Swapmeat and other new titles on Linux, Q4 2025

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Hi there again. Got moved in to the new place, am happy with less burdensome bills, and have begun working part-time in Northern Michigan.

Recently, after work, I’ve been messing around with a few demos during the Steam Next Fest and have been happily surprised.

A screenshot of swapmeat, as seen on the steam store

Having played Swapmeat on and off during all the previous playtests, and now with about two hours in the demo version of the game, I can honestly say these guys have optimized this game quite well.

Whether it’s on my Bazzite Box in the living room, my OLED Deck or my Main Desktop Rebuild tower, it’s been playing quite well despite all my deaths! From hosting games with friends to playing online with others, even over mullvad VPN, I get at least 60fps across the board and 115fps on my main desktop.

This game was installed without any custom proton rigamarolling.

an image of megabonk, as seen on the steam store

Another game that I was playing quite a bit of, when the demo was out, is Megabonk. Once it released, I went full bore into playing it on the living room Bazzite Box and Steam Deck. Runs flawlessly regardless of what device I ran it on, even my 7840U-equipped Framework Laptop 13!

Note that you may see closer to 30fps if you’re running the game on a 5 year old laptop APU, or less if you’re using older Intel with horrible integrated graphics, but in general it’s mostly 60fps across the board! Thank you dev for making it low-poly.

Hitting the install button on your game without messing with proton is nice.

an image of the store page on steam for return from core

Another one, just for fun, has been Return From Core! If Core Keeper, Factorio and Palworld had a broken stepchild, I would say it would be this game. Core Keeper top-down exploration style, with Factorio automation and Palworld-like useful companions. The monster girls are also absolutely adorable!

60fps across the board, working through default recommended proton.

Here with are with my favorite Roguelike game of all time. Started playing in 2018 in Early Access, through the “release date” that was 2020 and then onwards till now. Hopoo Games built this entire franchise from the ground up with the community, sold the IP rights off to Gearbox in 2024 or 2025 and now that new management has taken over the development, a new DLC is planned.

A GPU is definitely required to have all those enemies (sometimes hundreds) on your screen at the same time, something in the range of an RX5700XT or higher, 8GB VRAM minimum.

This will run at around 20-30fps on Deck with everything on low, but a solid 80-200 fps depending on enemy sprite amount on my main desktop.

Moving On for A Bit

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Looks like I haven’t blogged here in a while, since the time I was laid off from my recent retail job in late April.

I’ll be leaving Colorado the week of August 8th and moving into a family-owned home in Traverse City, Michigan soon. Need to sell the condo and downsize a bit as well. Seems as though not only did my attempted four years at living in California fail due to economic circumstances, but so did the four years I tried to live in Colorado.

Hoping to transform an EV into a bit of a camper on wheels in the future, to travel a bit before figuring out life a bit more and finding new work. I don’t think I’ll be working in the tech industry anymore. At the age of 32, it seems that after thousands of resume submissions and countless times of bothering hiring managers at physical and virtual work locations, nobody apparently wants to hire me, so it is what it is.

Bazzite on the HX77G and a Xeon desktop

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Hello all again! It’s been a bit of a while between the beginning of the year and now. I went from usually having a full schedule at my newer job to seeing myself and others have our hours drastically cut back. While I look for new employment to fill the gap, I have more time for projects. Here’s to finding the positivity and motivation in the hopeless abyss that is the current USA landscape, to work on projects.

Here we have my Minisforum model hx77g somewhat-low-end mini desktop. I’m of the opinion that Minisforum upcycles laptop motherboards and processors into small power-efficient desktops. Would be cool if an investigative youtuber like Strange Parts did a walkthrough of their factories. In a way, this could be seen similar to what Framework is doing with their Framework Desktop.

Originally receiving this tiny guy for a cheap $480 during end-of-2024 discounts, my plan was to make it the living room light gaming and media consumption machine. End goal is to have this, possibly an M2 Mac Mini a friend may be giving me and an Analogue 3D hooked up to the TV to switch between physical media gaming, ARM media consumption and gaming on x86/64.

I’ve also recently replaced my previous desktop with a Zen 4 one in the HYTE Revolt case through the help of a friend that has access to more parts, so now I’m working on building another Xeon + Intel GPU build in that case, pictured below:

Outside of those updates, not much going on for now. Once I finish the Xeon build repurposing the previous case, I think I’ll likely sell it with Bazzite on it to a friend or to anyone that follows my blog local to the USA, if interested. After that, I intend on using the ROCK 5 ITX board to build a low-power NAS with some hard drives, but more on that to come.

Some cool things I’ve been following recently:

Looking back on my 2024 Linux Gaming in 2025

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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:

Linux Mint on the Dell 13 7310 and building the Bazzite Meme Machine

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Hello again! Two last little projects before I gear up to start selling off a bunch of projects and builds again soon, should I have to. Need to downsize a bit, as I may be selling my place in coming months. That aside, let’s jump in!

I recently acquired a Dell 13 7310 Chromebook from a prior student of a high school. I first noticed that it was Enterprise Locked, so I reached out to the head of IT for said school, only to receive no response. Fearing the worst, I went ahead and replaced the motherboard for $55 or so, to make sure I started from a clean slate. Enterprise Locking is usually either due to the IT team not properly unenrolling a device before a sale or a student possibly stealing a chromebook.

Next I replaced the 32GB NGFF-sized EMMC module with a 512gb SATA module, as I’ll be shipping this to a friend in need out in the UK. She’ll likely appreciate the larger storage. As I no longer have an Amazon account, due to not wanting to support them, I found a replacement locally.

Now to remove the Write Protect screw and get this baby “Chrultrabook’d” with coreboot!

Looks like Linux Mint Debian Edition is up and running on the main drive fine, so I’ll do another round of updates, preinstall some software for the friend and get it shipped out!
Hmm, may have had the normal Linux Mint distro on this USB for testing. Will make sure everything is working fine there, then wipe it and install LMDE for the friend before shipping out. Made sure to install the keyboard mapping script as well as audio fixes mentioned in this page of the Chrultrabook documentation.

Next up, I have an assortment of new and used parts (mostly new) to build what I’m calling my Bazzite Meme Machine. The naming is due to Intel having a long-running stereotype that their processors suck up too much wattage for what they actually do, and they were known as an oven by a few friends when I worked in California years ago. With this getting Bazzite put on it, I’d like to see how this Arc A580 performs with a 10th gen i5, from before Intel started adding nearly-useless E cores.

However, I think this desktop build will have to wait until the weekend, as I may have a pending interview this week. Here’s hoping I can find new employment before I’m forced to move out of this lovely place.