Data) is an entirely offline repository of knowledge, giving you access to a vast library of otherwise net-based goodness without any network availability necessary.

Y'know, just in case the grid goes down for reasons.

These sorts of collections have been doing the rounds on different reddits and forums for a while, but the thing which really sings to me and my nerdy sensibilities is the fact that it's an easy one-shot install that lives locally on your system, and has a straightforward front end you can access via a localhost URL on any browser, whether you're connected to the net or not.

It also sings to me because it's free, where other prepper-facing repos can cost hundreds of dollars for the privilege. I also like the fact it is unashamedly high-end. It's not designed to run on a low-end machine, it's built for precisely the sort of system I'm running it on; a high-end gaming laptop.

And I am also into it because it includes AI. Now, no eye-rolling at the back. Hey, those cries of 'of course it does' are not helpful. But the AI actually is.

The thing with Project NOMAD is that it's been designed to give the user the chance to download a knowledge repository to their own devices, and that can range from a few texts, to a swathe of Project Gutenberg books, medical guides, and the entirety of Wikipedia. Parsing that much knowledge is not easy, especially if you're looking for something very specific, but packaging a local LLM (or multiples if you want to download different models) allows you to use the knowledge base it sets up—as well as add other documents to that knowledge base yourself—and then use the LLM to query it.

But it's not just about having an offline internet of data at your disposal when the WWIII comes home to roost, it gives you the chance to learn in a more structured way, too. By including an education platform, powered by Kolibri—a deliberately offline-first learning platform. You'll need to import your channels online first, but once you've downloaded the entire curriculum you can set up your own little post-apocalyptic school.

Now, I know that I'm still going to need some power source to keep the battery on my Blade 14 rolling, but some good solar panels (if you can still see the sun) or a wee generator would do the job. And I've already queried my NOMAD about how to build my own gasifier already so I can easily generate my own fuel for it.

I've gone big with my install and so, even before downloading the entire US curriculum Khan channel, I've got a setup that's around 500 GB in size. Though that is the entirety of Wikipedia and a ton of survivalist and medical text, too. As well as a detailed Google Maps-esque download covering the entire of the UK. Though I did have to go to Open Labs to download that specific pmtiles file myself as Project NOMAD only gives you the option to download US regions during the setup process.

It does have a tendency to jealously hoard resources like some Capital Wastelander, especially if you have an LLM installed, and it will run automatically when you boot up your machine unless you explicitly tell it not to. Right now, I've got a few Chrome tabs open and the Project NOMAD Command Center open, and it's yomming 12 GB of the 32 GB available to my system.

It also has to be installed on Linux, too. Oh, did I not mention that? Yes, the whole project needs to be installed on a Debian-based Distro, ideally Ubuntu. I've got it running on my PopOS install after a little messing around with Docker, but there's no hope for you if you're running Windows.

Well, if you're persisting with trying to run Windows after the apocalypse then there's really no hope for you anyways, amirite?

But now I, a Linux-user and prepper sympathiser, will be able to continue to read episode breakdowns of old seasons of Survivor on Wikipedia in case I forget who won the immunity challenge in one vital episode of the Cook Islands season. I will also still be able to read The Complete Book of Cheese (with such wonderful passages of prose as, "connoisseurs use gingerbread as a mouth-freshener; and I, too, that sunny day among the Edams, kept my gingerbread handy") and watch videos from The Urban Prepper about the vital 72 hour water supply.

And all because I have loaded a laptop up with a healthy dollop of the interweb tubes.

Now, I just need to figure out how to keep Steam running offline for time immemorial...

Steam Hardware Surveys come with copious caveats, including some courtesy of Valve itself. But the latest results for March are still intriguing, including a big jump in the proportions of gamers running Linux and a regression to the mean for the survey's GPU stats.

First up, that Linux result. According to March survey figures, the proportion of gamers on Steam running Linux increased from 2.13% in February to 5.33% in March.

That's enough to be well ahead of MacOS on 2.35%, though obviously still miles behind all versions of Windows on 92.33%. For the record, Arch Linux tops the Linux charts with 0.34%, with Linux Mint 22.3 next on 0.27%.

The SteamOS 3 as used for the Steam Deck is, of course, based on Arch Linux, likely explaining its top ranking position on the Linux list. Other notable trends include a pretty hefty shift away from Windows 10 in favour of Windows 11, with the latter up by over 10% and the former plummeting by 15%.

Exactly how accurate these figures are is an open question. But the idea that Linux is chipping away at Windows is not novel. There's a growing sense that the Windows quality of experience, for want of a better characterisation, is increasingly on the slide. And the obvious alternative is Linux.

Even Microsoft itself seems to have realised this, what with its recent messaging being all about improving Windows' fundamentals as opposed to loading it up with ever more AI slop. As it happens, several of the PC Gamer massif have also switched to Linux.

As for the GPU results in the survey, after February's suspicious looking win for the Nvidia RTX 5070, the numbers seem to have returned to normality.

The RTX 5070 jumped from 2.87% of Steam gamers in January to 9.42% in February, making it the most popular GPU on Steam. In March, the 5070 has reverted to, yup, exactly 2.87% again, placing it 5th overall.

That means the RTX 3060 returns to its likely rightful place at the top of the table, despite falling off slightly between February and March, from 4.6% of gamers to 4.1%.

AMD's latest RDNA 4 GPUs remain barely visible in the results, meanwhile, with the RX 9070 just making the top 100 in 99th place and the RX 9060 not appearing at all.

Arguably, that could be down to AMD Radeon cards being lumped together under the generic "AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics." But even that amounts to just 2.4% of gamers and number nine in the rankings.

AI must have been doing push-ups in the dead of night lately, because a lead Linux kernel maintainer says it's pretty recently started to come in very useful. Not necessarily for coding—although I'm sure that landscape is constantly evolving, too—but rather for generating security reports.

Speaking to The Register, Linux Kernel dev Greg Kroah-Hartman explained that while previously "we were getting what we called 'AI slop'... something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports."

"All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real... All open source security teams are hitting this right now."

The question is why these actually useful AI-generated or AI-aided reports have started streaming in so suddenly, and unfortunately, the answer is unclear:

"We don't know. Nobody seems to know why. Either a lot more tools got a lot better, or people started going, 'Hey, let's start looking at this.' It seems like lots of different groups, different companies... There must have been some inflection point somewhere with the tools. Did the local tools get better? Did people figure out something? I honestly don't know."

Anecdotally, though, Kroah-Hartman can attest to AI's usefulness for developer-related tasks such as code reviews:

"I did a really stupid prompt. I said, 'Give me this,' and it spit out 60: 'Here's 60 problems I found, and here's the fixes for them.' About one-third were wrong, but they still pointed out a relatively real problem, and two-thirds of the patches were right."

"The tools are good. We can't ignore this stuff. It's coming up, and it's getting better."

I'm as much of an AI-sceptic as the next person when it comes to certain use cases or the industry at large, but there's no denying it can be incredibly useful for particular tasks. Apparently, Linux kernel maintainers already have an AI code review system called Sashiko baked into their workflow.

