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This week, the OrangePi Neo was delayed until Q3. We’ll talk about it. Plus, Gears of War: Reloaded’s beta launches today with SteamOS support. And, the Steam Deck OLED is out of stock?

All of this and more today. That’s right, it’s Steam Deck (and Linux Gaming) news time.

OrangePi Neo

The OrangePi Neo is a handheld we’ve been talking about for a while now on the channel. It’s being produced by OrangePi which is a single-board computer manufacturer and it’s shipping with Manjaro Linux.

The Neo was slated for release in Q1 of this year but production issues have delayed the device to Q3. There’s no firm date for the release date.

I reached out to project lead of Manjaro Philip Muller, about the delay and he said quote:

Production might be Q3 now. Hardware seems final. They work on firmware stuff still. Valve has two retail units for review

All-in-all, though, I’m still looking forward to giving this device a spin. Especially since it’s got two trackpads which, in my opinion, is non-negotiable.

However, Manjaro Linux is also shipping on the ZOTAC GAMING ZONE handheld which could offer some stiff competition for the Neo.

I’m curious what you think about these Manjaro-powered handhelds. Let me know in the comments below! And make sure you like that smash button to let YouTube know you wanna see more videos like this!

Gears of War: Reloaded Beta on SteamOS

So, this week, we got some very exciting news. Gears of War: Reloaded is having a public beta this weekend it’s got SteamOS support.

I have such font memories of Gears of War and this is the first time the original game is going to be on Steam. This is a long-time coming and, as a Gears fan, I’ll be happy to be able to play the game on my PC.

And before anyone goes into the comments and says “But it has been available through PC Game Pass for like ten years,” allow me to once again state that I’m happy the game will finally be available to play on my PC.

Now, I have not preordered the game so I am not eligible for the the beta, but I will say that my enthusiasm is undeterred. It’s coming with SteamOS support and the Steam store page mentions that is release is optimized for PC & handhelds.

This game is almost 20 years old, so my money is on the title playing like butter on the Steam Deck and I can’t wait to pick it up on August 26th!

Theme Hospital CorsixTH

In the proud tradition of other FOSS games, CorsixTH offers a new beta for their Theme Hospital engine rebuild project and it’s got a few choice updates.

For example, the game has made a few changes to bring the gameplay closer to the original. VIP patients now work slower, like in the original, Annual rewards and trophies now have more robust evaluation criteria, patient’s treatment costs are not determined when they agree to pay, and more.

They also added some new features like a machine menu where you can view the status of all the machines in your hospital in one place. Also, patient happiness can now be a win/lose factor in custom games.

If you want to give CorsixTH a spin, you’ll need to own a copy of Theme Hospital from GOG (affiliate link).

And speaking of CorsixTH, keep your eyes peeled over on The Bryant Blog because I’ve got a review of the beta coming in a few days. And don’t forget to subscribe over there to stay up-to-date with that content. I’m writing about five articles a week over there and it’s been incredibly creatively fulfilling! We’ve got about a thousand subscribers so get subscribed and join a growing — and not to mention fun — community.

Ubuntu and Manjaro have pledged Wayland by default

In exciting desktop Linux news, this week both Ubuntu and Manjaro have pledged that they plan total Wayland support soon.

Manjaro said that KDE Plasma will be moving to Wayland now by default.

Artem Frinev, Majaro’s head of KDE said, quote:

"I was using Wayland for quite a while and things are more or less smooth (NVIDIA proprietary driver). I think it’s time for Manjaro to move to Wayland by default for both Plasma session and SDDM."

Meanwhile, on the Ubuntu side, Canonical has confirmed that Ubuntu 25.10 will be the first desktop to build to drop Xorg sessions. They’re moving exclusively to Wayland and, frankly, this is the right move.

Importantly, 25.10 is the last release before the next LTS or Long-term Support release for Ubuntu in April of 2026. So this will give them a decent amount of lead time to shake down the change ahead of a flagship release.

