Here's a short and sweet update on the work for Zink, the upcoming OpenGL on top of Vulkan implementation announced by Collabora which has been progressing steadily.

As a quick refresher: Zink is a Mesa Gallium driver that leverages the existing OpenGL implementation in Mesa to provide hardware accelerated OpenGL when only a Vulkan driver is available. More on the why can be found here .

Developer Mike Blumenkrantz has been hacking away at Zink code lately, after announcing back in November 2020 that Valve jumped in to fund more work on it. In a fresh blog post is up where Blumenkrantz mentions the continued sponsorship from Valve, and as a result Zink can now run with NVIDIA GPUs on Linux with the wording "So now zink+nvidia is a thing.". See it in action below:

Once it's ready, it's going to be extremely interesting to see what becomes of it.

Chess, it's a classic right? So how about a nice game of Chess? I am in fact talking about Lichess, a free and open source browser-based online Chess game.

You might think it funny but until recently, I had somehow never heard of it. It's been around since 2010, starting off a simple hobby project and it has since grown into one of the most popular Chess websites around. Ten years later it's still kept the original promises of remaining free and open source and it just seems to have continually grown. If you believe Alexa rankings, it's in the top 2,000.

With close to 80K players online at the current time of writing, it's easy to see it's popular and it has every right to be. It works perfectly in any browser I tried (including mobile!), it has no adverts, it doesn't require an account, it's totally open source (even the Android build is open source), it has a ton of puzzles, it can teach you to play and so much more. Lichess is not just a browser-based Chess game, it's a huge assortment of different modes and a big community to back it up. Not only all that, you can also sit and watch games too. If that's your thing.

If, like me, you had no idea it was a thing and apparently you also live under a rock, I hope this was helpful for you.

You can play for free online, against friends and a lot more on Lichess.org .

Now that the big stable Wine 6.0 release is out for the Windows compatibility layer, work begins again on another year of pulling in major new features with Wine 6.1 out now.

For newer readers and Linux users here's a refresher - Wine is a compatibility layer built for operating systems like Linux, macOS and BSD. The idea is to allow other platforms to run games and applications only built and supported for Windows. It's also part of what makes up Steam Play Proton . Once a year or so, all the development is bundled into a stable release.

This is a fresh development release which includes these highlights:

• Arabic text shaping.
• More WinRT support in WIDL.
• VKD3D version 1.2 is used for Direct3D 12.
• Support for Rosetta's memory layout on M1 Macs.
• Support for Thumb-2 mode on ARM.
• Various bug fixes.

They also noted 37 bug fixes including problems solved for the likes of: Banished, The Witcher 3, Sniper Elite V2, Batman: Arkham Origins, The Sims 3, Battle.net, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and others.

See the release announcement here .

Enlarge / Ctrl IQ provided us with this diagram of its proposed technology stack. (Thankfully, spelling correction is not one of the core services Ctrl IQ offers.) (credit: Ctrl IQ)

Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of the now-defunct CentOS Linux distribution, has founded a new startup company called Ctrl IQ which will serve in part as a sponsoring company for the upcoming Rocky Linux distribution.

Rocky Linux is to be a benefactor of Ctrl IQ's revenue, not its source—the company describes itself in its announcement as the suppliers of a "full technology stack integrating key capabilities of enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and high-performance computing."

About Rocky Linux

If you've been hiding under a Linux rock for the last few months, CentOS Linux was the most widely-known and used clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Kurtzer co-founded CentOS Linux in 2004 with mentor Rocky McGaugh, and it operated independently for ten years until being acquired by Red Hat in 2014. When Red Hat killed off CentOS Linux in a highly controversial December 2020 announcement, Kurtzer immediately announced his intention to re-create CentOS with a new distribution, named after his deceased mentor.

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Epic Games don't support Linux with their store, so the community continues building around it with the Heroic Games Launcher that can run plenty of games from the Epic Store. It does so thanks to the power of the Wine compatibility layer, giving you as many options as possible to keep on gaming on Linux no matter where your games are from. A great free and open source project.

New features added in recently released versions include: the ability to repair installed games, notifications support, a tray icon with the ability to close to the tray, it will remember the filters used, a warning on closing when downloading, a download time estimate on game pages, styling tweaks for light and dark themes, new options to enable extra features like MangoHud, the ability to add launch options and more.

Here's what it currently looks like:

The amount of improvements and overall work going into the Heroic Games Launcher really is impressive. It seems to be quite smooth, and makes using the EGS mostly painless.

Note: while it currently supports the Epic Games Store thanks to using another bit of open source named Legendary , they do have plans to expand to cover other stores too so that it can become an all-in-one solution for gaming on Linux. So, eventually it might be a bit like Lutris.

Find it up on GitHub .

For regular Linux gamers, Lutris is pretty much a household name by now. For those that aren't - Lutris is a game manager allowing you to sort through all your games from various stores.

