Swapmeat and other new titles on Linux, Q4 2025

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.

Arch Linux on the HP "DRAGONAIR" Chromebook x360 14c

Greetings again! Back in the new year with another cheap Chromebook I’ve “Chrultrabook’d” so to speak. Got rid of ChromeOS and the Google bootloader, then installed Arch Linux the easy way on this guy.

Having already gone through the removal of write protect documented here and having already installed the latest firmware from MrChromebox per his script, I’ve reconnected the battery and run through the “archinstall” install script for Arch Linux.

As I’m apparently not able to install the “asciinema” package during the “archinstall” script’s installation procedure due to some python errors, I’ll share this short recording of the initial part of the automated install process. Yes, call me lazy for using “archinstall” but it sure beats the hell out of constantly triple-checking whether I’ve gone through the same steps over and over. I’m a Fedora user at heart, but I’ll be testing some packages from the AUR on this converted ultrabook on and off.

Shame about the eMMC being there and not having a populated NVMe slot on this HP “DRAGONAIR” board though, otherwise I’d throw one of my spare tester NVMe drives in.

Next, I went ahead and ran through the automated scripts to enable proper keyboard button mapping, and to make sure Audio was functioning properly, then rebooted.

After that, I made sure to install the rua (linked) AUR helper to install packages through a safe Rust interface from the AUR. Two such packages I’m interested in are the Jottacloud backup utility and Tailscale…..however Tailscale is an official Arch package now apparently.

Last thing I did was gather some of the aforementioned packages as well as BIOS/mainboard info for others that are looking to turn this Chromebook into a Linux-native ultrabook.

hp dragonair with arch linux