It can all seem a very simple and easy proposition, with little downside, from the perspective of an end-user such as a dev using Sashiko or someone chatting to an LLM. But we should remember that that's glossing over the tons of energy, resources, and market effects that have gone into laying the preconditions for those interactions: namely, server production, energy consumption, and the dreaded RAMpocalypse.

But if all those resources can be used for something, I'll take security reports and code reviews over, say, AI filter-esque DLSS5. Though I suspect I'm preaching to the choir, there.

SteamOS is what keeps the Steam Deck and Lenovo Legion Go S as some of the best handheld gaming PCs, despite the former's outdated hardware. Valve's own operating system is also set to power the forthcoming Steam Machine. Though it's a Linux-based OS in its own right, with its own updates, and a big one has just landed…

In SteamOS 3.8.0 Preview, initial support has been added for the Steam Machine. While neither the price or release date of living room box has been confirmed, we do know the living room box comes with a Zen 4 CPU and a semi-custom RDNA 3 GPU. Support for these architectures should be pretty well baked into Valve's OS already, however, as the patch notes also confirm more up-to-date support for AMD/Intel platforms and third-party handhelds.

There's a lot in this update. Two points in the patch note, in particular, stand out as good news for anyone hoping to load SteamOS onto a non-Valve device:

• Improved compatibility with recent Intel and AMD platforms
• Greatly improved video memory management with discrete GPU platforms

The Steam Machine has a discrete GPU, hence further support makes a lot of sense, but it also gets us closer to Valve's vision of an actual Steam Machine. Not just the pre-packaged box, but the concept of sticking SteamOS onto your own hardware. We've tried SteamOS on a couple of devices over the past few years and it's yet to feel like the best option—Bazzite or another Linux distro is often a better pick.

We might be a ways off a wider release of SteamOS, and one that's ready to roll on a range of hardware, but in the meantime, Valve has made good on bringing further handheld support to the OS. There are a lot of improvements here for non-Valve handhelds, especially the Lenovo Legion Go 2.

• Power button short and long presses now supported across a wide variety of devices
• Improved controller support for OneXPlayer F1 series, GPD Win 5, GPD Win Mini, Anbernic Win600, OrangePi NEO, and Lenovo Legion Go
• Added controller support for OneXPlayer X1 series and Lenovo Legion Go 2
• Added system and controller firmware update support for the Lenovo Legion Go 2
• Added preliminary charge limiting support for Legion Go, Legion Go S, and Legion Go 2 - currently only accessible in Desktop Mode
• Added controller RGB LED color settings for the Lenovo Legion Go 2
• Added controller, TDP control, and speaker audio support for the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally series
• Reduced handheld controller input latency from 5-8ms to 100-500us
• Night mode, color vibrance, and color temperature sliders in Steam now work on Z2E and later AMD APUs
• Seamless boot fixes for Z2E and later AMD APUs
• Automatically handle internally rotated display for some third-party handhelds
• Improved motion control support for handhelds with BMI260 IMUs
• SD card reliability improvements for some third-party handhelds, including ASUS ROG Xbox Ally, Legion Go 1, Legion Go S, Legion Go 2, and MSI Claw
• Fixed washed out colors for Zotac and OneXPlayer handhelds with OLED
• Fixed some GPU hangs on Phoenix APU devices (Tales of Arise, Octopath Traveler II)
• Fixed ASUS ROG Ally power consumption from fingerprint reader while shut down

A couple of us at PC Gamer have tried adding SteamOS to various Windows-powered handhelds over the years, to mixed success. There are two things that tend to trip us up: screen rotation and audio drivers. Sometimes you can get around it, sometimes you can't, but I'm hopeful that further support baked into the OS should start to make a SteamOS switch more viable.

SteamOS has also been updated to Wayland by default. Wayland being a protocol that organises how applications are seen and interacted with. It's not a GUI, rather the protocol for displaying stuff—a display server that ensures display is coordinated between applications. The alternative, X11, is much older and largely being replaced in Linux distros by Wayland. I'm no expert on display servers or protocols, but it's a good thing that SteamOS has made the switch; providing everything plays nicely with Wayland.

KDE Plasma, the desktop environment used by SteamOS by default, is also being updated to support Wayland. This bringing with it support for HDR and VRR on external displays, per-display scaling, and rotated displays.

Is it time to update your Windows-powered handheld gaming PC to SteamOS? You might make a better go of it with this updated version of SteamOS, though we still think Bazzite is a great alternative. We're fans of Linux for handheld gaming, though it can lead to some less than ideal results on some devices. If you prefer not to tinker, Microsoft is rolling out a handheld-friendly version of Windows.

Nvidia GPUs don't always play nicely with Linux. Well, with recent driver issues, they don't always play nicely with Windows either, but it's been a bit of a pain for those swapping over for some time. If you are among those with an Nvidia GPU who use Gnome, things should be about to get much smoother.

For the unaware, Gnome is an open-source desktop environment for Linux, and the default interface seen in the likes of Ubuntu. Named 'Tokyo', after the Gnome Asia summit in 2025, Gnome 50 has just been unveiled, and it comes with a whole host of new features—but the most important for gamers will be better Nvidia GPU support (via Phoronix).

Under the 'Display Handling Improvements' section of the patch notes, it notes "Nvidia Performance Boosts", mentioning "Workarounds for Nvidia driver quirks." This means Gnome gamers should notice "smoother window animations and general desktop fluidity for users with Nvidia GPUs."

One of the biggest changes for those looking to swap from Windows to Linux is all those quality of life benefits Microsoft gets as the biggest platform holder. Nvidia will likely have Windows in mind first and foremost for its consumer tech, and the same is true for many developers.

However, there's been a shifting tide recently regarding Linux adoption. A chunk of the PC Gamer team have swapped over to Linux (mostly) successfully, and it's easy to see why. Microsoft has been through some rough times as of late, to put it lightly, and if you're thinking of ditching its ubiquitous OS, this should make things easier.

Google recently added official Chrome support for Linux on Arm, and Opera GX has recently announced a version for Linux. Today, actually.

It wasn't all smooth sailing in some of our team's swap to Linux, with our Jacob Fox running into a major problem at Gamescom that was eventually saved with a Windows USB. But Linux has plenty of upsides that aren't just "well, I don't want to use Windows". It's free, fast, and highly customizable, which might explain why a lot of developers like it so much.

Gnome 50 adds better VRR support, strong color management, HDR screen sharing, improved remote desktop, and a whole host of other features. And the best part of it all is that there are no unneeded AI features or new subscriptions.

If you've recently made the switch to Linux with your Arm64-based processor, but miss Chrome, I've got some good news for you. At some point in the next few months (Q2 according to Google), you will finally be getting official Google Chrome support.

As pointed out by Google, this follows Chrome support for Arm-based macOS devices in 2020 and Arm-based Windows devices in 2024. Many Apple devices are Arm-based (though they will naturally use macOS), and Snapdragon chips are Arm-based, too. Most Snapdragon laptops do come with Windows 11 built-in though, so it requires a little work to swap over.

