There is a new player in the operating systems arena from KORA Systems Inc. Called KORA, this operating system is the first bottom-up OS designed specifically for AI PCs, enabling agentic workflows. It is one of the first concepts where a system is so heavily customized that AI workflows are native to it. The company developed this customized operating system on top of NixOS, using it as a foundational layer.

The customization includes the development of what are called neural workspaces and file systems, which replace traditional folders and desktop apps. While these traditional elements are still present, the workflow on KORA OS is organized around intent, context, and memory. Each workspace is divided based on user intent, and the OS manages the files accordingly. Security is robust, as KORA implements each workspace within a secured sandbox for applications and agents, with separate permissions. The memory and context of the workflow remain on the user's desktop, never leaving the machine. Features like semantic search and email are natively integrated, allowing you to search across your entire OS or email to find what you need.

The PS5 jailbreaking scene keeps making progress almost on a weekly basis. A jailbroken PS5 can now download Windows games from a Steam library and run them locally on the console, with no PC streaming involved. The tool behind it is Playden for PS5, an alpha launcher from developer leolobato that adapts the macOS version of Playden. It lets users sign in to Steam with a QR code, browse their library, download games, and launch each one from its own tile on the PS5 home screen. Under the hood, it relies on prospero-win, a PS5 port of Wine, with DXVK handling the graphics side. Unlike Linux on the PS5, there's no separate OS to boot into, since Playden runs as a regular PS5 app.

Development is moving quickly. The first public release landed on October 12, and version 0.5.0 added Direct3D 12 support through VKD3D-Proton, which, according to the release notes, opens the door to games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Deep Rock Galactic. Version 0.6.0 followed this week with USB and FTP game imports, 120 Hz output and a 4K resolution option. Of course, this is still very much experimental. The compatibility list has a decent number of working games, mostly older and indie titles such as Half-Life 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and Vampire Survivors, but plenty of others crash or refuse to start.

Valve has been tweaking and adjusting Steam's Big Picture and handheld client UI since the launch of the Steam Deck, and now, with the Steam Machine making its way to the hands of gamers, it seems as though the gaming giant is reevaluating its UI once again. This time, a new Steam beta has launched, featuring Big Art Mode, a new mode that more or less mimics the functionality of a third-party community-driven tool called DeckyLoader.

The new Big Art Mode can be optionally enabled, and it basically expands game thumbnails to a large vertical shelf at the bottom of the display, with the highlighted game's artwork scaled to fill in the background, instead of showing the customary grid with games in their shelves. This new Big Art Mode is also accompanied by several other new customization features, including new custom screensavers, and a new optional personal calendar on the Home screen.

Just on time, according to the recent launch date announcement, Fedora 44 has officially left the gates, with both Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 and Fedora Linux 44 Workstation (with Gnome), seeing significant user-facing and behind-the-scenes updates. The biggest changes come by way of the addition of Gnome 50 on Fedora Workstation and KDE Plasma 6.6 on Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44. Both versions can now be downloaded from the Fedora website, and existing users can perform in-place upgrades following the official guidance. The full Fedora Linux 44 patch notes are available here.

While Gnome 50 and KDE 6.6 both feature neat UI tweaks, bug fixes, and accessibility and performance improvements, Fedora Linux itself also saw a few notable changes. For starters, Fedora 44 now includes the NTSync driver, and it is enabled by default, enabling some impressive performance and stability improvements in certain games and with the most recent Proton and Wine versions, as we covered previously. All Fedora KDE versions will now all use the same out-of-the-box experience, making initial setup feel more familiar and enabling hardware vendors to sell hardware with Fedora KDE pre-installed with a proper user greeting and setup wizard. Fedora Atomic Desktops have also dropped FUSE2 library support, which may be of import to some users using AppImage applications. Both Fedora Workstation and Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop use Wayland by default, but in the case of Fedora Workstation, Gnome 50 no longer includes any code for X11 compatibility. X11 can still be installed, but it is not officially supported and may result in issues. Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 also switches to KDE Plasma Login Manager by default, which may be unfamiliar to some users and may actually have fewer features.

It seems as though Valve's Proton 11 is rolling out in a new Beta update, and along with it, all of the improvements that come from the recent updates introduced in Wine 11, as pointed out by Brad Lynch on X. The changelog for Proton shows the inclusion of Proton 11 Beta, which would be based on Wine 11. Wine 11 made waves in mid-March when it launched, specifically because it added NTSync kernel driver support to the translation layer, introducing theoretical massive performance improvements to Linux games.

