Games: Boiling Steam on OrangePi, Linux Rootkits, Proton Experimental, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 13, 2026

• Boiling Steam ☛ OrangePi Zero 3W Review: Tiny Yet Powerful

  OrangePi has kindly sent us a new board to test, the OrangePi Zero 3W. Our last review with OrangePi hardware was the OrangePi 4 Pro SBC - a powerful, low wattage board, low-cost alternative to the Raspberry Pi 5 (while a little less powerful). This time the Zero 3W sits in a very different category. It’s absolutely tiny, and it’s hard to believe that this thing actually has pretty much the same hardware specs as the larger OrangePi 4 Pro!

• Make Use Of ☛ PC gaming’s anti-cheat problem is getting ridiculous and Linux players are paying the price

  Anti-cheat (more specifically, kernel-level anti-cheat) is something we’ve come to normalize over time, despite its many security risks. Running what is essentially a rootkit with Ring 0 access is something that should not be encouraged at all, but there’s more to it than just unrestricted access.

  Kernel-level anti-cheat solutions tend to be designed around Windows, and these are entirely incompatible with Linux while using something like Proton. Most popular live-service games employ kernel-level drivers in some way or another, which makes it impossible to run these games on Linux. Linux gamers are being effectively gate kept here, and there doesn’t seem to be any end to this suffering.

• Declan Chidlow ☛ Examining My Team Fortress Statistics

  Team Fortress 2 data is all kept and stored on Steam so can be easily accessed. I fetch the data manually on occasion and then use Web Origami to transform it to this readable page. When I last fetched the data is evidenced by the modification data in this post’s header.

  This is a similar process to the one I employ for Examining My Halo Service Record.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Proton Experimental updated with fixes for STEINS;GATE RE:BOOT, EA App, Borderlands 4 | GamingOnLinux

  Valve released a small update for Proton Experimental - the compatibility layer to run Windows games on SteamOS / Linux for September 11th. There was also an update with more on September 4th.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Licensing / Legal

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Wiki documents at least 44 instances in which Sony says you own your games as digital games ownership lawsuit progresses — project is direct assault on Sony's claim in recent ownership lawsuit

      The case isn't exactly about ownership, though; it's really about consumer disclosure and product representation. The plaintiffs aren't arguing that buying a digital game somehow transfers ownership of Sony's underlying intellectual property, but rather that Sony's use of words such as "buy," "purchase," and "own" could reasonably lead consumers to believe that they were acquiring a durable right to use the game, rather than merely obtaining a revocable license. That distinction matters because Sony's defense depends in part on the claim that no reasonable consumer would interpret the transaction that way. At the same time, the plaintiffs have produced a substantial body of evidence showing that Sony itself routinely uses precisely that ownership language when describing the digital games its customers have purchased.