2020 was a really weird year with lots of surprises. Some good, plenty bad and Linux seeing a fresh port to the Nintendo 64 was also a thing that happened.

One we missed from late December while we took a short holiday: developer Lauri Kasanen put out an RFC (request for comments) noting that there have been other attempts in the past but this is not based on either. Kasanen also noted it's being sent as an RFC as they're "not sure if it's useful to have this merged" considering it's an "Old, niche, and limited platform". Fun for a day project perhaps? Not particularly useful for many uses though considering the power.

Answering the inevitable "but why?" questioning, Kasanen said "Having Linux available makes it easier to port emulators and fb or console games. www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Nintendo_64 can be edited to no longer say "vaporware". Most importantly, because I can".

This is not a special full distribution either, what they're providing simply allows the Linux Kernel to boot up on it and you can find their bootloader up on GitHub . Sounds like it's a bit rough too going by the readme . It's always amazing to see projects like this, even as just the for-fun part of hacking away at tech. The answer to "but will it run Linux?" is almost always a Yes if someone spends a few minutes looking into how.

It seems Feral Interactive have a few less ports available to buy supported for Linux and macOS to start off 2021 with as both Mad Max and Shadow of Mordor have been delisted for both platforms.

The change happened just before the end of 2020 on both titles, as seen on SteamDB ( #1 - #2 ). On the macOS side, they lost more as a few Lego titles also vanished from mentioning macOS. Why? They all have a common publisher - Warner. Confirming this to me on Twitter , Feral Interactive stated "Hi, these games have been removed from sale on macOS/Linux due to their licenses expiring.".

So what does this actually mean? The Linux ports still exist, still work as expected and anyone who buys them on Steam would still get them too as they're attached to standard purchases. Going forward though, they're not being advertised or supported.

A shame but actually somewhat common. We see this with racing games, football games, sometimes music causes issues and more where licenses are often for a specific time period. In this case it's a bit more unique that it only affected the external ports.

Ethan Lee , the developer responsible for the XNA reimplementation FNA along with around 50 game ports to Linux and macOS has announced they're stopping future macOS ports with a big update to a bunch of existing games.

Don't know who they are? You've probably played plenty of games either ported by them or running on tech created / maintained by them including: Streets of Rage 4, Superliminal, FEZ, Transistor, Rogue Legacy, Salt and Sanctuary, Owlboy and loads more .

Writing on their IcculusFinger profile page, Lee wrote a few paragraphs about a little history before diving into the current state of Apple products mentioning "I've put it off for as long as I could, but after looking at Apple's trajectory vs. my own infrastructure for Mac support, it's looking like 2021 is the year that I have to say goodbye to the Mac as a primary target.".

The good news for Linux fans? According to Lee, "New games, however, will primarily be Linux (and Windows, if applicable) only.". It also seems quite interesting that console releases have been opening up the gates for Linux ports according to Lee too. This is also backwards to what we often see with Linux support removed (hi Rocket League), so it feels a little odd.

As for existing ports? Lee went ahead and updated over 30 of them with the latest tech for both macOS and Linux, so they should all continue running smoothly.

Hopefully Ethan Lee will have many more Linux ports planned for 2021 and beyond.

I also found the bit about drivers interesting, with how they can grab a RenderDoc capture and post it to the Linux Mesa driver issue tracker when they have a driver problem and sometimes get a response and a fix in the same day - shows how awesome open source can be, compared with Apple "reporting bugs to Apple when you're not rich is like pulling teeth with boxing gloves".

On top of all that? The latest releases of FNA , FNA3D and FAudio are out now.

While Steam as a gaming platform is facing ever increasing competition, Valve likely aren't too worried given how much Steam has been growing over 2020 and into 2021.

After setting a new concurrent user record of 24,804,148 in December 2020, that was once again smashed on January 2, 2021 with 25,415,080 user accounts online but only 7.4 million were actually in-game (thanks SteamDB ). It's not exactly a surprise, with multiple user records for both Steam and games being broken through 2020 with many more staying at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The top dog on Steam remains as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Valve's first-person shooter originally released back in 2012. It obviously helps that it went free to play back in late 2018 which helped keep its popularity and since the pandemic really hit, the numbers for CS:GO have repeatedly hit new highs.