NTSync theoretically reduces the overhead when running Windows games via Proton by moving Windows NT library emulation into a kernel driver. While it isn't going to improve frame rates across the board, it has been reported to improve compatibility where esync and fsync were lacking, and it may reduce CPU overhead. This has the end result of making some games feel smoother, thanks to improving frame rate consistency and increasing 1% and 0.1% low frame rates.

As we enter a new month, Steam's Hardware and Software Survey data has been processed, providing us with a clearer view of the overall gaming market that uses Steam platform. Today, the most notable change in the Steam Survey is the increase in Linux gamers, who have moved from their historically low single-digit market share to mid-single digits. As of March, Linux-based operating systems were running Steam on 5.33% of all polled systems. This represents an impressive 3.10% increase over February's data, which showed a dip in Linux market share from January's 3.5%. Fortunately, the numbers have now been revised upwards, marking a significant improvement for the community that has been steadily implementing improvements and making Linux-based gaming more accessible to everyone.

What might not be surprising is that a large portion of those 5.33% Linux installations run on Valve's customized SteamOS operating system. With a 24.48% share, the use of SteamOS grew by 0.65% last month alone, while other Linux distributions also contributed significantly. Other Windows alternatives like macOS are gaining momentum as well, with Apple seeing a 1.19% month-over-month increase to 2.35%. Although Linux now holds more than twice the market share of macOS, its growth within the Steam install base is a significant change, nearly doubling in just a month. Perhaps these alternative operating systems are now attracting enough attention from big game studios to encourage them to release native ports instead of relying on translation tools like Wine/Proton.

Unity game engine is finally getting native integration and support across more gaming platforms, according to James Stone. What we are getting now is the first actual native port instead of the emulation we've been dealing with until now. Game developers using the Unity engine have been shipping Unity games on Steam. However, Steam was never an official Unity platform, and developers used Steamworks in the past to make it happen. That's now a thing of the past, as Unity is officially supporting one of the biggest gaming platforms in existence. Additionally, we are seeing ports to Steam Deck and Steam Machine, which run on the SteamOS operating system; these previously relied on the Wine and Proton translation layers to transform Unity's API calls and make Unity games work.

Now Unity is enhancing its Linux integration further to create native runtimes and reduce reliance on the translation layers that have been doing the heavy lifting. This is a positive sign for the growing recognition of the Linux gaming world, which has been steadily rising as gamers encounter Windows-related issues. Adding native integration with the Valve ecosystem is helping Unity extend its influence across the gaming community, alongside Valve hardware such as the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and the Steam Controller. For more details and updates from Unity at GDC 2026, check out the video below.

KDE released Plasma 6.6 today, the latest version of the popular Linux desktop environment, also used in Steam Deck desktop mode. The biggest addition is the new Plasma Login Manager, a potential replacement for Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM) in distributions like Fedora Linux 44, CachyOS, and EndeavourOS. Note that it requires systemd, so it won't work on systemd-free distros. The Spectacle screenshot tool gains OCR capabilities, and a new USB portal lets sandboxed apps request access to USB devices. Users running Linux kernel 6.19 can now adjust the visual sharpness of all on-screen content. You can also turn your current Plasma setup into a global theme. KDE Plasma 6.6 adds XRandr emulation in KWin for better XWayland app compatibility, per-DRM-plane color pipeline support, and custom screen mode support in Wayland sessions. Screen mirroring is improved, and a new "Slow Keys" accessibility feature has been added.

Windows games with HDR running through Wine or Proton also get a color accuracy workaround. Wi-Fi passwords can now be stored in a root-owned location for better security, and a QR code in the Networks widget makes connecting easier. Battery handling on laptops is improved, ambient light sensor support enables automatic brightness adjustment, and colorblind user support has been enhanced. Windows can now be selectively excluded from screen recordings.

Linux gaming has quietly reached a new inflection point. A recent Boiling Steam summary of crowd-sourced ProtonDB compatibility reports shows that about 89.7% of Windows titles now at least launch on Linux systems. The numbers are spread into a few categories. Games rated "Platinum," meaning they install, run, and save on Linux without requiring user intervention, made up 42% of new releases tracked in October, up from 29% the previous year. At the same time the share of titles that refuse to launch, the so-called "Borked" cohort, has fallen to roughly 3.8%, a group that still includes deliberate blocks such as March of Giants, which explicitly detects Wine and Proton and exits to the desktop.