Google says, "This move addresses the growing demand for a browsing experience that combines the benefits of the open-source Chromium project with the Google ecosystem of apps and features."

The mention of the Google ecosystem is a good one here, as it could possibly ease the gap of swapping from Windows to Linux. Given that your Google account keeps your bookmarks and password data, you just have to remember how to get into your account to get access to all of your Google data.

For the likes of Google, it will want to make the swap from one OS to another as seamless as possible, as it will just lose out on any users swapping to unsupported devices. Google argues, "Launching Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices allows more users to enjoy the seamless integration of Google’s most helpful services into their browser."

Many of us here at PC Gamer have made the swap to Linux, too, and Snapdragon chips are getting mighty impressive. Just under two weeks ago, Snapdragon's X2 CPU popped up in Geekbench, and it's a bit of a beast. Notably, Nvidia is working on a chip comparable to Intel and AMD's offerings, which is also Arm-based, so we could see even more Arm machines in the future.

Making it easier to switch over to Linux feels like a smart move for anyone other than Windows right now. Given dissatisfaction with Microsoft as a company, and the potential of even more AI in Windows, neither the company nor the product have the best reputation right now.

Google finishes its announcement, stating, "This launch marks a major milestone in our commitment to the Linux community and the Arm ecosystem." It continues, "We look forward to seeing how developers and power-users leverage Chrome on this next generation of high-performance devices."

Naturally, you don't even need to wait for Google to launch its Linux ARM-compatible browser. Maybe swapping to Linux is a good time to swap to Brave, Zen, or Firefox too.

If you've ever looked at a PlayStation 5 and thought 'That would be a really good budget gaming PC, if only you could put your own operating system on it', then I have good news for you. Because that's precisely what one software engineer has managed to do, though the simplicity of the outcome belies the seriousness of the challenge.

The engineer in question, Andy Nguyen, posted their success story on X (via TechSpot), reporting that his Ubuntu-powered PS5 Slim happily runs GTA 5 Enhanced, with ray tracing enabled. Now, it's worth noting that Sony already uses Linux (apologies, a heavily customised fork of FreeBSD, not Linux) for its own PlayStation operating system, but that doesn't mean the project was anything simple.

That's because Sony locks everything right down, and the old PS2/PS3 days of slapping Linux onto a console with a disc are long gone. Nguyen first had to use a known exploit to bypass Sony's barriers, which only works for older versions of the PS5's firmware. But just getting access is only part of the solution, because you then need drivers for everything, and Sony's hardly going to just hand those over.

When it comes to the PS5's GPU, a heavily customised RDNA 1/2 unit, you'd be forgiven for thinking that there's no way around that thorny problem. Rescue came in the form of open-source Mesa, which can apparently be very easily tweaked to support the custom GPU.

Other than Nguyen's PS5 Slim struggling to run at full pelt due to thermal problems, the Linuxified console appears to run GTA 5 Enhanced pretty well. Audio output is present, controller support seems fine, and even the USB ports are apparently all fine and dandy. In short, it's a proper gaming PC.

Now, before you run off and start trying the same thing on your own PS5, do note that none of this is simple to do. Take the exploit hack that's required: if you regularly update your console, then you're out of luck, as the firmware will have been upgraded to remove the access.

And if you watch the video in Nguyen's post carefully, you'll see that the Steam performance overlay has…err…problems with recognising a few things correctly, such as GPU clock speeds, utilisation, VRAM levels, and somewhat importantly, temperatures (somehow I don't think that the chip really is running at -2147483 degrees Celsius).

But if one person has succeeded, others will surely follow, and that makes me wonder just how long it will be before we start seeing a very odd AMD GPU cropping up in the Steam Hardware Survey. Probably sooner than we see any real Steam Machines, that's for sure.

I am surprised at just how damned grotty this thing is. I pulled the old XPS laptop out of my wardrobe because I've started wearing cardigans and have therefore become a bit of a Linux bore. I was keen to see whether I could resurrect an old system—whose end times had come regarding shifting to Windows 11—with a lightweight Linux distro.

But I was not prepared for either how grubby this old machine had got in the worryingly cold and damp darkest recesses of my built-in wardrobe, nor how lightweight the specs of this actual system really were.

It's sticky. And, I think, kinda moldy. And I'm not certain how that can happen to a laptop and it still turn on. Seriously, there really is something odd about the material Dell used around the keyboard of this ol' thing, and it hasn't dealt well with the intervening years in solitary isolation. But a little isopropyl and this thing is going to feel good as new. So, here we are with a resurrected little Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 that now feels far more zippy and sports a way better battery life than it had back in the Windows 10 days of mid-2019. Well, it does sometimes, but as I found out, time is a harsh mistress on Li-Polymer batteries.

I'm writing this piece right now on the ancient Dell machine and the system feels snappier than it has any right to with just 8 GB of LPDDR3 memory. And I've not made it an easy task, either, because I'm doing this on a 2-in-1, and Linux does not have the best history of touchscreen support.

But I will say things didn't look good when I first tried to boot up this old XPS.

Powering the device on with a power cable connected and I'm confronted by a series of solid pages of colour cycling through on rotation. Eep. Moldy laptop looks like it's got a dead LCD.

Having done a bit of research, it seems like these old XPS machines will go into this sort of display debug page if there's an issue with the monitor panel or electronics, but there were a few things to try and see if I could get past it. Which I tried. Unsuccessfully. I power cycled the laptop, and it was still screwed. I unplugged the battery itself, and powering on it was still screwed.

But then I came across a buried reddit note about how the debug mode can appear if you hit the 'D' key during boot. Now, obviously I wasn't doing that myself, but the suggestion that turning off the machine and hammering that key a whole bunch of times before rebooting started making sense. Especially as I was looking down at the unpleasantly sticky mess that is this li'l laptop.

And, sure enough, brutalising the 'D' key to unstick it actually worked.

A relatively short time later and the surprisingly unfamiliar Windows 10 desktop greeted my peepers. It's been a while since I last touched a Windows 10 device, and I'd forgotten what it was like. Now, I've not become a Linux bore because of any deep-seated antipathy towards Microsoft, and don't really bear any ill will towards Windows 11 at all. But I was surprised at how old Windows 10 looks to my eyes.

I will say, however, that after a full day of updating the essentially deprecated OS as far as I could go the old XPS 13 was still surprisingly capable. Open up a few Chrome tabs too many and you'd know about it, but other than that it was already more effective than I expected from looking at the System report.

This thing is rocking an Intel 7th Gen chip, a Core i7-7Y75, from 2016. Aside from being a decade old now, it was already a relatively low-rent, low-power chip back at its launch. It's a dual-core processor with a clock speed of just 1.3 GHz (oof), though with a boost clock of 3.6 GHz.

And yet it's still a perfectly functional little browsing, media watching device. In the interests of sustainability, then, let us bring it up to date.

