Why it's a good thing that the Linux desktop is boring again

Hopefully the title has piqued your interest, as that was the intent. With the upcoming release of GNOME 40, I've found myself in a rather contemplative and nostalgic mood lately. I remember, back in the early 2000s, I'd read about a new desktop in development called GNOME. Curiosity got the best of me and installed the beta version of the environment. If I'm being honest, I wasn't impressed. My formative years with the Linux desktop were spent using the likes of AfterStep and Enlightenment E16. If you know either of those desktops (or Window Managers) you get it. Both of them were exceptionally configurable and could be made to look absolutely gorgeous. At one point, I had AfterStep tricked out to the point where everything was varying degrees of transparency and the window decorations were as much sculpture as they were code. When people saw my desktop, they were astonished. It was a work of art.

NomadBSD 1.4 is now available!

We are pleased to present the release of NomadBSD 1.4.

Games: Koi Farm, Vintage Story, and Valheim

• Koi Farm is a simple relaxing chill-out experience about raising fish

  Koi Farm released recently and it's quite a little gem. It's a small game though, all about raising Koi with an "infinite number" of patterns you can create by cross-breeding all the different colours and you end up with lots of different mutations as you go along. You can pick them up, drop them between a big display pool and a smaller breeding pool and eventually let them go to swim on with their lives. On top of that, you can also turn them into special cards to stick in your book and progress through it.

• Survival game Vintage Story gets an official mod database, improved Wayland support

  Out for your next survival game that isn't Valheim? Do give Vintage Story a go, which on the surface looks like Minecraft but it's so much more interesting and far deeper mechanically. While this is mainly a stability update for the previous release, which was pretty huge, some fun bits have been put in. One of the big additions is an official Mod Database, for players to upload and download from. Eventually, they said, it will integrate with the game client to "blur the line on what is vanilla content and what is modded content" (if you want to use it, that is). The rest of the update is mostly small tweaks and fixes but their support of Linux continues shining. For Linux players, you should hopefully see improved support for running the game on Wayland. They upgraded the version of OpenTK used along with some extra Wayland fixes that should improve mouse support there. See the full changelog here. [...] A community member is also hosting a server for Linux fans...

• The tenth Norse world sure is busy as Valheim hits 5 million sold | GamingOnLinux

  Fully expected of course, Valheim continues pulling in masses of new users with the announcement that it's now sold 5 million copies over the first month. What is it? For those living under a rock: a brutal exploration and survival game for 1-10 players, set in a procedurally-generated purgatory inspired by Viking culture. Across this time more than 15 thousand years have been spent playing Valheim based on a combined player time count, over 35 million hours of Valheim was watched on Twitch, it continues rising up as one of the best reviewed games on Steam (#39) and this is all still from a five-person team. The actual player-count seems to have now settled though from the 502,387 peak 10 days ago to it seeing a more regular player count of around 350,000.