In September 2013, Valve founder Gabe Newell gave a rare, 20-minute presentation at LinuxCon.

Recently, Engadget wrote an article about Linux gaming and apart from a bit of a silly title and information regular GOL readers will be aware of, they did have some interesting info from Valve.

I don't put too much thought into the title they decided to give it, "Linux gaming is on a life-support system called Steam", since when you think about it that's actually quite close to the truth. Valve are the biggest pushers of Linux gaming and one of the only major forces doing so.

While I've long said that the amount of Linux gamers using Steam will be increasing all the time, the actual market share of Linux on Steam hasn't really gone anywhere. At times, it has certainly looked like the amount of Linux gamers has decreased if you take the percentage at face value.

Why is it not surprising? Well, it makes sense for multiple reasons. Did you ever buy and watch any movies (or other non-gaming videos) on Steam? I didn't, it's far easier to use a different service like Netflix, Google Play or practically any other where you could watch your content across pretty much any device and browser.

On top of that, Valve's bread and butter is gaming and since they now have more competition actually focusing on that is obvious at this point.

Google has scheduled an event next month at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

This is reportedly where it could unveil its gaming project that has been under development for quite some time.

Rocket League, the game that sucks away most of my gaming time has a fantastic update now out that allows you to party up with friends across different platforms.

There's a whole new part of the interface to deal with this, the Friends List which is split into different sections covering friends from your current platform, RocketID to show friends on other platforms, a recent players list to reach out to people you've had a good game with and an alerts section to see notifications.

Towards the beginning of the month we reported on the Gallium Nine state tracker working on NIR support as an alternative to its original focus on the common TGSI intermediate representation to Gallium3D. That NIR-ified version of Gallium Nine is now working and beginning to run most Direct3D 9 games fine.

Plumbing NIR support into Gallium Nine is being done for newer Gallium3D drivers that focus on NIR support rather than the aging TGSI. In particular, NIR support is needed for the new Intel Iris Gallium3D driver (though still yet to be mainlined), possibilities like running Gallium Nine atop Zink to in turn map to Vulkan drivers, and working for other NIR drivers like VC4/V3D or Freedreno.

Coming just one week after the Vulkan 1.1.100 release and just days after the Vulkan API celebrated its third birthday, Vulkan 1.1.101 is now available.

Vulkan 1.1.101 is a bit more eventful than 1.1.100 in that there are two new extensions introduced and then a number of issue corrections/clarifications to the documentation.

Save Koch from developer Wooden Monkeys could be a very interesting one, a strategic sim that puts you in the shoes of a trapped mafia kingpin as you try to save your empire and your life.

I think Vaporum is a really great dungeon crawler, with good visuals and a rather interesting setting and it just keeps getting better.

When I originally took a look at the game back in February last year, I noted how in terms of performance I was hitting around 50FPS. With today's update, that's often double what it was which is madness.

Yacht Club Games originally announced the final two expansions would be released in April but they've decided to delay them.

For those not up to speed, King of Cards is the next and final expansion for Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove. You take on the role of King Knight, through 4 new worlds and more than 30 all new courses. Then we have Showdown, which is a mix of multiplayer madness for up to 4 players as well as giving another new story mode. Both are going to be free updates when released!

It seems there's a game sale for every possible event in the world now, not that I am complaining as it's good for our wallets.

The current sale over on GOG is their 'Lantern Festival' to celebrate the Year of the Pig. So you too can pig-out out on some of the great deals going.

This time, there's not a huge selection for Linux gamers, so I've picked out a few of the best deals.

Some big news for Blade Symphony today, not only do they have another major patch release they've also announced the free to play release date.

On March 7th, the flood gates will officially open on Steam for everyone to jump into Blade Symphony completely free. This is a huge milestone for Puny Human, something they've been solidly working towards for some time now.

While it has no clear release date other than this year, Monster Logic certainly looks like a sweet programming puzzle game that's coming to Linux.

Escape Legacy: Ancient Scrolls from Storming Tech is an escape room puzzle game that landed Linux support back in December.

A little late on covering it, sure, but this is due to the fact that the Linux version didn't actually work. I reached out personally to the developer, both through email and on their Steam forum and they have just this month fixed it. I actually discovered it thanks to Steam's Discovery Queue feature, something I've not used often but surprisingly it has shown me multiple games I've not seen before so it's quite handy.

It has a demo available and from the small slice it offers up, it was actually reasonably impressive. The demo isn't long and it is a bit abrupt as it doesn't even let you finish the first level with a barrier stopping you going further but it does seem interesting.

Moonlighter was already quite interesting, with the mix of action-RPG dungeon crawling along with working in a shop to sell your goods, now with the free Friends & Foes update it's even more fun.

The first of the major new stuff is the companions system, so once you kill a particular enemy type at least 10 times a special egg will appear. After three days in-game, it will hatch giving you a new friend to take on your journey. They've also added 8 mini-bosses, inventory sorting, a better system to show when shop prices update, an improve item pick-up mechanic and so on. Quite a feature-packed update!

When looking over it, at first glance it might seem like they've gone a little backwards in terms of supported titles. For example, they went from 1085 with a playable status in November to 1081 in December. However, this is due to a change in their compatibility list, which was revamped to bundle "multiple game IDs for the same game into one single entry". On top of that, they're also now bundling "IDs from the same region as well" so the compatibility list should be far more accurate going forward.

Looking at the performance difference with the new "Approximate xfloat" feature, it's quite impressive. They showed Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time going from 39FPS to 50FPS, God of War 3 saw a similar improvement going from 9FPS to 15FPS on AMD and 14FPS to 32FPS on Intel and they noted many other titles also seeing such improvements.

Gaming on Linux has come a long way. There are thousands of amazing games available out there for you to play and enjoy. Today here, I will discuss some best games for the Linux terminal console. We all know that Linux users spend lots of time on Linux Terminal for doing the advance level task and sometimes it may be tiresome. And it will be great if you play some quick games on Linux terminal to remove the tiredness and boredom. So today I will only concentrate on making an amazing list of best Linux Terminal console games for you.

I have already covered some write up on best Linux games, cheap steam games, top-rated steam games, and of course, best free steam games for Linux users. If you have not checked it yet, go there and choose your best one. So, guys, I am stopping further ado and jumping right to the point. Hence, let us head over to our topic.

This is a bit of an odd one, Adventure Land is an MMO where you code characters using either the provided code or do a little of your own to help you progress. They plan to go open source too.

Adventure Land sounds like quite a sandbox MMO, one with no specific quest-line to follow, no guides you have to follow and so on. They say you can "trade, gamble in tavern, party with friends, pvp solo with your rouge or go after rare loot".