Looking back on my 2024 Linux Gaming in 2025

/

Hi all! I’m sure it’s been a while since I’ve posted. With new jobs and undocumented side projects comes a loss of a track of time it seems. Nevertheless, I’d like to take a look back on the games I played in 2024 on Linux.

Looking back at 2024, it seems I picked up V Rising quite a bit this year. Sharing a server, hosted by a friend of mine, was quite fun. We’d all build up our castles and sack bosses together, as well as get minions and the like. The game ran flawlessly on Linux over the recommended Proton for most of that summer onwards and we played our hearts out.

Core Keeper and No Man’s Sky have been flawlessly working for my on Linux for years, through Proton, so I have no complaints there…outside of the fact that Core Keeper doesn’t optimize Unity. One of the last Unity holdouts, I think Core Keeper will run on it forever despite being a mostly 2D game. The backend chomps at your Steam Deck’s battery life despite you only seeing whats on your screen as you progress in the game. It only gets about 3-4 hours on a good day with the Steam Deck OLED due bloated Unity.

Streets of Rogue 1 has been an interesting story, as running it with the Linux Runtime seems to have you needing to tap around the main menu a bit with your fingers before it recognizes the Steam Deck controls, or Xbox controllers for that matter. When running it through Proton Experimental? Runs fine, but say goodbye to the saves you had in the Linux Runtime. I’ve only recently started playing the Demo for Streets of Rogue 2, and the developer only recently added controller support, so I’ll make a ProtonDB post in the future if the next game needs any tweaks.Steam Machine.

Palworld barely ran when it first came out, due to needing some optimizations. Nowadays, I tend to use the latest Proton-GE for Palworld to be on the safe side, in case any updates come through that break compatibility in some way. I’ve been playing Palworld on and off for probably the past month or so as I try to level up enough in my singleplayer save to access the new content without worries. Great game all around, and screw Nintendo for suing them.

Another game I’ve played a bit in 2024, which likely wasn’t tracked by Steam, was the Ship of Harkinian take on the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. I’ll link to their website here, but wow it’s refreshing being able to play OoT on my Steam Deck and living room Steam Machine. It’s been running excellent.

I’ll be selling the Steam Machine build soon, and replacing it with a Minisforum hx99g.. It will still be running Bazzite, unless the previous audio issues pop back up, in which case it will likely run ChimeraOS. I don’t have any new images of the Steam Machine build, so here’s a previous one. The cables are only slightly more organized, and I bet custom-length sleeved cables would have likely helped immensely with the heat management in here, as the GPU keeps dumping heat into the CPU if ran for longer than four hours on high settings.

Throughout 2025, despite my A.D.D. and prone to getting distracted often in my free time, I’ll try to finish the other projects I’ve half-started. I’d like to finish my FPGA FunnyPlaying GameBoy Color build, 3D print some things with the AnkerMake3D from years back that I’ve just now setup, and eventually finish the Intel Meme Machine build when I can find a case that doesn’t use shitty proprietary fan controllers.

In other news, here’s some things I’ve been reading, watching or getting involved with this year:

Steam Machine after-build Update

/

Hi there again! Following up with the prior blog post here. I have a few fixes for my Steam Machine build that I may have experienced some anomalies with after initially building it and installing ChimeraOS that I’ll address here. Also, the Steam Deck might get Nix package support soon, so I’ll give some thoughts on that here.

Regarding that Steam Machine that I mentioned finally building in my last update here, I've made a few fixes that seemed to be necessary.  
After the initial install, it seemed the system was experiencing some lag.

I went ahead ahead and updated the ASRock Fatality AB350 board from P6.60 to P7.00, then finished by updating to the recent P7.40 release found here. I utilized ASRock’s quick flash utility, which doesn’t require an OS to flash the BIOS, which was nice.

After updating the BIOS, and then redoing the Battle.net install utilizing Proton instead of running it through Lutris, since the steam shortcut can no longer be made utilizing that method in ChimeraOS, Diablo IV is now showing up in the Steam Big Picture mode.

In other news, I’ve been following along with a recent Nix comment made here. This gives me hope that we’ll be seeing a dedicated “/nix” directory added by default to SteamOS soon by the developers.

My Steam Deck "deckscript" has been sitting idle for a little while, due to constant changes in SteamOS from Valve wiping out any installed pacman packages. I've expanded more info on how I plan to migrate the bash script to one that mainly installs nix packages and flatpaks, plus grabbing enhancements, in the pull request here.


Here's a short little recording below, of what happened when I tried to set up the Nix package manager on the Deck via the terminal.
I'll be able to make more progress on this once that new SteamOS release comes out and gives us a predefined `/nix` directory in the future.

I’ll also be working on migrating my Fedora post-install script and the same with my Pop!_OS script over to Ansible roles or playbooks in the future, as I’m getting back on the train that was slowly learning about that. I’m mainly learning about it at night, so it may be a little while. Pull request for that is linked here.

I’ve also gone ahead and set up Syncthing between my ChimeraOS Steam Machine (that I renamed to Illyria) as well as my desktop and gabegear-named Steam Deck. This helps me sync Yuzu save data and keys, as well as aids me in creating a serverless cloud-sync between devices for Steam games that don’t support cloud saves. More info on getting setup is available at their site here.

Finishing the Steam Machine

/

Heyo! I finally got all the parts together, this past weekend, to finish my older-hardware living room build for TV gaming. Click here for a full breakdown of all the parts.

Humble beginnings. This process took probably around three months to get all the parts somewhat-affordably used or free from friends.

…I might eventually end up getting custom-sleeved cables though, as this spaghetti monster of power cables is quite difficult to keep neat in this tiny case, for airflow reasons. Sadly, the CPU is currently hovering around 60-80c depending on the game that’s being played, due to its Noctua cooler being right under the PSU fan.

After building it, while quite inebriated late at night, I was honestly surprised to see everything fire up without blowing up hahaha. I’m using the vizio soundbar + subwoofer for sound through the TV and have the TV connected to it via HDMI to the AMD card. The internet is over ethernet, as I don’t want to futz with wifi attenuation issues due to the solid wall between the router and it.

I burned ChimeraOS to a USB, chose it as the boot device, and let the automated installer do its thing. On first boot-up, I signed into Steam and started installing games! My favorite part is the webUI that you can use for easily installing other games via flatpak/GOG or retro roms. I’ll add some photos of that below.