You all love to tinker right? SteamTinkerLaunch is an open source project to bundle together tons of available extra options for running your Steam games.

It's a wrapper which allows you to customize game launching so it can get your games to hook in with other tools like MangoHud, GameMode, vkBasalt, ReplaySorcery, automatically run a growing list of tweaks needed for specific games, it has support for Steam Play (including Proton and other Steam Play tools) and the list goes on for a while.

A big release went up adding in some new features like:

• An actual user interface settings menu
• Support for native Linux games
• Auto configuration to find an available text editor when needed
• Support for Valve's new GameScope project
• Lots of other smaller fixes and clean ups

If you've been after a single solution to bundle together lots of other tools, to set them up to run when you launch your games on Steam this might be for you. Seems like it's trying to allow you to do a bit of everything . You can add it to individual games by installing it and then setting a launch option of simply "stl %command%" and then that game will use whatever tweaks you've setup with SteamTinkerLaunch.

Check it out on GitHub . Arch users can install it from the AUR .

If you're working with sprites and pixel-art, you need to pay attention to Pixelorama as this free and open source program is coming on nicely and another massive upgrade is out now.

As an editor for artists, the 0.8 release that went up on September 23 has made it that step closer to an all-in-one solution for all your sprite needs. There's now a lot of different built in tools you can use, different pixel modes, animation support and much more.

Pictured - Pixelorama 0.8, town image credit .

The list of new features in v0.8 is long, here's a few quick highlights:

• The Web (HTML5) is now a supported platform of Pixelorama! It is now possible to save .png and .pxo files, as well as load image and palette files in the Web version.
• Project tabs! You can now have multiple projects open at the same time, and access each one with tabs.
• Gradient generation. A new option under the "Image" menu that lets you generate a RGB gradient.
• Added previews in all image effect dialog windows with a checkerboard background. Also placed checkerboard backgrounds in the cel buttons of the timeline, and the Export window.
• A new isometric grid.
• You can now drag & drop files into the program while it's running to open them. You can open .pxo files, image files and palette (json, gpl and pal) files this way.
• You can now draw on the tiling mode previews!
• Added Symmetry Guides. They let you change the axis of symmetry for mirroring.
• Palettes can now be created from the colors of the selected sprite.
• You can now preview how the frames of the spritesheet you are importing will look.
• You can now import image files as layers. Their size will be cropped to the project's size.
• You can import image files as brushes, patterns and palettes.
• Added Scale3X algorithm as an option to scale sprites
• Selection region and size are now being shown when making a selection on the top, next to the position label.
• A play button has been added for playing the animation exclusively on the small canvas preview area. A zoom slider for the preview area has been added, too.
• Added support for importing PAL palette files.

This release also cleans up the UI some more with added quality of life fixes, like more options where you expect them to be for ease of use. It's looking quite lovely now. While there are a number of other pixel art editors out there - plenty of them are either too basic, too expensive, overly complicated, don't work on Linux and so on - having Pixelorama support Linux and be open source is great.

What's interesting is that it continues to show how Godot Engine can be used nicely for apps and not just games too, since that what Pixelorama was created with.

Learn more about it on the GitHub and it's also on itch.io (which has a web demo). They also have a Patreon to support it.

That's right, no need to wipe your glasses as that's a real headline here. Microsoft are bringing their Microsoft Edge browser to Linux in October.

Not a huge surprised, as this was already confirmed previously but having a launch month is the next step. Writing on the Windows Experience Blog , Liat Ben-Zur, Corporate Vice President confirmed the Linux launch plan:

Our mission to bring Microsoft Edge to the platforms our customers use daily takes its next step: starting in October, Microsoft Edge on Linux will be available to download on the Dev preview channel. When it’s available, Linux users can go to the Microsoft Edge Insiders site to download the preview channel, or they can download it from the native Linux package manager. And just like other platforms, we always appreciate feedback—it’s the best way to serve our customers.

What's not entirely clear is what they mean by the native Linux package manager, since there's a few. Most likely though, since they (like a lot of others) target Ubuntu directly, they might mean the Snap Store .

All of this is as Microsoft appear to continue treating Linux less like a hostile target, and more like something to take advantage of themselves. Linux has ended up being a big part of Microsoft, from integrating it into Windows with Windows Subsystem for Linux and Linux is a popular and supported choice by Microsoft on their cloud Azure platform too. Heck, they even admitted they were 'on the wrong side of history when open source exploded'.