Where any switch to Linux can live or die is in the distro choice. There are simply so many, and so many options within them. But I'm a simple man, and easily swayed by looks, and have been very taken with the Cosmic desktop (tiling for the win) created by System76 for the Pop!OS distro I use on my Blade 14 laptop. But I wanted an immutable distro so I didn't end up breaking this poor old thing needlessly.

So, I eschewed people smarter than I recommending more lightweight Linux options in favour of Origami Linux. And with just one hiccup, it installed with ease in lightning speed.

That hiccup? Well, remember the whole thing about USB Type-C being able to be plugged in whichever way you choose? That's a lie, by the way. While the plug is indeed symmetrical, the electronics are not, and my old USB-C hub, which I used to give the XPS 13 a Type-A port for the purposes of installing Origami, needed swapping around before it could find the USB stick with the Linux installer on.

Props to Jacob for reminding me of that as I sat at my desk cursing at the machine.

Origami is a good-looking OS (thanks to that Cosmic desktop environment) and even just the simple fact I can shift the panel to the side rather than take up precious vertical desktop space on this 13-inch 1080p display makes a surprisingly big difference. Take that, you immovable taskbar of Windows 11.

I've also been using workspaces on Windows for a while, especially when I'm on my laptop with a solitary screen for comfort. But sliding between full desktop displays is so much zippier on Linux, and Origami is even able to do it with this 10 year-old weak-heart Kaby Lake CPU.

And you know what else it can do? Sleep. That's something that's made such a difference switching my laptops over to Linux, actually being able to close the lid, go away for a day or so, and come back to flip it open again and easily resume where I was without running the battery dry. Or actually just having to reboot.

That's my consistent sleep/resume experience with Microsoft's OS, and Linux has effectively banished it.

But it's not even just about aesthetics and core functionality, I'm actually getting a healthy extra level of battery life out of this ageing machine now that I've swapped for Linux. Using my own little battery life tester app, I'm seeing just over two hours in total battery life in Windows, with between 20 and 22 W power draw over that time.

Origami dropped that power draw to just 12.49 W on average over the time I was testing, and meant the system—while playing the same live TV stream over Wi-Fi at 50% screen brightness—lasted nearly three hours instead.

But you know what sometimes happens to decades old laptops? Their batteries die. Sadly that's now the case with this ol' XPS 13. Because while on different battery life tests I'm getting two hour 45 mins or nearly three hours sometimes, I've also seen the battery sometimes go down to 60% charge and then suddenly drain all the way to zero.

That just happened while I was writing this, too. I put the machine aside to tackle another task, putting the machine to sleep on 64% battery knowing that I could just pop it open again in half an hour and be ready to go. But… it wasn't. I opened the lid to see the battery suddenly down to 1%.

So yeah, this battery is toast, and now I can't trust it. Which is a really sad end to this story, because, as you can see, for a while I was super excited to see the state of this old device given a new life, now sadly taken away. Thankfully, though, this era of XPS 13 still gives you easy access to the battery, and replacing it with a fresh one is a simple matter of dropping $30 on a new battery and a little light screwdriver work. Sustainable laptopping win.

All is not lost, then. Now, what does need to be lost is the mold on this chassis, and maybe I can even see it blossoming on the screen itself. Now, where did I put that isopropyl?

California has adopted a bill that requires operating systems to ask for a user's age or date of birth during setup. The bill, which will become enforced legislation from January 1, 2027, says an OS should use this to determine the availability of applications in a storefront and share this information with any developer that requests it in real-time. All of which sounds incompatible with many of today's open source software, including Linux—so what are they to do?

Jef Spaleta, project leader for popular Linux distribution, Fedora, has said they are still trying to get to grips with the legislation and what it requires. However, in their measured response, they have noted that age information may need to be tied to account creation and that information stored in a file somewhere easily accessible to applications.

"End of the day.. this might be as simple as extending how we currently map uid to usernames and group membership and having a new file in /etc/ that keeps up with age," Spaleta says in a discussion over at the Fedora Project.

"It might be as simple as that and we extend the administrative cli and gui tools to populate that file as part of account creation. That might be simplest and it solves the problem for the full ecosystem of Linux OSes. Then applications just have to start choosing to look at the file."

"No telemetry… just a way for applications to query the OS… a local API… sounds a lot like a dbus service to me," Spaleta says.

A D-Bus service (allowing for communication between programs) is also suggested by another developer on the ubuntu-devel mailing list.

Aaron Rainbolt contributes to Kicksecure and Whonix, two security-focused Debian-based distros, and says these "aren't particularly interested in blocking everyone in California and Colorado from using our OSes, so we're currently looking into how to implement an API that will comply with the laws while also not being a privacy disaster."

A reply to that thread is someone suggesting the law is completely unenforceable, so there's definitely going to be some back and forth on any potential compliance here.

There is another valid response: simply reject users from California. Or, at least, nominally do as such. That's what the developers of the MidnightBSD OS have suggested they'll be doing, by excluding residents of California from using the OS from January 1, 2027—the same day the bill becomes active in the state.

Ironic, really, as the 'BSD' in MidnightBSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution, for the University of California, Berkeley. This is where one of the earliest Unix forks was created, and it remains the basis for many today, including FreeBSD. FreeBSD is part of the foundation of another California-based institution's product, Apple's macOS.

It's not a petty means of targeting Californian citizens, however. It means the job of checking whether people have installed its OS falls onto Californian authorities to deal with. How might they go about that? Again, seems practically impossible, and boggles the mind to even suggest such a thing could occur.

Though MidnightBSD has since drafted what an alternative (a better plan) might look like. It suggests writing a user's age to a file readable by root only. Though in the Google Doc for the potential change, it is noted:

"Would it be legal to ask if you want to turn this feature off and skip this crap outside the US?"

It's not just California that's rolling out age verification methods affecting operating systems. A bill is under consideration in Colorado, SB26-051, that would require a similar thing, but only if it passes into law. The Colorado bill would take effect from January 1, 2028.

The pair of bills (derogatory) are the subject of fierce resistance from an unlikely source: the creators of an open source calculator. DB48X is a project to rebuild and improve upon the "legendary" HP48 family of calculators and RPL programming language, and for modding newer calculators to utilise it.

The legal-notice file for the project now reads:

"As a consequence of recent legislative activity in [California][cal]

and [Colororado][col]:

* California residents may no longer use DB48x after Jan 1st, 2027.

* Colorado residents may no longer use DB48x after Jan 1st, 2028.

DB48x is probably an operating system under these laws. However, it does not, cannot and will not implement age verification."

You know you've messed up when you've angered the math lot.

It's worth noting that both bills, California's and Colorado's, set out a proviso that an operating system must not collect or share information beyond the scope of the bill. That's either age or date of birth, nothing else. Though it seems to me that it's touched a nerve for the assumed overreach it represents, rather than what it actually means in practice or implementation.

There are a few obvious problems with the legislation, too. The sort of problems that make you wonder whether it's being rolled to do something effectively or look like something is being done.

