Steam Summer 2019

The Steam Summer Sale is officially upon us, and you know what that means: Very cheap video-games to throw your money at.The 2019 Steam Summer Sale runs until July 9.

Games to look out for:

Left 4 Dead 2
ARK: Survival Evolved 
ARK: Survival Evolved Season Pass
Goat Simulator: GOATY
Total War: THREE KINGDOMS
Valve Complete Pack BUNDLE
CS:GO Prime Status Upgrade
Valiant Hearts: The Great War*
Cities: Skylines
Shadow Warrior 2013
Shadow Warrior 2*
Tomb Raider 2013
Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration
Borderlands: The Handsome Collection
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
The Deus Ex Collection*
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey*
Dreamfall: Chapters
MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD*
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt*
SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics
The Elder Scrolls Online*
Torchlight*
Torchlight2
Bejeweled3*
SUPERHOT

*Windows games powered by Proton.

Canonical returning 32-bit Ubuntu Linux

Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine

Last week Canonical announced plans to drop 32-bit packages and libraries from Ubuntu 19.10. These packages enable 32-bit software to run on 64-bit versions of Ubuntu. This move would have affected the dozens of Linux distributions based on Ubuntu. Taking away 32-bit support would mean losing a bunch of Steam games. While the Steam client software has a 64-bit version and would be able to run, many of the games on Steam are 32-bit and would become unplayable.


"Ubuntu 19.10 and future releases will not be officially supported by Steam or recommended to our users. We will evaluate ways to minimize breakage for existing users, but will also switch our focus to a different distribution, currently TBD." 
-Pierre-Loup Griffais
 
However after both developers and huge a amount of anger this weekend from gamers. Canonical backed off of their new plans. They say they will now have a community process to determine which 32-bit packages are needed to deal with legacy software. When Ubuntu stopped shipping 32-bit Ubuntu Linux ISOs it didn't seem to be a big deal to anyone. So I'm sure they didn't expect dropping the 32-bit libraries would cause problems. I guess they didn't understand that Steam on Linux has been a boom for GNU/Linux gaming. Plus Valve has always recommended that gamers run Ubuntu Linux. Both Steam and Wine depended on 32-bit libraries.

The Steam summer sale starts next week

Getting Steam up and running on MX Linux 18.3 for native games and Valve's fork of WINE (Proton) is pretty painless. Valve has been pushing development of Steam on GNU/Linux through the Proton compatibility layer and AMD Radeon drivers getting better and better. The Radeon driver for my RX 560 works right out of the box. MX Linux ships its own Steam executable, easily found and installed via the Software Center. MX Linux is only a Semi-Rolling release distro, but it has very fresh software.

The Steam summer sale tends to offer some very good deals. There are many games, DLC packs, plus franchise and studio bundles.

Games to look out for:

Batman: Arkham Origins* 
CS:GO Prime Status Upgrade
Total War: THREE KINGDOMS
Left 4 Dead 2
ARK: Survival Evolved
Borderlands: The Handsome Collection
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Deus Ex: Invisible War*
Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition*
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey*
Dreamfall: Chapters
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt*
Valve Complete Pack BUNDLE
DOOM 2016*
Dying Light Ultimate Collection
SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics
Baldur's Gate: The Complete Saga
Shadowrun Complete Collection
State of Decay: YOSE*
Dota 2
Torchlight II
The Talos Principle
PAYDAY The Heist*
PAYDAY 2
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning*
The Elder Scrolls Online*
Life is Strange 2*
Goat Simulator: GOATY
F1 2017

*Windows games powered by Proton.

Amd next horizon event: Last week

Note: This is not a NVIDIA v.s. AMD Post

In the past I have said many times that NVIDIA had better performance on GNU/Linux due to poor drivers from AMD. However in recent times the open source AMD drivers have gotten better by leaps and bounds. Their efforts has continued to move in the right direction, just not as fast as many would hope. Mesa has made many improvements to OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in 2018. There has also been improvements by Valve and other companies to make these opensource drivers better for GNU/Linux gaming. As of June 2019 both NVIDIA and AMD work rather well on Windows but on Linux, it’s definitely easier to set up AMD cards. If you want your graphics driver to be in the mainline kernel and work without proprietary kernel modules...you have to go AMD.

Note: Mesa implements various API’s (Application programming interface) like OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenCL, OpenMAX, VDPAU, VA API, XvMC and Vulkan.

AMD Radeon RX 5700 Series

AMD announced its new Radeon GPUs at E3 last week. The new "Navi" Radeon RX 5700 and 5700XT is in competition with RTX 2060 and 2070. The Radeon RX 5700XT will be available for $449, while the RX 5700 is a $379 GPU. A $500 50th Anniversary of the card will also be available. As for the mainline kernel support for the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700XT won't all be there for launch day in July. It will be around September before we see  stable/released versions of the Linux kernel and Mesa. AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver support for launch-day but the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver support who knows. AMD's "Navi" GPU support is likely to come with Linux 5.3 and Mesa 19.2. which should shipped with Ubuntu 19.10 and Fedora 31.

Proton 4.2-6

Valve's just released Proton 4.2-6. If you are a gamer I don't need to tell you have important Proton is. Proton 4.2-6 remains based on upstream Wine 4.2. They also say that DXVK 1.2.1 has been rebuilt with a modern compiler. The aim is to increase performance for 32-bit games.

Note: Valve's Proton 4.2-7 Fixes Performance & Sound Regressions

Regardless of what happens between AMD and NVIDIA in the PC graphics card wars, AMD GPUs will be a treat if you are an open-source driver fan. The open source driver is part of the kernel, meaning less steps to get up and running with Steam and Steam Proton. Just plug and play.