It's going to be a bit of a hot topic, and I'm sort of dreading asking this because the comments will be quite colourful but here we go anyway: will you use it and what do you think of Microsoft getting certain applications on Linux?

Personally, I am all for it. A key part of the computing experience is having access to the applications you like and want to use, even if it's a browser with a few key differences - it all adds up. The more Linux gets, the better.

Note: this is actually not the first modern Microsoft application to arrive on Linux, as Microsoft Teams became available on Linux late last year. There's also Visual Studio Code and Skype too which have been on Linux for some time now.

Enlarge (credit: Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images )

Researchers said that a tip from a child led them to discover aggressive adware and exorbitant prices lurking in iOS and Android smartphone apps with a combined 2.4 million downloads from the App Store and Google Play.

Posing as apps for entertainment, wallpaper images, or music downloads, some of the titles served intrusive ads even when an app wasn’t active. To prevent users from uninstalling them, the apps hid their icon, making it hard to identify where the ads were coming from. Other apps charged from $2 to $10 and generated revenue of more than $500,000, according to estimates from SensorTower, a smartphone-app intelligence service.

The apps came to light after a girl found a profile on TikTok that was promoting what appeared to be an abusive app and reported it to Be Safe Online, a project in the Czech Republic that educates children on online safety. Acting on the tip, researchers from security firm Avast found 11 apps, for devices running both iOS and Android, that were engaged in similar scams.

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Need an easy way to run a bunch of system enhancements? GameMode, originally made by developers at porting studio Feral Interactive has a new release out.

While all of the tweaks can be done by themselves, the point is to have an easy place for anyone and everyone to kick their Linux system into the highest performance possible. A great idea and it's getting quite featured-filled too.

The highlights of GameMode 1.6 include:

• Created a new manpages for gamemoderun and the example, now called gamemode-simulate-game
• Add ability to change lib directory of gamemoderun
• Add option to use elogind
• Copy default config file to the correct location
• Allow LD_PRELOAD to be overridden in $GAMEMODERUNEXEC
• Various minor bugfixes
• Improvements to dependency management

It's worth noting, that most of the work going into GameMode now appears to be from outside contributors, not Feral Interactive directly although they still maintain control over it and do the releases.

Games can actually integrate support for it directly, so that it all becomes automatic if you have GameMode installed. A bunch of Feral Interactive's own Linux ports have it like DiRT 4, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and multiple more recent Total War titles.

What can you actually do with GameMode? Some of the features currently include adjusting:

• CPU governor
• I/O priority
• Process niceness
• Kernel scheduler (SCHED_ISO)
• Screensaver inhibiting
• GPU performance mode (NVIDIA and AMD), GPU overclocking (NVIDIA)
• Custom scripts

See GameMode on GitHub .

Free, open source and pretty essential for anyone doing livestreaming and/or recording videos on Linux; OBS Studio has a new Release Candidate out for testing.

26.0.0-rc1 comes with multiple major new features, along with some really good bug fixes so now is the time to get testing and ensure the 26.0.0 release is a great one. Here's a highlight of some new features across all platforms:

• Added a Source Toolbar to allow easy access to relevant controls for the currently selected source. The toolbar can be toggled via the View Menu -> Source Toolbar
• Added media controls to allow controlling playback of media/VLC sources on the source toolbar when a media source, VLC source, or slideshow source is selected
• Added a new noise suppression method to the Noise Suppression filter, RNNoise, which is an AI-based noise suppression method with significantly better results for voice than the pre-existing method (Speex)
• Added the ability to take screenshots of the previews, sources, or scenes with hotkeys
• Added sRGB color support and made it default for more accurate color representation
• Added a log viewer when going to the Help menu -> Logs -> View Log menu item
• Added a percentage toggle checkbox to the volume controls in advanced audio properties
• Added more audio capture support for BSD operating systems
• Added the option to disable antialiasing for text sources [Codex-]
• Added a right-click context menu option to projectors to make a specific projector always on top of other windows

Game pictured: Children of Morta

After giving it a test run, I genuinely love the UI addition to have this new Source Toolbar for really quick adjustment of sources. You can see it in the above picture where it mentions Properties, Filters and the Screen source being the HDMI input. It's a nice little time saver to have less clicking around. The new Noise Suppression using RNNoise is going to be extremely useful too, nice to see it being pulled in by more projects as it is impressive.

