Linux Mint, the beginner friendly Linux distribution is getting ready to release a big new upgrade with Linux Mint 20.1 'Ulyssa' that will be their new Long Term Support version.

Coming across three official flavours that had their Beta release with the Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce desktop environments so you can pick what you're more familiar with. Each with their own special theming from the Mint team, along with plenty of other tweaks.

Pictured - Linux Mint 20.1 Cinnamon Edition

With all editions being built on top of Ubuntu 20.04 for a solid and stable base, it brings with it linux-firmware 1.187 and the Linux kernel 5.4. Across each variant you will find Cinnamon 4.8, MATE 1.24 and Xfce 4.14. This release of Linux Mint includes their new Web App manager, which allows you to turn any website into a dedicated launcher to have it behave a bit more like a desktop application. There's also their new IPTV player Hypnotix, they now supply their own build of Chromium that does not use Snaps like Ubuntu does, an improved interface for their upload manager mintupload, the Celluloid video player now has hardware acceleration enabled by default for smoother playback and more tweak across the whole system.

Linux Mint 20.1 will be supported until 2025 with security upgrades, and it will keep the same main package base of Ubuntu 20.04 until 2022 as their future release until then will be smaller point-releases making upgrades easier. As this is a Beta release, keep in mind it will have some rough edges.

If you're after a Linux distribution perhaps as a newer user coming from Windows, the Cinnamon desktop which is the main edition of Linux Mint will offer a very familiar experience and it's one I quite like using personally.

See more on the Linux Mint site .

NVIDIA have released a small and sweet update to their developer focused Vulkan Beta driver series with 455.46.04 out now for Linux.

Here's the changelog:

• New:
  • VK_NV_acquire_winrt_display [Windows]
• Fixes:
  • Fixed a crash from vkCreateGraphicsPipelines when certain blend operations were used with scalar outputs from the fragment shader
  • Fixed the X driver's composition pipeline (used, e.g., for X desktop rotation, "ForceCompositionPipeline", and some OpenGL Swap Group configurations) to correctly preserve color precision in depth 30 [Linux]

You can find the NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver here .

Reminder: This special Vulkan beta driver is where all the shiny new stuff goes in before making its way into the stable release for everyone. Really, it's mostly aimed at developers and serious enthusiasts. Unless you need what's in them, it's generally best to use the mainline drivers (either stable or beta).

Just recently, NVIDIA actually changed how they describe all their driver releases too which should make things a bit less confusing. Previously you had this Vulkan developer beta, then their mainline drivers had a "long lived" series and then a "short lived" series. The difference of which NVIDIA explained before as:

Any given release branch is either long-lived or short-lived. The difference is in how long the branch is maintained and how many releases are made from each branch. A short-lived branch typically has only one or two (non-beta) releases, while long-lived branches will have several.
[…]
When we make changes to the driver, we evaluate the oldest branch the change needs to go into. New features go into whatever the latest branch is, while bug fixes go into the older branches and are integrated through the newer branches. So using a short-lived branch doesn’t mean that you miss out on fixes, it just means that you also get the latest features.

They've now moved to calling the different branches as "Production Branch" and "New Feature Branch" (shown here ), so the meaning on each is at least a lot more clear now. The latest Production Branch level driver is at 450.80.02 from September 30 and then the New Feature Branch at 455.45.01 from November 17.

On top of that, there's also the very latest on their mainline drivers with the Beta release 460.27.04 from December 15.

Want to test out another Linux game that uses the Vulkan API? Prepare to lose a lot of your free time with Transport Fever 2 as they've just enabled it.

Urban Games and Good Shepherd Entertainment have been working to try and improve the overall performance of the game, on top of adding in macOS support too. The latest Beta is now available which adds in: Vulkan support with a switch available in the UI for OpenGL and Vulkan, there's a new cable-stayed bridge type, a library fix for Linux and more.

It's still quite early and there's plenty of issues but they're continuing to upgrade the foundation, and their game engine to support further updates to Transport Fever 2. You can find more info on the dedicated Steam Group they setup especially to gather feedback on the testing.

Considering how nicely reviewed it is by users, you can't really go wrong picking it up. Overall on Steam for example it has a Very Positive user rating and the more recent reviews even give it a higher Overwhelmingly Positive rating so it seems Urban Games have done well. See the likes of Vulkan in it is quite exciting too.