The most persistent obstacles are not obscure indies but anti-cheat middleware and contractual choices. Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye, and similar systems remain the primary gatekeepers for online multiplayer, and enabling them on Linux is often more a negotiation than a mere technical flip of a switch. When a studio approves Steam Deck support, desktop Linux compatibility frequently follows within a single build cycle, suggesting the code paths are already unified and only sign-off is pending.

Valve released its latest May 2025 Steam Survey results, and Linux gaming is on the rise. According to Valve, the usage of Linux kernel-based operating systems among Steam users increased by 0.42% to reach 2.69%, marking one of the highest levels the platform has seen. Windows remains the dominant operating system, at 95.45%, with macOS holding 1.85%. However, Linux's growth is significant for open-source enthusiasts. Given the continued expansion of Steam's user base, the absolute number of Linux gamers is likely at an all-time high now, with hopes of continued growth. The infamous year of Linux on the desktop is actually this year's Linux on handheld. In May 2023, Linux accounted for just 1.47 percent of Steam users, rising to 2.32 percent in May 2024 before this latest increase.

This upward trend has been driven in large part by Valve's SteamOS, which is based on Arch Linux and powers the popular Steam Deck handheld console. As more people adopt the Steam Deck and install SteamOS on desktop machines, the Linux gaming community on Steam continues to grow steadily. SteamOS is also expanding to more handheld devices, and more companies are launching and experimenting with handhelds using other Linux distributions. Improvements at the kernel level and enhanced driver support from AMD and Intel have also contributed to this surge. Besides more driver optimization, the Wine-based compatibility layer, Proton, has undergone numerous updates to enhance performance and stability, often achieving comparability with and sometimes outperforming Windows.

While Apple laptops have never really been the first stop for PC gaming, Linux is slowly shaping up to be an excellent gaming platform, largely thanks to open-source development efforts as well as work from the likes of AMD and NVIDIA, who have both put significant work into their respective Linux drivers in recent years. This makes efforts like the Asahi Linux Project all the more intriguing. Asahi Linux is a project that aims to bring Linux to Apple Silicon Macs—a task that has proven rather difficult, thanks to the intricacies of developing a bespoke GPU driver for Apple's custom ARM GPUs. In a recent blog post, the graphics developer behind the Asahi Linux Project showed off a number of AAA games, albeit older titles, running on an Apple M1 processor on the latest Asahi Linux build.

To run the games on Apple Silicon, Asahi Linux uses a "game playing toolkit," which relies on a number of custom graphics drivers and emulators, including tools from Valve's Proton translation layer, which ironically was also the foundation for Apple's Game Porting Toolkit. Asahi uses FEX to emulate x86 on ARM, Wine as a translation layer for Windows apps, and DXVK and vkd3d-proton for DirectX-Vulkan translation. In the blog post, the Asahi developer claims that the alpha is capable of running games like Control, The Witcher 3, and Cyberpunk 2077 at playable frame rates. Unfortunately, 60 FPS is not yet attainable in the majority of new high-fidelity games, there are a number of indie titles that run quite well on Asahi Linux, including Hollow Knight, Ghostrunner, and Portal 2.

In a notable step forward for the RISC-V architecture, the Box86 and Box64 emulator developers have successfully run The Witcher 3 on a RISC-V processor. While performance is far from optimal, even on a Milk-V Pioneer with a 64-core processor and an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics card, the achievement is remarkable.

RISC-V, a free and open-source instruction set architecture, is still in its early stages compared to established platforms like ARM and x86/x64. Despite this, the Box86/Box64 team, known for creating environments to run Windows programs on Linux, has demonstrated that AAA gaming is possible on RISC-V hardware. To accomplish this feat, the developers utilized Box64 with Wine and DXVK to emulate the necessary instructions.

A couple of days ago, Valve has released the first stable version of Proton 9.0, a compatibility layer for Windows games to run on Linux-based operating systems. The newest stable version is built on Wine 9.0 and brings all the improvements and fixes seen in earlier beta releases.

According to the release notes, the new Proton 9.0-1 enables some games that were previously playable only with Proton Experimental, including Sonic Colors: Ultimate, Command & Conquer games, The Finals, Lord of the Rings: Gollum and others, enables NVIDIA NVAPI by default for most games, adds support for Steamworks SDK 1.59, and fixes a bunch of other issues in a lot of games. The new version also limits the number of cores seen by some games in order to make them actually playable on CPUs with high core count, including Far Cry 2 and Far Cry 4, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition, a couple of Warhammer 40,000 games and others.