The first being that neither bill, as far as I can tell, specifies what level of verification is required of a user's age. All they require is a user's age or date of birth. A simple dropdown interface may suffice. So, beyond being a headache for open source developers to figure out how to implement it in distros that often collect little to no personal information, the effectiveness of such a system appears to be based on an honour system.

Then there's enforcement, which appears shaky at best. Both Californian and Coloradan bills set out civil fines of $2,500 for unintentional breaches and $7,500 for intentional breaches, but how would the majority of breaches be discovered in the first place?

It's all a bit wishy-washy. Moreover, it is coming at a time when age verification is being rolled out more widely across the globe and facing stern criticism, such as an open letter from scientists and researchers that notes the many pitfalls of ill-thought-out verification methods, including for privacy and security, and their overall effectiveness.

Linux! It's the kernel at the heart of a sea of distros that all seek to answer one question: what if computers were fun again but also sometimes you abolished your graphics driver by typing "sudo zypper dup" while one or more repos were out of sync?

My journey with it has been ongoing: from dipping a tentative toe into Bazzite last year to completely ditching Windows in favour of openSUSE Tumbleweed (it has a chameleon, you see) a few weeks ago. But one thing has eluded me that entire time: working HDR.

I've done my best—which is not much—to get HDR to play ball with my LG OLED TV, but no dice. Notionally, there's already a solution: the Gamescope micro-compositor that lets things run in HDR on your Steam Deck. Alas, as many Gamescope arguments as I fed into my Steam-game launch options, it just wouldn't take. At best, nothing would change. At worst, HDR would attempt to work, but only turn the game in question into a washed-out mess.

But those days are behind me. Last weekend, I started to muck about with ScopeBuddy (and its civilised graphical frontend, ScopeBuddy-GUI), a tool—originally made for Bazzite, in fact—that's designed to simplify those long, garbled strings of Gamescope arguments into a simple command.

More importantly in my case, it has a setting that will (attempt to) automatically detect your monitor's resolution, VRR-capability, and HDR settings and make games play ball with them, in a manner that's really as simple as slapping "scb -- %command%" into the launch options.

Installing it's as easy as using a curl command and marking ScopeBuddy as executable (all of which is guided step-by-step on the GitHub), while ScopeBuddy-GUI is a couldn't-be-simpler flatpak.

Once installed, you can just fire up the latter and set a global config that will apply to any game you launch with the "scopebuddy" or "scb" option, and you can also create app-specific configs to apply particular fixes to particular games. It rules. All of this is great.

It… works? It was incredibly easy? I didn't really have to do anything? Alright, I can hear you already. ScopeBuddy's been around for a whole year at this point: breaking news this is not. Still, as more and more people become Linux-curious, I feel duty-bound to call tools like this out.

HDR really was the last thing standing between me and a full embrace of Linux (mercifully, I don't play any of those games that want to use kernel-level anticheat and therefore don't work on Linux). I've finally overcome the last hurdle keeping from me ditching Windows forever.

The government of California is implementing a law that requires operating system providers to implement some form of age verification into their account setup procedures.

Assembly Bill No. 1043 was approved by California governor Gavin Newsom in October of last year, and becomes active on January 1, 2027 (via The Lunduke Journal). The bill states, among other factors, that "An operating system provider shall do all of the following:"

"(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.

"(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user."

The categories are broken into four sections: users under 13 years of age, over 13 years of age under 16, at least 16 years of age and under 18, and "at least 18 years of age."

In essence, while the bill doesn't seem to require the most egregious forms of age verification (face scans or similar), it does require OS providers to collect age verification of some form at the account/user creation stage—and to be able to pass a segmented version of that information to outside developers upon request.

That's likely no big deal for Windows, which already requires you to enter your date of birth during the Microsoft Account setup procedure. However, the idea that all operating system providers need to comply (in California) has drawn a fair degree of ire from certain Linux communities.

"This is basically impossible for California to enforce" says CatoDomine on the Linuxmint subreddit. "Even if Linux Mint decides to add some kind of age verification, to comply with CA law, there's no reason anyone would choose that version."

Comment from r/linuxmint

"It's more likely they will put a disclaimer on their website: "not for use in California."

Looking at the wider picture, however, mandatory age verification appears to be a growing trend. The UK government's current implementation under the Online Safety Act has come under heavy fire for privacy concerns, while platforms like Discord have received similar critique for their face-scanning age verification efforts, not least because of associations with companies that may not be using the collected data for mere age-confirmation purposes.

And while this implementation is California-specific, it does speak to a wider desire from governments to enforce age verification on a legal level—even if in this case, it seems virtually impossible to effectively enact.

If you were a leading a tech company with big aspirations, you'd be looking into Linux and Arm right now. Nvidia certainly is. The company already has both in its product stack, namely the DGX Spark, which uses a custom Linux OS and off-the-shelf Arm cores. This chip is also set to launch as the N1X for consumers this year. However, there are promising signs that the graphics card manufacturer is looking into ways to use Linux and Arm for good—or rather, for gaming—in future.

Nvidia is currently hiring for a Linux Graphics Senior Software Engineer. The role is teed up as such:

"We are growing Nvidia and the Linux graphics driver team with the smartest people in the world. We're looking for outstanding software engineers to help us develop driver solutions for new GPUs on desktop, server and gaming Linux platforms; including our newest addition to the line-up: the ground-breaking DGX Spark. We collaborate with open-source frameworks like Vulkan and OpenGL, and we enable Linux games and apps to take advantage of Nvidia GPUs for both x86 and ARM architecture."

There are a few further points of interest in the application pack, spotted over on Reddit, to do with gaming specifically, which we like to see from the GPU company turned AI poster child.

Firstly, the job is described as working on "high-performance Dynamic Binary Translation (DBT) solutions to bridge the architecture gap, enabling native-speed x86-64 gaming on Linux/ARM64 platforms."

Seamlessly translating one architecture to another is a key step for gaming on non-Windows, non-x86 systems. There are two bridges required here: x86 to Arm and Windows to Linux. Nvidia isn't starting from scratch, however, as we're already benefactors of one of these in a popular product today, the Steam Deck. Proton, developed by Valve, already does a superb job of translating games made for Windows to work on Linux with no loss in performance.

There's also Fex and Box64. These are x86 emulators that run on Arm and Linux. There have also been tremendous strides in the development of these tools, including by Valve, who has been supporting Fex for a long while. Valve intends to use Fex to run x86 games on the Arm-powered Steam Frame VR headset. And I've tried it, and it works great, if a little slower than natively running a game on x86. Valve told me that it varies on a game-by-game basis. There's still work to be done here, then.

Microsoft also has its own emulation software for x86, called Prism, which is tuned for use with Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors. We know those can struggle with game support, but essentially, there's interest from all over the industry to get the x86-Arm conversion sorted. Especially from Nvidia.

Nvidia is also hiring for a Senior Software Engineer, Graphics Performance to work on future Linux graphics drivers.