Lots of features already included too:

• Free play with countless configuration possibilities
• Three campaigns across three continents with over 20 hours of playing time
• Editors for creating maps and editing saved games
• Three landscape types: moderate, dry, and tropical
• Realistically modelled vehicles from Europe, America and Asia
• A total of over 200 vehicles: trains, buses, streetcars, trucks, aircraft and ships
• Modular train stations, bus and truck stations, airports and harbors
• Realistic transport simulation including one-way streets and light signals
• Editable and paintable terrain with realistic effects
• Intuitive construction tools for building railroads and more
• + plenty more and modding support

You can buy it on Humble Store , GOG and Steam .

Play classics like Command & Conquer, Dune 2000 and Red Alert in a fantastic open source game engine with OpenRA.

Now available with a new testing release to pull in all the latest work, with lots of work current being done to finally allow the later Tiberian Sun to be supported by OpenRA which is incredibly exciting but it's not quite there yet. Due to all the work going into that, this new test release is short on new features.

Some highlights from the test release:

• New lobby options for Stealth Deliveries in Tiberian Dawn and Automatic Concrete in Dune 2000
• Disable spawn points in a game lobby by right-clicking on the map preview
• Share OpenRA status and game invites on Discord
• More fluid infantry combat after fixing several long-standing combat bugs
• Battlefield zooming is now centered on the mouse cursor
• Red Alert Spies can now reset support powers by infiltrating the structure that grants them
• Servers can be configured to save replays, enabling the creation of community ladders
• 8 new Red Alert single-player missions supported
• AI behaviour and performance improvements
• Dune 2000 gained new new weapon damage calculations that are more faithful to the original game

Something else that's exciting apart from the upcoming support for Tiberian Sun is progress on supporting the assets from the C&C Remastered Collection. The team has hit a new milestone on that, with investigations on it done and work underway to actually integrate the changes needed for it to work that will come to a future release.

As usual their effort to create a modern RTS game engine that can run these classics (and other complete games) is magnificent. I'm a huge fan, as you can probably tell, partly because such RTS games were part of my earlier gaming memories. FOSS game engines like OpenRA are just awesome.

See more on the OpenRA site .

Today along with upgrading Quake II RTX, NVIDIA had another surprise with the release of the new 460.27.04 Beta driver with quite a number of changes. On top of that, there's also a big new release of the LunarG Vulkan SDK for Ray Tracing.

Firstly, the driver update. Version 460.27.04 is out now, tagged as a Beta release of their mainline drivers. This new driver adds support for these extensions:

• VK_KHR_acceleration_structure extension.
• VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline extension.
• VK_KHR_ray_query extension.
• VK_KHR_pipeline_library extension.
• VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations extension.
• VK_NV_fragment_shading_rate_enums
• VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate
• VK_KHR_shader_terminate_invocation
• VK_EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64
• VK_KHR_copy_commands2

That's not all. The driver release itself also brings with it bug fixes and numerous improvements for Linux users including support for RandR rotation and reflection while using an NVIDIA-driven display as a PRIME Display Offload sink and "Reverse PRIME Bypass" which is "an optimization that bypasses the bandwidth overhead of PRIME Render Offload and PRIME Display Offload in conditions where a render offload application is fullscreen, unredirected, and visible only on a given NVIDIA-driven PRIME Display Offload output".

With OpenGL and Vulkan the shader disk cache also saw some upgrades this time around too. The location was moved, and the default size has bumped up to 1024MB, although they mentioned that caches with paths containing "/.nv/ will continue to use the previous default of 128MB "unless the size is manually overridden".

See the full driver notes here .

As for the Vulkan Software Development Kit (SDK), The Khronos Group announced today that LunarG have put out a big upgrade to the SDK with full support for the new Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions, including Validation Layers and integration of upgraded GLSL, HLSL and SPIR-V shader tool chains. With this out, plus the new drivers, the pickup of Ray Tracing might start to increase.

"Shipping API specifications was just the first step in building the developer ecosystem for Vulkan Ray Tracing, we now have tools and samples to truly enable developers to tap into the power of cross-platform ray tracing acceleration," said Daniel Koch, senior graphics system software engineer at NVIDIA and Vulkan Ray Tracing TSG chair at Khronos. "One of the key requests from the developer community was the ability to easily bring DirectX 12 ray tracing (DXR) code to Vulkan. We have achieved that through delivering a carefully designed superset of DXR, and integrating Vulkan Ray Tracing support in the DXC open source HLSL compiler."