It will definitely be interesting to see how the Steam playerbase evolves through 2021, especially if we see Valve release one of those secret projects they teased before. Hopefully one that's more available to everyone and not a VR-only title like Half-Life: Alyx, since the cost of VR is still rather high. Considering they're a private company though, they can do and work on whatever they want.

Now that the Atari VCS is out in the wild for plenty of IndieGoGo backers, we've seen plenty of reports of how it works and one GamingOnLinux reader gave us plenty of info.

Currently, it seems like the whole thing is still in something of a Beta stage. The software seems a little on the buggy side, and there's still not much in the way of games available for it. However, it actually does sound like a reasonable good little device - which I am sure will surprise plenty of naysayers.

User slaapliedje in our Forum has been going through details including how, yes, you really can load a plain Linux distribution up with Debian Buster tested working (once you do a couple small tweaks). All very interesting but even more so is how their own Atari World OS is clearly a normal Linux distribution with a fancy console interface on top.

Pictured: Atari 5200, 7800 and the Jaguar+CD with the Atari VCS - credit to slaapliedje

Very interesting to know just how close the VCS really is to a traditional Linux box. I thought they would have customized it more, but they appear to have stuck to what they originally said about keeping it reasonably open to the point of not even protecting the games you get on it. In an email to us, user slaapliedje mentioned how they've been able to move games on their Atari VCS over to an external drive, and then launch those games on their normal Linux desktop.

You can connect another drive to it (I am currently using a Samsung USB 3 SSD drive) and hit ESC on a keyboard, boot to USB. I installed Debian on it, which you have to use a distro that has signed keys for secure boot (so my attempt with GamerOS failed). But with the drive connected, you can copy the games from within AtariOS to other storage.

Keeping in mind this is the backer release, not the retail release, they still have time to fix up lingering issues.

The end of 2020 will shortly be upon us, so we wanted to offer our best wishes to all of our readers. It's been quite a year hasn't it? One to remember, or one to try hard to forget? A bit of both when it comes to the world I think. COVID19 sure did a number on the human race but there is a light at the end of the tunnel for us all it seems.

Through this year we've seen a lot of fun things for Linux gaming including tons of exceptional indie games being released. Certainly hasn't been a dull year! You can see some of my own favourites right here. We also had Vulkan Ray Tracing officially released - finally, that is quite exciting for the future of games. Valve are also continuing to put resources into many different parts of Linux and Linux gaming through Steam Play , driver upgrades, the newer container system and lots more that continue to mature. There's so many moving parts to keep everything exciting that we can't wait to see evolve even further through 2021.

For us here, it's been another knockout year. Just like with 2019, we've seen 2020 be our busiest year on record. Hopefully that trend continues for us and Linux overall, like with the Linux share on Steam continuing to see a slow gradual trend upwards .

If you need help with Linux and / or gaming - remember to hop on over to our Forum . It's a much better place than chat rooms like Discord, Telegram and others because search engines index the forum, and solved issues can be found by others!

As of now, we shall be taking our winter break. So we shall be away and resting between December 24 - 27 and we shall be away again likely December 31 - January 1. Time to catch up on some of our own games and have that all important family time.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year from GamingOnLinux. Here's to hopefully 2021 not being terrible. Stay warm, stay safe and all the best from us.

If you wish to support us you can find out how here .

The Wine compatibility layer for running Windows apps and games on Linux currently needs X11 or XWayland but that looks like it could change with a new Wayland driver for Wine.

Announced by the open source consulting firm Collabora, one of the companies that works with Valve, their Alexandros Frantzis wrote in a blog post about the work. Frantzis mentions how the current setup of X11/XWayland is "a source of complexity and possible inefficiencies. It would be ideal if Wine could talk directly to Wayland to enable a leaner and more efficient stack on modern systems" and so that's the aim here.

Currently it works but it is limited. It supports OpenGL, a single display, mouse cursor, QWERTY only for keyboard input, window resizing and more but there's plenty still to be done like: minimising support, different keyboard layouts, Vulkan (there's another project for that they hope to work with) and so on.

Here's a video of it in action, keeping in mind it's far from finished:

Watch video on YouTube.com

There's now an RFC (Request for comments) submitted to the Wine project to get things moving.

