People often ask me (joking, no one asks me anything, I ain't got no friends) what my favorite Linux desktop is. And my answer is, well, long and complicated. But I guess, in the past fifteen years, I've mostly used and loved Plasma and Unity, with some brief moments of joy with Gnome 2. Then, inevitably, the question of Xfce comes up, and my answer is even longer and more complicated.

The release of Xfce 4.14 might provide a part of the answer you're looking for. And you should definitely look at my reviews of various distros running Xfce, like say Xubuntu or MX Linux, to get a sense of what this desktop environment does, and how it does it. But then, it's never been really my default go-to setup, although I did use it quite successfully and effectively - and still do - on my feisty, 10-year-old Asus eeePC netbook. On the desktop proper, I like it, and I liked what it did approximately three years or so. Since, it's kind of kept a quiet profile, not quite here nor there. Well, I want to see if the new version has the kick to make my proverbial colt buck and gallop. Testing time it is then!

All of the applications below are confirmed to run on the Librem 5 Smartphone running PureOS.

Each application is grouped into one of three categories based on how optimized it is for the mobile screen.

• Hellblade Senuas Sacrifice | Linux Gaming | Ubuntu 18.04 | Steam Play

  Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice running through Steam play.

• Valve just turned the gameplay of Dota Underlords on its head with Contraptions

  Valve seem to be using Early Access to really mix things up for Dota Underlords, with a new update out adding in Contraptions you can put on the board.

  While I like Underlords a lot, I was pretty keen to see them do a little more with it. So the idea of Contraptions is pretty fun and it does mix the gameplay up quite a bit. You can place them on the board, move them around and they will affect the combat making placement even more crucial than ever. They also don't count against the normal unit cap.

• Wine Is Now In Better Shape On NetBSD Thanks To GSoC 2019

  In addition to NetBSD seeing better DRM ioctl support for its Linux compatibility layer (as part of an effort towards possible Steam support) thanks to Google Summer of Code 2019, there were also Wine improvements as a result of this Google programming initiative.

  Student developer Naveen Narayanan worked the summer on improving NetBSD's Wine support, particularly when it comes to AMD64 (x86_64) support.

The release of Ubuntu Linux 19.10 edges ever closer, with an expected Beta release landing on September 26 ahead of the planned October 17 launch. Here's a brief rundown of what to expect, and a few features that might make it worth the upgrade from versions 18.10 or 19.04.

As always Ubuntu 19.10 will introduce the usual minor interface and software tweaks, but there are some highlights I'm seriously looking forward to, such as flicker-free boot for Intel users, similar to what you see today in Fedora 30.