Further to both posts, Nvidia is seeking a Senior System Software Engineer, Vulkan Performance, to diagnose "GPU and CPU performance bottlenecks in Vulkan and Proton titles". Nvidia is already a big contributor for Vulkan, which is made by a cross-industry consortium called Khronos. Its members include Nvidia, Arm, AMD, Epic, Google, Intel, Qualcomm, Huawei, Valve, Sony, and on and on.

Across the three job postings, you get a pretty good idea of intent for the future of Nvidia's graphics drivers (traditionally, not Linux-friendly) and Arm-based systems. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as a hungry person once said, and a couple of job postings don't necessarily indicate the path of travel for a large company with tens of thousands of employees such as Nvidia. But it's a promising sign for Linux gamers nonetheless.

I've never been particularly number-inclined, and apparently I'm in good company, as Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds has a similar issue. In a post announcing Linux 7.0 rc1, Torvalds is quick to point out that the major number release version doesn't necessarily mean it's the most exciting version of the Linux kernel yet.

"We have a new major number purely because I'm easily confused and not good with big numbers", says Torvalds (via The Register).

"We haven't done releases based on features (or on "stable vs unstable") for a long long time now. So that new major number does *not* mean that we have some big new exciting feature, or that we're somehow leaving old interfaces behind. It's the usual 'solid progress' marker, nothing more."

However, Torvalds has performed some back-of-a-matchbook maths to work out the rough release cadence, and predicts that "With our normal release schedule of 5-6 releases per year and my antipathy to big version numbers, you should basically expect us to bump the major number roughly every 3.5 years."

Despite the update not being revolutionary (and knowing the odd Linux fan as I do, that's almost certainly perceived as a good thing), Torvalds does talk up the robustness of the merge overall.

"Despite any lingering ".0 release" worries that people might have due to experiences with other projects, this was one of those fairly smooth merge window[s] for me. I define those as the merge windows where I don't have to bisect boot failures on any of my machines.

"Admittedly this time around that was because I caught one failure case early before I *actually* booted into it, but hey, that still technically counts as 'smooth' to me."

Good stuff. There's nothing like classic Nordic understatement to sell an upgrade, although with expectations now reasonably tempered, Torvalds seems keen for the Linux community to jump on board with the most recent release:

"But your milage may vary. Which is why you should now all drop everything, run to your computers, and test-build and test-boot a shiny new kernel. The fact that it all works for *me* is good, but let's make sure it works for others too, ok?

"Just kidding. A leisurely stroll after you've finished chewing is fine." Well, you heard the man. What are you still reading this for, anyway?

There are a lot of things I've enjoyed about switching to Linux, but my second favourite—after the incredible smugness I derive from telling people I've switched to Linux—is Luxtorpeda.

Luxtorpeda is a clever bit of kit that you can set as a compatibility tool for any game you have on Steam. You just install it, head into the Steam settings for whichever game you want to use it with, and switch out Proton for Luxtorpeda. Bish-bash-bosh, done.

What does it do? I was just coming to that, but thanks for asking. Fire up a game Luxtorpeda supports using the tool and, rather than launching into the game, it will pop up a box that lets you easily install an open-source engine reimplementation or popular fan mod(s). It makes it easier to get a fixed-up, modernised version of a lot of old games running than it is on their native Windows.

For instance, launch Morrowind and it will automatically set up OpenMW. Launch FEAR (hell yeah FEAR) and it will install EchoPatch, and now, with the hot-out-the-oven Luxtorpeda v76, it'll work its magic on the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 1, too.

Specifically, Luxtorpeda will patch up your installs of MG1, MG2, and MGS2 and 3 with MGSHDFix, while MGS1 gets the MGSM2Fix treatment. These are pretty much the gold standard of Metal Gear resolution patches on PC, and even with the Metal Gear series' recent big updates from Konami, they still have a role to play.

MGSHDFix, for one, adds custom resolution and ultrawide support, the ability to skip intro logos and other tweaks, and cleans up bugs that Konami still hasn't fixed itself (and seemingly never will, given that the most recent big update was supposedly the final one).

MGSM2Fix, meanwhile, adds proper widescreen support to MGS1. Yes, you can stretch out the game by default, but it looks terrible and makes Snake look like that one video of Jair Bolsonaro. MGSM2Fix makes it work properly (though the HUD will still appear stretched).

Oh, and it stops your monitor going to sleep during long cutscenes. Kojima!

Luxtorpeda's been an essential part of playing games for me ever since I moved over to Linux. Now it's an essential part of my Metal Gear experience, too.

Gentoo Linux has kicked off its long transition away from Microsoft's GitHub to Codeberg, an open-source git-hosting service run by the Berlin-based non-profit Codeberg e.V (via Phoronix).

Which is quite an intimidating series of nouns, but here's why the average Joe/Jane might find it interesting: Gentoo is specifically migrating away from GitHub because Microsoft just can't keep its AI hands to itself. In its 2025 retrospective, published last month, Gentoo announced an initiative to migrate its mirrors from GitHub to Codeberg, "mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories."

Like any other AI company, Microsoft is ravenous for training data, and has leveraged its ownership of GitHub (which it acquired in 2018, not without controversy) to feed that hunger, training its LLMs on public repos hosted on the site and nagging users to make use of its GitHub Copilot assistant.

Well, Gentoo's had enough. In a post on the project's site yesterday, it announced that "Gentoo now has a presence on Codeberg, and contributions can be submitted for the Gentoo repository mirror at https://codeberg.org/gentoo/gentoo as an alternative to GitHub." It's not a full leap—you don't move a project as large and complex as Gentoo in one fell swoop—but it's the beginning of a long process.

"Eventually also other git repositories will become available under the Codeberg Gentoo organization," wrote Gentoo's maintainers, assuring users that "These mirrors are for convenience for contribution and we continue to host our own repositories, just like we did while using GitHub mirrors for ease of contribution too."

Gentoo is a venerable and well-respected Linux distro, albeit one with a reputation for complexity. That reputation mostly stems from the way it handles packages; users traditionally compile their own software from source rather than making use of precompiled binaries (which is what those of us on simpler OSes are generally used to, as compiling software from source can be, delicately, a complete ballache).

Nevertheless, it has a fairly sizeable—and often quite welcoming—community, and was the basis for the ChromiumOS operating system from which Google's own ChromeOS was derived. If it's sick enough of Copilot to start a major shift like this, it's certainly not alone.

The thing about Linux is: it's cool, and very interesting and beautiful people use it. I've been running Fedora 43 on my main machine for a few months now and, to be honest? It's easy. Almost boringly easy. I got into all this expecting to have to wrestle the OS' peccadilloes into submission, but aside from minor tinkering to get proprietary Nvidia drivers and codecs installed, it's been smooth sailing.

Imagine my disappointment. And now, as of the most recent Steam beta update, there's even less Linux weirdness to deal with when you slip free of the shackles of Windows. As of yesterday's Steam (and Steam Deck) client beta update, Valve has put paid to a bug that meant the platform would sometimes forget it can run Windows games on Linux. Cut it some slack; it's 23 years old.