A good start and very promising but far from production ready. Either way, with most distributions likely to move to Wayland over the next few years the work needs to be done and ready so it's good to see it moving.

For newer Linux users or people looking to switch, it can be a minefield to try and find accurate and up to date info on what Linux distro to game with. Here to help. What is the best Linux distribution for gaming? It's actually not a tough question.

With how far Linux has come in only the last 2 years, you can play a seriously large amount of games now. Sadly, there's some (quite a lot actually) places out there that seem to slap a new date on old crusty articles and give really bad Linux gaming advice. Most of the people writing these types of articles elsewhere clearly don't use Linux - I do, and I have done for around 15 years now.

Let's start off with what not to do shall we? First off, don't bother with SteamOS from Valve. Currently, it's out of date and has been for some time now. It hasn't been properly updated since 2019! Valve are not working on it but they might return one day. Anyone suggesting it likely has no idea what they're talking about and any website listing it is junk.

Next: Ubuntu GamePack or any "specialized" Linux gaming distribution. You can throw almost all of those types in the trash. They really don't do anything normal Linux distributions don't do already and they can often introduce their own special bugs. I consider them like the old discs you would find in the bargain bin in a local PC store. You really don't need them, don't waste your precious time.

So what to actually install at the end of 2020 and in 2021 to game on Linux?

The answer is actually really simple, it's not a long list and you have two really easy choices: Ubuntu or Pop!_OS .

Pictured - Ubuntu 20.04 running Steam on my laptop.

Why those? Well, Ubuntu is almost always the most widely used Linux distribution by normal desktop users. On Steam, it has always been on top as the most used distribution by gamers - there's an obvious reason for that too — it works. It's what I always recommend to newer users because it's like a warm cuddly Linux blanket. It's easy to find answers for, and it's not complicated to use. As for Pop!_OS, it's based on Ubuntu and since System76 sell desktop Linux hardware with it you can be sure it's also well tested.

Even our own GamingOnLinux livestreamer uses plain Ubuntu! Ps. follow us on Twitch .

If you do want a specialized distribution, perhaps for a console like experience that SteamOS was supposed to offer then take a look at GamerOS . Despite the naff naming, it offers up a good big-screen experience for Steam.

Apart from that, everything you need can be easily installed directly on Ubuntu. Steam for the biggest library of Linux compatible games and for the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer for playing Windows games on Linux, Minigalaxy for GOG games, RetroArch for emulation, itch.io has their own client too for lots of indie gems and the Lutris game manager for everything else. It's really easy to get going too, on Ubuntu you just need to open up Ubuntu Software and search for Steam and it does it for you.

Don't make it complicated for yourself. I say all this as an Arch Linux user, which is a bit of a long-running joke about you always knowing who an Arch user is as they will tell you - and oops, I just fell into it. I'm saying it for good reason though! I have been through Arch Linux, Manjaro, Fedora and more and I still consider Ubuntu to be the number 1 Linux distribution for getting going quickly especially if you're not too comfortable yet.

Keep in mind that just as macOS and Windows do have plenty of issues, so does Linux. Don't expect perfection, be prepared to learn a bit and do things differently. If you need help, we have plenty of resources available for you. We have: a Forum , a Discord , IRC , Matrix , Telegram . You will find answers across there, with the Forum being the best way because search engines pick up answers from forums and do not from social chats like Discord.

Lastly - have fun and keep on gaming on Linux .

Giving you much more control over what news you see from games, applications and curators on Steam - Valve officially launches the Steam News Hub .

This new system is what they've had up in Beta for quite some months now since March , which they invited us in to participate back in September when they hooked up news feeds for curators like us. Today, the Steam News Hub has entirely replaced the old and basic news feed list.

With it you gain access to a much more personalised feed, along with various options to tweak it to your liking. It's quite useful but once you start following lots of games it can be easily overwhelming. Thankfully, there's also ways to mute specific games and mute different types of announcements. It's not just news though, it's also various upcoming events all under one roof along with official Steam announcements.

Pictured - an example of my own feed taken today.

Find the new Steam News Hub here and be sure to follow us to get our latest recommendations and see all our news snippets related to Steam gaming.