For Linux users especially, there's a few needed fixes included:

• Fixed an issue where the browser source could crash when browsing files
• Fixed an issue with “always on top” sometimes not working with projectors
• Fixed an issue where cameras using V4L2 would not respond correctly to pan/tilt controls
• Fixed an issue where a user’s preferred language could not be detected correctly

Amazing to see all the work that goes into OBS Studio and great to see a new release in testing.

You can find it on GitHub .

Need to make some nice models for games? Asset Forge is a nice way to do it, allowing you to kit-bash your way to create some really nice assets.

The idea is that you're given a bunch of pre-made blocks, that you can stick together to create entirely new models. Position them, rotate them around, resize them, export them into common 3D formats, render them as a 2D sprite and much more. It opens up asset creation to a new audience and it's a wonderful idea.

Asset Forge 2.1 just recently went up adding in overhauled texture tiling which should fix all currently reported issues and new options to place selection on floor or in centre. There's also various bug fixes and 50 new pre-made blocks for you to use (some are only in the Deluxe version).

Check it out on itch.io .

The developer, Kenney, is a pretty well known name in game development circles for their lovely and colourful free assets. Kenney also just recently put up a new Space Kit , which contains 150+ ready to use models with a space theme with a public domain license lot a like of their assets.

Do you distro-hop on Linux often? Ventoy might be the tool you're looking for and it's quite possibly my new best friend.

What is it? Ventoy is a free and open source application that you can stick on a USB drive, which allows you to create a reusable system for booting ISO/WIM/IMG/EFI files. Instead of wiping your USB drives over and over with new distributions, Ventoy lets you just dump the files onto the drive, reboot and get an easy list of distributions to boot.

It's a tool that I'm definitely going to be getting plenty of use from. Could end up saving quite a bit of time, all you need to do to test something out directly once setup is just dump the file onto a drive and reboot. During my own testing, it works exactly as described.

However, it doesn't work with everything. It does have a pretty huge set of compatible files but some don't show up. It's an evolving project, so over time more and more will be supported it with it, even so it's a wonderful bit of software that's worth highlighting.

See the official site here and on GitHub .

GB Studio is a free and open source retro adventure game creator that allows you to visually make games that can work cross-platform on Linux, macOS, Windows…and the Game Boy.

Yep, the classic hand-held from Nintendo still has a huge homebrew community and with tools like GB Studio many more people can make games for it. GB Studio just recently had a massive 2.0 Beta release, which pulls in major new features for the project. The way it's going, it might end up as the ultimate retro game creation tool. Check out their trailer for the 2.0 release below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

We talked a little about in a previous article , as the idea is brilliant. Being open source under the MIT license is a wonderful touch too so anyone can learn from it. Not only that, it's just a sweet tool to use to make cool retro games that can run across PC systems and on a classic Game Boy too. Since it's a visual builder, no years of programming are required as you get to drag/drop and tick boxes to do stuff making it highly accessible. As of GB Studio 2, it also adds support for the upcoming Analogue Pocket device too (which looks awesome).

Just some highlights of what's new in the 2.0 Beta includes:

• Add full color support, each scene can contain up to six 4-color palette (24 colors per scene) and seven different sprite palettes.
• Add additional genres to Scene Type dropdown, "Platformer", "Shoot Em' Up", "Point and Click" and "Adventure", each one affects player handling in that scene. A single project can use any/all genres as required
• Add "On Update" script to actors which calls on each frame allowing movement to be controlled manually.
• Add event to dynamically switch color palettes used in a scene
• Add palettes section for editing and creating color palettes
• Add support for larger background images, up to 2040px in either dimension, maximum width * height of image must be under 1,048,320
• Increase number of allowed actors and triggers per scene to 30. Up to 10 actors will be visible on screen at the same time.
• Add ability to pin actors to screen to use as simple HUD elements
• Game engine completely rewritten to make less top down rpg genre specific
• Cache compiled files as much as possible to reduce time required for repeated builds
• The ability to eject the full source code of the game

You can find it on itch.io , their website and GitHub .