The bug in question afflicted users with especially large libraries—though Valve doesn't say how large—and would "result in Proton games showing up as 'Not valid on current platform'". Which rather defeats the whole point of Proton—Valve's fancy, WINE-based compatibility layer that lets Windows-only games run on your Linux distro of choice.

Which is rather good news. Also bundled into the beta are fixes for the client's downloads view "when moving game entries between scheduled and queued sections," gyro fixes, repairs for "an issue with Switch Pro Controller Home LEDs turning on when disabled," and those rascally ABXY button options should no longer go missing from your configs.

The gradual tilt toward Linux is probably the most interesting thing happening in tech right now, if you're me (which I assume you are). As Windows gets more and more insufferable, increasing numbers of people are saying to hell with it and sticking some flavour of Linux on their machines, often Bazzite, Nobara or some other gaming-specific distro in our neck of the woods.

Is it the end for Windows and the beginning of the era of total open-source dominance? Well, no. But even folks that have previously paid no mind to Linux are starting to have to pay attention. That's healthy and, as a beautiful, neophyte Linux-er, pretty dang cool.

We were pumped for the launch of the Steam Machine after visiting Valve HQ late last year. We even wrote up some pricing expectations, which in hindsight look to be the product of incredibly wishful thinking. But we didn't know what we do now. Due to incredible demand for memory chips of all kinds—DRAM, mostly, but NAND too—for use with AI, the entire PC gaming ecosystem is in sticker shock. Prices are increasing many times overs.

Valve, too, isn't immune. In a new FAQ, the company highlights how it would've liked to have shared prices for its latest products—the Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame—by now. However, the memory crisis has demanding a rethink.

"When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you've likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame).

"Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed. But we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change. We will keep you updated as much as we can as we finalize those plans as soon as possible."

All three of Valve's new products are still expected to launch in the first half of 2026. While we don't have fears for the future of the Steam Controller, the other two are likely to be in a very tricky spot. Below, you'll find our revised guesses as to the price of the Steam Machine, which more than anything else, appears the most at risk of being priced into relative obscurity.

Let's look at memory prices, first off. A 16 GB dual-channel kit of plain Crucial memory used to cost around $50 or less. Today, it's around $200. Four times as much. One analyst firm today noted memory costs surging up to 90% so far this year. It's only the start of February, eesh.

The Steam Machine uses SODIMM sticks, usually found in laptops, and generally more expensive for consumers to purchase. Single stick kits are a little more affordable. I wouldn't be too surprised to see Valve switch to single stick RAM in light of current SODIMM prices, as it otherwise has nowhere else to go—the platform supports DDR5 and going lower than 16 GB would be a disaster in the making.

Though you'd expect Valve to pull favourable rates with suppliers compared to the average joe, but Valve isn't one of the big guys. Similarly, the reports of companies staking out memory manufacturers in Korea in the slim hope of scoring sticks puts any meaningful discount into doubt.

Last year, I guessed $529-$649 for the Steam Machine, on the basis that if Valve charged more, it would land at the same price as some budget PCs with more modern kit. Plus, I went to Valve HQ, and it seemed to me like affordability was a consideration throughout the design. As I said then, an RTX 5060 PC build would set you back around $750-$800.

But that was then. Nowadays, you're looking at around $900 for something similar and even that's a rarity. It's up to $1,000 for an RX 9060 XT, though a more powerful and newer GPU than the one found in the Steam Machine.

Since my original guess, we've also heard Valve talk on the potential price tag. Not just the bombshell last night that it's still trying to figure it out, but that it intends to price the Steam Machine "like a PC, not a console". Similarly, Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the engineers behind the project, confirmed that Valve was aiming at price parity with a similarly performing PC (ie a pretty affordable PC), but that pricing was up in the air. And these comments were made before the new year, before memory shortages really hit hardest.

All together, it looks like Valve's best chance of getting a Linux machine into every living room was sometime last year, and now it's looking for a way to weather the ongoing memory crisis. Perhaps with a view to do something similar to the Steam Deck—keep the Machine around in the market long enough to make an impact and reduce BOM costs. Though unlike the Steam Deck, which enjoyed a rush for preorders on account of its affordability, the same might not happen for the Steam Machine if it's landing at too high a price and during a slow period in PC sales—which analysts expect we'll see this year.

I've just scrolled through Newegg's prebuilt PCs, going from cheapest first, and you can't buy a remotely modern gaming PC for less than $750, and I'm being pretty generous with my definition of 'modern'. That'll get you couple-generation-old tech and DDR4 (which is fine for gaming but it's not exactly the latest and greatest). For what Valve's offering, one-generation-old tech and DDR5, you'd be lucky to find that under a grand on Newegg. I've only found that Walmart machine for $900 that dares to include DDR5 for that sorta money.

For the 512 GB model, and I keep revising my guess as I fluctuate between optimistic and realistic, around $899. Charge much more and it would be cheaper to buy a PC with better parts and more storage space. Though if Valve is holding off until, say, June to launch this thing, as the memory crisis threatens to deepen, perhaps we won't see as many PCs like that $900 one from Walmart—which is a bit of a rarity even today.

For the 2 TB model, I'm wondering if Valve isn't considering ditching that entirely, with these drives in excess of $200 a piece. I think Valve would have a very hard time selling it for a four-digit sum. Most sensible users would buy the cheaper option and wait until all this blows over to upgrade the storage, right?

How much is it worth to Valve to get more players on SteamOS? That's likely a part of the discussions ongoing at Valve HQ as it deals with this dire situation. And hey, if you want to blame something for the situation we're in, you can blame AI.

I have to admit that I was utterly naive to think that the Steam Machine would launch at anywhere near $500. With a discrete CPU and GPU inside (i.e. no all-in-one APU to help reduce costs), it was already going to be a little tricky to keep things nice and cheap. But now that the global memory situation seems to be spiralling almost out of control, there's zero chance that it will be under $1,000. Yes, even the 512 GB option.

It could be under that price tag, because Valve does have the capital to effectively pre-order a metric shed load of bulk components under contract, for far less money than you and I have to cough up when we need more DRAM or a bigger SSD. However, Valve isn't pitching the Steam Machine as being a 'cheap' gaming PC.

Sony and Microsoft can afford to keep console prices relatively low because they were designed from the very beginning to be as cheap as possible to manufacture. And then there's the fact that they both get additional revenue from game licences. Valve might get a healthy cut of a publisher's income on every game that it distributes on Steam, but the Steam Machine isn't a closed platform, or at the very least, it doesn't look like it will be.

From what I can tell, it looks like you could stick any OS onto the device, and as long as you can get hold of the drivers for all the hardware inside, you could avoid SteamOS and Steam entirely. In other words, Valve can't guarantee that every Steam Machine it sells will automatically generate income via Steam itself, unlike with consoles.

None of my friends have expressed any interest in buying a Steam Machine and I guess that if it does launch with a four-figure price tag, the launch will end up being somewhat of a flop. There must be some pretty morose people at Valve right now.

It's absurd to think of how much PC part pricing has changed in the handful of months since I last made a Steam Machine pricing guess. At the time, I guessed (or more accurately, wished) for console, or slightly above console, prices. With the fast-rising cost of memory and storage, I think we could see prices rising up to the $1,000 mark.

