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Games: Steam Deck, Steam Games, Loki, Slop Issues, and CachyOS
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Tom's Hardware ☛ PS5 emulation arrives on Steam Deck, Astro Playroom showcased running at 0.6 FPS — milestone SharpEmu development shows promise, despite unplayable performance
Astro's Playroom runs at 0.5 to 1 FPS on the Steam Deck when emulated through SharpEmu. It's not much — it's nothing at all, in fact — but just the proof-of-concept alone is enough to stir up excitement for both Steam Deck and PS5 emulation scenes.
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Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native GNU/Linux Builds, including Sovereign Tower - 2026-08-12 Edition
Between 2026-08-05 and 2026-08-12 there were 81 New Steam games released with Native GNU/Linux builds. For reference, during the same time, there were 616 games released for backdoored Windows on Steam, so the GNU/Linux versions represent about 13.1 % of total released titles. This week’s pick is certainly Sovereign Tower since it’s another inventive choose your destiny adventure game where you are in charge of your kingdom. This time, you can backtrack on choices made before to achieve better results. Highly praised by gamers so far. Full list of games worthy of your consideration below!
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GamingOnLinux ☛ Out in Early Access - Sandustry has you explore, mine and automate in fully destructible pixel worlds | GamingOnLinux
Hooded Horse picked another good one to publish here from developer Lantto Games. Sandustry is a factory automation game where every pixel is a resource. Note: this was a personal purchase.
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GamingOnLinux ☛ PAYDAY 2 dropped the Native Linux version so you'll need to use Proton | GamingOnLinux
OVERKILL / Starbreeze Entertainment announced that PAYDAY 2 has dropped support for their Native Linux version with a big update to the game with 64bit support.
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GamingOnLinux ☛ Typomagical is a typing spell-building bullet heaven that will make you panic | GamingOnLinux
Blending the very different worlds of typing games with survivor-like bullet heavens, Typomagical will make you sweat as you frantically type spells. Your fingers will end up quite afraid of you loading this one up. Disclosure: the developer sent a key to GamingOnLinux.
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GamingOnLinux ☛ Grand-scale FPS 'WARDOGS' should work on Linux / SteamOS, devs confirm working on Proton support | GamingOnLinux
The developers behind the upcoming grand-scale FPS WARDOGS have confirmed they're working to support Proton so it's playable on Linux / SteamOS. I did repeatedly try to get word from them over email, but our direct questions on it have been met with silence.
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Make Use Of ☛ 2026-08-11 [Older] Before Valve bet on Linux gaming, one company risked everything on it
Valve's Linux push can look almost inevitable in hindsight. Proton lets SteamOS run Windows games, the Steam Deck turned SteamOS into something people actually buy on purpose, and Valve followed it with a new Steam Machine for 2026. Linux gaming still has plenty of rough edges, but we've come a long way from the days when installing Linux meant accepting that most commercial PC games simply weren't coming with you.
More than a decade before Valve brought Steam to Linux, a small company in Tustin, California, tried to change that in the expensive way. Loki Software licensed Windows games from major publishers, ported them individually, boxed them up for Linux users, and hoped there were enough customers to keep the whole thing afloat. The company lasted barely three years before going bankrupt with less than $50,000 in assets and somewhere between $1 million and $10 million in debt.
Plenty of tech companies disappeared around the turn of the millennium, so bankruptcy alone isn't what makes Loki's story interesting to me. What caught my attention was the problem it burned through all that money trying to solve. Linux had users who wanted commercial PC games, but each major Windows release needed someone to justify building a separate Linux version. Valve would spend years wrestling with the same basic problem.
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GamingOnLinux ☛ Cellular roguelike shooter 'Pathogenic' is a body-infecting good time | GamingOnLinux
Pathogenic is a top-down roguelike shooter where you control a customizable lone pathogen infecting a human host. Released July 16th from developer Aberrant Labs and publisher Slug Disco, they sent GamingOnLinux a key to check it out.
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GamingOnLinux ☛ Open-source re-implementation of The Elder Scrolls: Arena adds major new features like enemy combat AI | GamingOnLinux
OpenTESArena 0.18.0 the open-source re-implementation of The Elder Scrolls: Arena is out now, bringing many gameplay enhancements. It's getting closer to being more of a playable game now for modern platforms.
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GamingOnLinux ☛ Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV delayed until December | GamingOnLinux
One game we have to wait a bit longer on is Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV, which has moved from September to December 3rd. Not a very long delay, but hopefully enough time for the developers at KING Art to make it truly worthwhile. I would prefer a delay over a rough release - too many big games release in a poor state on PC over the last few years.
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FOSSLinux ☛ How to Set Up CachyOS for Gaming: A Beginner Guide (2026)
I spent three weeks gaming on CachyOS and the performance gap over stock Ubuntu is real. Here is the exact walkthrough for setting up Steam, Proton, and every gaming tool you need on this Arch-based powerhouse.
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FOSSLinux ☛ How to Stream PlayStation Games on Linux [Ed: There is definitely LLM slop contaminating this article. Not 100% slopfarms, but still worrying.]