Not only that it also allows you to manage emulators for your favourite classics, Windows games using the Wine compatibility layer and quite a lot more. It's very useful and they continue polishing up the overall experience after a huge update went out late last year.

The latest v0.5.8.3 is a small one which has these fixes:

• Really fix popovers not showing on Wayland without making them non-modal
• Prevent GStreamer based configuration from being applied in incompatible
  wine builds.
• Fix crash when wine runner accesses DXVK versions before they are
  uploaded.
• Prevent init dialog from being closed while it downloads the runtime.

The project itself has been going through some changes recently too, and not everyone has been happy about it from all the discussions I've seen. Lutris is an open source project available on GitHub and the team ended up closing both issue reporting and pull requests for normal users last year, as explained in a Patreon post , to allow them time to sort through everything due to both the amount of requests coming in and patches being offered that didn't align with their goals and all sorts of reasoning.

Now though it's back open as of a few days ago , although contributors who want to submit patches and pull requests now need to adhere to a Contributor License Agreement which can be seen here . Seems pretty reasonable, mostly reminding people to get their code tested properly.

Inspired by the likes of Dwarf Fortress, Civilization, SimCity and more we have the free and open source Arcane Fortune which continues to expanding in features. Played in your favourite command-line terminal application, or just use the pre-made launch script it comes with that sorts out everything for you.

Seems like it has some genuinely great ideas, and considering how ridiculously popular Dwarf Fortress is, we know that shiny graphics are not a key to success. Perhaps Arcane Fortune will be able to carve out a nice niche.

Pictured - the beginnings of a new civilization in Arcane Fortune.

What's new in Arcane Fortune 0.3.0:

• Nobility - these families may join your empire and offer some advantages based on their personality and inclinations. For example, in diplomacy or war. Their opinions of you may change, however, depending on how you govern your empire.
• A trade system to exchange resources and negotiate defensive pacts with other empires.
• Kingdoms - sub-empires that may join your empire. Unlike noble houses, they retain more autonomy, but will share all the diplomatic relations (war/peace) with the parent empire.
• Assassination - useful both to explore other cities (they can scale walls) and to rid the world of the presence of unwanted leaders and nobles.
• Screen reader mode -- there is a page on the wiki which has more information about this mode and its features. Mostly the benefit of this mode is that the text cursor will be placed in relevant parts of the screen and some text can be tabbed through to help cue screen readers. There are also other small changes I've made based on feedback I've received.
• Changes to mouse controls making it easier to pan the map while moving a unit (thanks to lecom & Tchey on the forums for specific advice on this).
• Miscellaneous bugfixes (and likely new bugs to replace them!)
• Performance optimizations -- some of which might not be noticable since the nobility might slow the game down nearly as much as I've managed to speed it up.

The idea is certainly interesting, and the mash-up of ideas already makes the early game quite engrossing. The key is going to be in the AI, much like it is for Dwarf Fortress. Arcane Fortune is going to need to keep players engaged with encounters, and other civilizations.

You can download free on the official site and GitHub .

LDtk (prev called LEd) is an in-development free and open source level editor, one that's modern and designed to be as user-friendly as possible designed by a former dev on Dead Cells.

A big release just went out out with the 0.7.0 version, which the developer explained has "many important changes to make LDtk production ready and future proof . These changes will allow better support for large projects, better API creation and maintenance, and smoother user adoption".

Some of the bigger changes in this release include a new home layout, which is designed to focus on "what's really important". You can also now enable LDtk to separate level files to have one main project JSON file, and then one per level which sounds like a good features to prevent ending up with unreadably long files.

For game developers and anyone tinkering with level design, you can also now avoid JSON with an option to export all supported layers as PNG images. That might even be useful for just quickly showing off your work to someone. Speaking of images, each level can now have a custom background image too.

Backups! That's now a thing too, with LDtk making backups of your project when saving in case of issues.

Making LDtk even more useful, you can now have an LDtk project supported and loaded up with the open source and cross-platform HaxeFlixel thanks to a new official LDtk Haxe API. There's more to the release than all that, so be sure to check over the full changelog.

You can download LDtk 0.7.0 from GitHub , for Linux select the Ubuntu download which gives an AppImage that should run fine across any distribution. Also read more about it on the official site .

Tomorrow, January 23 there's going to be an online GodotCon that's going live on YouTube. This is a chance for anyone interested to learn more about the free and open source game engine Godot Engine.

Interestingly, it won't be live. The talks are pre-recorded according to the announcement. However, to help with that and so you can chat with the Godot team and other users and developers using Godot, the team has now set up their own dedicated social chat area using Rocket.chat.

Schedules available as a PDF and Google Sheet . Looking over it, some of the talks are quite exciting! Lead developer Juan Linietsky for example, will be giving a talk on the new rendering coming with Vulkan in Godot 4.

It's happening between 8:45 UTC to 16:00 UTC. You can watch it right here! The livestream is embed below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

See the full announcement here .