Different tiers of storage, combined with upgradeable memory and storage, certainly help in this regard. It's not impossible to think Valve could put out a machine under $1,000 with the lowest possible storage and memory, so a buyer can upgrade at a later date.

Valve will have the privilege of direct contact with parts manufacturers, but, in the hardware space, it just doesn't have the pull that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo do. It can't estimate sales in the tens of millions, and risking the losses that console manufacturers make may not be sustainable for it. This is before mentioning that console manufacturers specifically target a more affordable price point, where we have heard little in that regard from Valve.

Valve says in its latest FAQ that it can't say a price until it can 'confidently announce' it. This level of uncertainty is certainly a worrying statement on current supply and future acquisition. We don't know what stockpiling efforts have been made to meet demand, but I'd guess the answer is 'not enough'.

Andy Edser, Hardware Writer: I cautiously estimated that the Steam Machine would end up with a $500-$600 price tag last year, but that was before the memory crisis turned the PC hardware market into an apocalyptic wasteland, with those of us prepared to navigate it fighting tooth and nail over anything with a DRAM module.

Sure, Valve (and AMD) will still likely be using their considerable industry influence and existing memory manufacturer relationships to minimise the fallout. But at this point, looking at my earlier figures and what Valve has said in the meantime, I've almost certainly lowballed it.

$800-$1,000 for the 512 GB version, with the 2 TB version soaring well over a grand. That's my guess, and this time I'm sticking with it. Unless another hardware shortage occurs, or we all end up underwater in the meantime. In which case, $1,000+ for both, and me crying into my soup. We'll see.

I mean, at least Valve is remaining committed to launching all three new Steam-y products in the first half of this year, eh? That's 'the goal' anyways. But if anyone is surprised that the Steam Machine and Steam Frame pricing and launch dates are still up in the air as we get into February, then you obviously haven't been paying attention to the nightmare state of the PC hardware market right now.

We've been tracking memory, SSD, and GPU pricing for the past three or four months and it's only going one way; it's rapidly going up. So, what's Valve to do?

One thing it could do is release the Steam Machine with a special launch price, trading on the fact that it would have got its initial run of memory and SSDs, and yes, even GPU modules, for a completely different price than subsequent orders will end up being if purchased months later. After all, Valve will have secured a certain amount of the componentry on contract in advance of manufacturing and eventual release.

But we've been down that road before with the current generation of graphics cards when they launched early last year. The MSRP and launch pricing of every single one of AMD and Nvidia's RX 9000 or RTX 50-series cards was completely different to what users could pick them up for even just a few hours after the initial release stock had run dry… or retailers and manufacturers sniffed a chance to gouge PC gamers on pricing.

Obviously, with Valve controlling the retail through the Steam store itself it can control those prices to avoid gouging on new gear, but even so, having to spike prices after launch itself will sting.

We don't really want that to happen here with the Steam Machine and Steam Frame. But we also don't know if Valve would have had enough of that early, cheaper RAM and SSD stock to fulfil a release in all the territories it has promised. If you do a special launch price, it would have to be across the board.

Valve could still do the launch price dance, releasing the Steam Machine at $699 in limited regions if it wanted; pulling it back to a US-only launch just inside of its first-half of 2026 release window.

But that's not going to make anyone happy, except for the first few hundred people getting a Steam Machine for a never-to-be-seen again price and re-selling them for over a grand on ebay.

So, I don't see Valve going down that route. And it's already said it's not going to subsidise the devices itself to achieve a cheaper retail price in exchange for the hope of getting more people spending in its Steam ecosystem. Which makes sense, because I guarantee the vast majority of people buying a Steam Machine will already be card carrying members of the Steam community with a huge library of games already on the platform.

I guess what I'm coming round to is the fact that Valve is royally screwed here.

This is a budget gaming PC, with a specs list that already puts it behind the sub-$1,000 machines that you will find at Walmart and Amazon. So it can't really go any higher than that and still hope to find a place in peoples' hearts. I get the argument that finding a gaming PC that smol is tough, but equally if you're looking for an affordable gaming PC, I would wager price becomes a far more important point than the litre capacity of the chassis.

That makes me think—if Valve actually does release the Steam Machine in the first half of this year at all—it will cost $999 for the 512 GB version and $1,500 for the 2 TB system by way of offsetting the cheaper version. After all, early adopters will pick up the higher capacity model in their droves, because they always do.

But then I am slowly coming around to the possibility that it might not actually come out at all. Already the second coming of the Steam Machine feels fraught, and with component pricing showing no signs of plateauing just yet, I could definitely see Valve putting the mini PC on indefinite hiatus. Then maybe Valve will retire the Steam Machine name entirely as a cursed thing.

Just a few days ago I reported that a bunch of different Linux gaming distros have teamed up to 'improve the open source gaming ecosystem'. One distro that is noticeably absent from the Open Gaming Collective (OCG) collaboration, though, is CachyOS, and Peter Jung, founder and developer of CachyOS, has explained why (via GamingOnLinux).

Replying to someone on Reddit, Jung, AKA ptr1337, explains: "We have thought about this but we opted out, since we do not see all too much benefit from our side. Handheld stuff is not our major focus. Also, we had some concerns that this could become a 'bureaucratic loophole', which seems to be more or less true so far.

"Additionally, to us all this 'initiative' looked like an emergency rushed thing, so that Bazzite finds new kernel maintainers and for other technical stuff after kicking the maintainer, which basically made most integration work for them."

The dev also expressed that the company doesn't want to be associated with Playtron, another somewhat controversial distro that's part of the OGC. Apparently, "there are more reasons, but I'll keep them out of the public."

The idea behind the OGC seems to be twofold: first, to ensure different distros aren't all working on the same things separately and unnecessarily and to work on shared solutions, and second, to have more collective power and presence within broader Linux. On the latter point, this should be helped by patches for the new and shared OGC kernel, according to Bazzite, being "at least in review for eventual inclusion into the Linux kernel."

CachyOS is an Arch-based distro that focuses on staying "blazingly fast". That purported speed is a big part of its appeal for gaming, for obvious reasons. Our hardware commander Dave tried it for a while and didn't hate it, though he didn't find it too different to his experience using Bazzite given he mostly used the standard Gnome desktop environment.

Jung's allusions towards Playtron likely refer to the strange history of baking crypto features into the OS, plus concerns over a Playtron handheld's terms of service seeming to hint at practically non-refundable deposit.

The CachyOS dev also seems to imply that the OGC is a handheld-centric collaboration. However, it's not only handheld distros present in the OGC. Nobara Linux is on the list, for instance, and that's a desktop distro made by Proton-GE developer GloriousEggroll.

In another reply, Jung says that the collective simply isn't necessary for the distro:

"We've been working together with ChimeraOS and Asus-Linux for more then a year. Much testing and integration from Inputplumber came from the CachyOS Handheld Edition too! :) I dont think for that a collective with strings attached is needed."