The press release also mentions that through "the design of Vulkan Ray Tracing, projects such as vkd3d-Proton will be able to efficiently support layered DXR over Vulkan".

As one of my absolute favourite games from 2019 , Baba is You really is an exceptional puzzle game that really makes you think outside the box and break some rules.

The thing about Baba is that you're pushing around and combining logic blocks, to change the rules of each level to be able to actually solve it. The idea is just brilliant, it works well and it's quite challenging too. Have you never seen it? Check out the trailer below first to get a good idea of what to expect:

Watch video on YouTube.com

While there is a lot of included content, more is always nice - and they just delivered.

With a Beta now available for a built in level editor, along with the ability to load up from a set of featured levels. You can also input a level code from anyone on the internet to play their creation, which is being shared on a new official Twitter account . It's a fantastic addition and allows you to be seriously creative. Due to the block pushing mechanic, along with lots of logic blocks you can make some wild levels.

Try out my own quick creation with level code "F3MH-4LZS". You can see it in the picture below.

Pictured - the Baba is You level editor running on Linux.

I fear for my free time with this addition. Playing with it is really fun. I can only imagine what people with a far more creative mind than me can come up with.

You can try out the level editor right now on itch.io (free until released fully) or on Steam with the "betatest" opt-in Beta for owners. As for where to actually buy it if you don't own it: Humble Store , itch.io and Steam .

A fresh Beta update for the Steam Client has rolled out and it seems Valve have begun modernising more parts of the UI, along with Linux fixes.

For the Steam Library, they've now ripped out the old Properties dialog with one that more closely matches their newer design style found elsewhere like with chat settings and they also fixed displaying the coming soon date for a pre-loaded game.

Here's a quick look at what it looks like (click to enlarge) in the new Beta:

There's a whole new design with a sidebar instead of tabs along the top, with a box for launch arguments now just always visible and a whole page just for Compatibility which is where you will find the Steam Play settings now. Overall, it looks nice and sleek and seems to do the job just fine as before. I'm sure it will annoy someone though, change always does.

Just for Linux - Valve also improved the performance of processing incremental Vulkan shader database updates, they fixed several issues around skipped Vulkan shader processing continuing in the background after a game has started and for NVIDIA GPU users they've currently disabled shader processing due to driver issues that are "being looked into". Hopefully NVIDIA will be able to sort that soon to give us all a better experience.

A new networking option was also added:

P2P connections now may attempt to negotiate a direct connection (punch NAT), if needed, to prevent connections from having very high latency. Added an option in the In-Game settings panel to control when your IP address is shared.

Want to build your own crazy dream-world perspective puzzles? Superliminal now has a level editor available in Beta.

Probably one of my absolute favourite Linux releases this year, Superliminal works on what you see and how you see it. It's all about perception as you move objects around to resize them against what you see, and also line up what you see in the environment to make new objects pop out. It's absolutely wonderful.

When it released on Steam and came with Linux support in November, they allowed the important of any 3D model with the Steam Workshop but that was a small step. Now you can create entire puzzles and levels.

Check out the level editor in action:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Looks like the Steam Workshop is filling up too with lots of objects and levels being created by the community. Given the unique gameplay mechanic, I can't wait to see what elaborate designs people can come up with.

You can buy Superliminal from GOG and Steam .

Continuing to move through their library of classic RPGs starting with the first Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, there's now the 2.6 Beta available for Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition. Eventually this update will also be coming to Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition too.

This is a massive upgrade for the tech behind the game, as well as solving numerous bugs and other issues. To try it, which is currently only on Steam until it's ready for everyone, you can opt into it by going into the Properties -> Beta tab and selecting "road_to_2.6".

What's new for BGII:EE in the 2.6 update? Some highlights:

• Changed to 64 bit executables; 32 bit operating systems are no longer supported
• Hundreds of bug fixes including many spell fixes
• Improved pathfinding
• Improved multiplayer stability
• Added Adventurers of Neverwinter content to all games
• Added French text localization to Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition

Plus plenty of other assorted fixes and improvements to existing features. The full list can be seen here .

Beamdog are looking for feedback on how your testing went if you do try the 2.6 Beta update. They need to know if you can Launch and Save + Load it correctly without issues and they want this tested on Linux too.

You can leave a comment on this Steam announcement post . Once ready, it will be up on the GOG store as usual too.