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Games: Brotato Comes to GNU/Linux and "Lenovo Legion Go Extreme Mode Is Coming To Address The Gaming Handheld's Biggest Flaw In Linux"
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Brotato gets first proper content drop of the Evil Empire era, plus Mac and Linux support
Brotato is now under new management after Evil Empire recently took over the direction of everyone’s favourite potato-themed auto-shooter.
This change of leadership has, in turn, let the game’s original developer Blobfish off the leash so it can work on new projects. We’ll hear more on that in due course, I’m sure.
At the time of the Brotato X Evil Empire announcement we got a little tiny update to the game with a small injection of content, but a much bigger one just dropped and, in particular, there’s quite a few interesting quality of life changes to tell you about.
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Hot Hardware ☛ Lenovo Legion Go Extreme Mode Is Coming To Address The Gaming Handheld's Biggest Flaw In Linux
Linux users running Lenovo's Legion gaming handhelds and laptops are about to get a much-needed update to the way their systems handle power profiles. Developer Derek J. Clark has submitted a new patch series to the Linux kernel that adds explicit support for an "Extreme" performance mode to the lenovo-wmi-gamezone driver and overhauls how compatible systems are detected. The change is aimed at improving reliability and eliminating confusing behavior in tools that expose Lenovo's built-in performance profiles to userspace.
The short version: some Lenovo Legion devices report support for an "Extreme" thermal mode in firmware, but don't actually implement it correctly. In theory, the mode pushes the CPU and GPU power limits to the maximum levels the cooling system can handle, but on some devices, this is actually beyond what the internal battery can safely supply, and on other devices it was apparently stubbed out, meaning it doesn't necessarily do anything at all. Earlier kernel versions tried to work around buggy firmware by maintaining a deny-list of affected devices, but Clark's patches flip that logic to an explicit allow-list. In practice, that means no Legion Go models will offer Extreme mode in the software until they've been tested and validated for stable behavior.
This change also clears up one of the stranger quirks in Linux on recent Legion systems. Because of how the firmware misreported profile names, Linux tools like GNOME's power settings and third-party utilities could show mismatched modes—"Performance" in the UI might actually trigger a "Balanced-Performance" state under the hood, or even invoke the half-implemented Extreme mode. The result was inconsistent LED indicators (where color cues didn't match between Windows and Linux), and the impression among some users that "Performance" mode was performing poorly on Linux.