Apple has struggled in the area of offering comprehensive gaming ecosystems - in the personal computer space - over the past few decades with only a handful of studios bothering to port their games over to macOS, but material presented at this week's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) indicates that the technology giant is getting serious about its silicon becoming a legitimate platform for video games. A lot of the company's presentation focused on the controversial Vision Pro Headset, but some press outlets took notice of a quieter announcement during proceedings. Hideo Kojima (of Metal Gear Solid fame) made an appearance and announced: "I have been a die-hard Apple fan since I bought my first Mac back in 1994—and it has been a dream of mine to see my team's best work come to life on the Mac. Death Stranding Director's Cut on the Mac takes advantage of the latest Apple technologies to provide the best experience to our fans." Several other development outfits have also declared that their games are set for arrival on Mac systems this year. Apple was enthused about this new strategy and let everyone know that: "tens of millions of Macs can run demanding games with outstanding performance, exceptional battery life, and breathtaking visuals."

Susan Prescott, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations stated: "A new era for gaming on Mac is here...Developers around the world can harness our powerful tools in Metal 3 to deliver incredibly responsive gameplay with high frame rates to more players than ever before." Their software engineering team has been working on a system that simplifies and accelerates the process of creating Windows-to-Mac game ports. A Proton-esque environment - comparable to Valve's software layer efforts with Steam Deck - is capable of translating and running the latest DirectX 12 Windows titles on macOS. Codeweavers revealed in a blog post that Apple has chosen to base the Game Porting Toolkit on their CrossOver source code.

When Valve claimed that their Linux-powered Steam Deck device would be able to run any game from the Steam library most of us assumed this was simply a statement on the power of the device. We assumed that the Linux OS wouldn't be compatible with certain games such as those using Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) or BattlEye however Valve confirmed that they would work with the companies to add support. This has culminated in Epic Games recently introducing Linux & Mac support for their EAC software noting the Steam Deck in their announcement.

The addition of Linux support has been specifically designed to work with the Wine and Proton compatibility layers to ensure that all games using the software should run correctly. This will mean that titles such as Apex Legends, Dead by Daylight, War Thunder, 7 Days to Die, Fall Guys, Black Desert, Hunt: Showdown, Paladins, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection can now be easily updated to include Linux support. The rival BattlEye software isn't currently available for Linux but the CEO has confirmed that support will be added with the first game featuring it coming soon. These moves will drastically improve the Linux gaming landscape and will hopefully encourage more developers to natively support the platform.

Proton is a new tool released by Valve Software that has been integrated with Steam Play to make playing Windows games on Linux as simple as hitting the Play button within Steam. Underneath the hood, Proton comprises other popular tools like Wine and DXVK among others that a gamer would otherwise have to install and maintain themselves. This greatly eases the burden for users to switch to Linux without having to learn the underlying systems or losing access to a large part of their library of games. Proton is still in its infancy so support is inconsistent, but regularly improving and the list of supported Windows games is growing each day.

In fact, this project has announced that it has now over 2,500 Windows games (2,663 at the time of writing) that work on Linux with Proton and Steam Play. Beyond those supported "whitelisted" games, there are several others that although not-whitelisted are supported and "play just as well as on Windows". Some examples are "No Man's Sky", "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt", "Wolfenstein: The New Order" or "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim". Any user can contribute and report about the titles in his game library thanks to ProtonDB.

There is light in the end of the tunnel for proponents of a native-Linux version of Valve's Steam platform, as a Steam for Linux is just months away, according to a Phoronix report. Linux has been hiring developers with experience in Linux OpenGL applications for some time now, and the gearwheels at Valve have been able to drive out an early version of Left 4 Dead 2 that was seen running native on Linux (Ubuntu 11.10), without translation layers such as Wine, utilizing the OpenGL API, with the ICD provided by AMD Catalyst. Although first denied in 2010, Valve is back to the idea of Steam for Linux, thanks to its "flat" company structure that lacks a hierarchy. Following the footsteps of Steam for Mac, Valve could port some of its games to Linux, and give the client SteamPlay capability.

Linux and Unix owners already know and love Wine. No, silly, not the red/white alcoholic beverage, the program. Wine, which has been in development for some time, is a program that allows Linux and Unix users to run Windows applications in a Linux/Unix environment. Wine is getting ever closer to a final version, and this Release Candidate 2 shows this in the list of changes. All that the authors changed from RC1 to RC2 is a list of bugfixes, which can be found here. If you'd like to download the latest version of this revolutionary program, you can check it out here.