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Steam Deck widens the gap.

Steam Deck widens the gap.

This week, the Orange Pi Neo handheld was just announced and it has huge implications for Linux gaming... we'll talk about it. And what does January's Steam Hardware Survey tell us about the growth of Linux gaming? We'll explore. Plus a new update makes it easier than ever to play non-Steam games on Deck. All of this and more today. That's right, it's time for some gaming news!

NonSteamLaunchers gets massive improvement

Have you heard about NonSteamLaunchers? It's a tool that help you install and manage, well, non-Steam launchers on SteamOS-like distros.

NonSteamLaunchers handles a huge assortment of other launchers. Not the least of which are:
The EA App
GOG Galaxy
Battle.net
Rockstar Games Launcher
Epic Games Launcher,
Amazon games
Xbox Game Pass
Ubisoft gags

This app also will install any of the supported launchers as well as any of the games you own and can now add them to your Steam library as well!

It's a neat little project and I can't wait to see where it goes from here! You can support their work with the link to their Patreon below!

Orange Pi Neo Linux Gaming Handheld

So, the Orange Pi Neo. Did you hear about this? At FOSDEM 2024 last week, we saw the Manjaro team announce the Orange Pi Neo handheld. Orange Pi haven't released specs about this, but Manjaro has. They've even got a dedicated page for this device on their site.

Look at this thing. It's got a Ryzen 7 7840U, a 7 inch 16x10 display at 1920 x 1200, 500 nits brightness, and a 120Hz refresh rate. It's running Manjaro Gaming Edition which is an immutable variant of Manjaro with updates via OpenGamepadUI.

It looks like there's two options for RAM: 16 or 32 GB of LPDDR5 at 7500 MHz. Storage will range from 512 GB up to 2 TB of PCIe 4.0 SSD in the 2280 form factor!

The battery is listed as 50WHrs, the triggers and thumbsticks both use hall effect sensors, there's a 6-axis gyroscope, 2 USB 4.0 type C connectors, 1 SD card slot, Bluetooth 5.3, Wifi 6e, a 65W power adapter, and it comes in white and black variants.

One odd thing that they touted several times is that the chassis has "no exposed screws" as a selling point. I don't see why that's a selling point when it comes to repairability. But other than that, I'm pretty stoked for this thing!

When you look at the design mock-ups for this thing, it has a really important feature: dual trackpads. Hopefully these have some level of haptic feedback. And, if that's the case, then it would be perfect!

No word yet on pricing, yet, but if they can sell this thing at a competitive price, then I'm all-in! It's a really cool looking device with the right specs. I can't wait to get my hands on this!

Now, here's a question: do you stay up-to-date with Linux gaming news? Do you just hate YouTube and want a better way to watch these videos? Check out my new website subscribeto.me. It's a place where I'm hosting all my videos. Right now, I have my next YouTube video already live. And if you're watching this on YouTube? Well, this video was out last night over on my site. Subscribeto.me also features content from other Linux-y creators. And if you want, you can like, comment, and even subscribe using your existing fediverse account!

Now, subscribeto.me would not be possible without my Patrons. So I want to thank them for their continued support. These guys make what I do here possible. So thanks!

Megaman Franchise

Now, if you're a fan of Megaman and you're willing to roll the dice with a Capcom game... then there's a Humble bundle for you! The Megaman Franchise Pack comes with up to excellent retro titles!

There are several collections of games here,

  • Mega Man 11
  • Mega Man Zero 1, 2, 3, and 4 as well as Mega Man ZX and ZX Advent
  • Mega Man X and X2 through X8!
  • And then there's the classic Mega Man games spanning the original all the way through Mega Man 10!

So this is the whole franchise and there's a huge number of games you get when you buy the full pack for $20 or more! As always, a portion of Humble purchases go towards charity! Use my affiliate link below in the pinned comment secure bundle for yourself!

Linux market share remains consistent

Okay, this week the January Steam Hardware survey was released, and with it we get renewed insight into Linux market share... at least in the gaming sector.

The first interesting tidbit to note is that Windows grew by about a tenth of a percent while MacOS shrank by nearly the same amount and Linux took a much smaller loss at just two hundredths of a percent.

And when you look at look for the Steam Deck's graphics card in the GPU section, you see that it actually grew by four hundredths of a percent! That's pretty impressive. The Steam Deck is still growing and growing strong! In December, the overall Deck GPU percentage was just 0.78%.

But the numbers get even more telling when we drill down into the Linux section.

SteamOS Holo accounts for 42% of all Linux users and that grew month over month by just about 1.6%. Arch Linux lost about one tenth of a percent and is now at around 7.75% while Ubuntu lost 0.24% and is now at 6.8% overall.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, as the Flatpak version of Steam grew by 0.6% and now is just one percentage point away from Ubuntu.

Another interesting thing to note is that the Steam Deck's GPU now accounts for just over 42% of all Linux hardware on the survey.

When we take all this into account and make a few educated guesses about the number of monthly active Steam Users, we get a total number of Steam Decks and Linux Users accounted for in this hardware survey.

Keep in mind, these numbers are approximate. But if there were about 245 million monthly active Steam users, that would mean that two million of them were Steam Deck users, nearly 5 million of them were Linux users, and just under 4 million were Mac users.

SteamOS 3.5.14 preview

There's a brand new SteamOS preview that everyone's talking about. What does it do? Well, it brings a fix for Persona 3 Reload. This fix improves ray-traced reflections in the game. That's the big selling point with this preview update for the OS. And a lot of folks are happy about this.

Valve has been making a point of improving the Steam Deck's raytracing experience and it's got me wondering: what are they cookin' up over there? Are they preparing the Deck to run their next game perfectly?

This release also sees improved corner tracking on the OLED's trackpads and they fixed two rare crashes during session changes.

Well, that's all the Steam Deck news I could find this week! Thanks so much for watching. Don't forget to like that smash button and subscribe for more videos just like this. And check out Subscribeto.me for more content! I'll see you next time!

-- Chapters --
00:00 - Introduction
00:24 - NonSteamLaunchers app gets new update
01:13 - Orange Pi Neo handheld ships with Manjaro Linux
03:39 - My new site
04:25 - Mega Man Franchise Pack
05:15 - January Steam Hardware Survey analysis
07:35 - SteamOS Preview Update

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