The Linux community has been talking about how Wayland is the future for something like a decade. I remember talking reading about Wayland before this channel was even a thing. So it’s exciting to see progress moving more swiftly than ever now.

Supply Chain Issues

The Steam Deck OLED is currently out of stock on the Steam Store. The question is, why?

Well, if you’ve been following any of the goings on in the dumpster fire we call the global economy, you’ll know that the supply chains in the US and Canada have been wonky right now.

Regional issues due to Trump’s trade provocations have caused hardware vendors to run headlong into gaps in much-needed parts.

And Valve’s not immune from the trade war malarkey. The Steam Deck OLED is completely out of stock while the LCD model is still available.

It’s unclear which parts exactly are out of stock, though presumably it could be the OLED screen or the higher capacity 2230 drives.

Steam Deck OLED 512GB and 1TB models are temporarily out-of-stock in the US and Canada as we adapt to recent supply chain constraints. We anticipate being back in stock by end of summer, and currently expect prices will remain the same. We'll update here as soon as we have more clarity on what the timeline ultimately looks like.

00:00 Introduction
00:28 OrangePi Neo & ZOTAC GAMING ZONE updates
03:07 Gears of War: Reloaded
04:19 Theme Hospital engine CorsixTH beta update
05:36 Wayland is almost here (finally)
06:46 Steam Deck OLED is out of stock in the US and Canada

What would happen if Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube cooperated with each other? What would it be like if we lived in a world where where you could use your account on one platform to like, comment and share posts from any other?

I’m not talking about merely sharing a link from one platform to another, either, where interactions were siloed off from each other.

No, what if you could leave a comment on a Facebook post for this video and that comment would automatically appear in the comments section of this video.

Well, that already kinda exists. The Fediverse, you might have heard of it. From Mastodon to Peertube and more—it’s is a collection of different services that are all working together to form an interconnected universe of applications. It sounds unbelievable, but it’s here today.

It wrests control of the web out of the hands of corporate oligarchs and digital tycoons and returns that power to where it belongs: us.

I’ve spent the entirety of 2024 working on the Fediverse and I’ve learned a lot. See, I started mirroring these videos over on my Peertube instance: subscribeto.me/ and it’s sucked me. I’ve gone down this rabbit hole of discovery. I’ve passed through the looking glass. I’ve seen the promised land. And now, I want to share this with you.

So in this video, I want to take a moment to explore 5 of the most important lessons I’ve learned and why I’m now betting the future of my company on this amazing technology that we call “The Fediverse.”

00:00 What if we lived in a cooperative online world?
01:33 What is an "instance?"
02:11 #5 - Netiquette was not a fluke
04:49 #4 - Kindness is King
06:44 #3 - It's not a Social Network
08:06 #2 - The Fediverse is boring (complement)
11:04 #1 - Viral Memes as Bioweapons
12:59 Social Media is the enemy of humanity
13:36 What the Fediverse truly is

I've been using Friendica for a few years, and after playing around with other software such as #Pleroma, #Misskey and #Lemmy, I've ended up returning to the old reliable in my personal server. I'm honestly surprised to see Friendica offering a more solid offering of capabilities than many other newer #Fediverse platforms, such as #Mastodon itself. However, it still seems to be missing a few important capabilities (some of them already implemented in other AP software, some of them being improvements to the already existing capabilities of Friendica) that I would like to see implemented eventually, to finally being able to move full-time to a single Fediverse software instead of spreading my server cycles between several web-apps. Feel free to add to this list, or to recommend workarounds for any of the issues I've listed below. Also, I plan to see how to learn enough PHP in order to send PRs for a few of these, but I want to check if there's any work in progress regarding any of these issues to avoid duplicate efforts.

Issues that already exist in the tracker, roughly sorted by priority:

• Import posts from Mastodon / Misskey exported backups: see issue 6004 in GitHub.
• Ability to vote in polls, not just have them read-only: see issue 11093 in GitHub.
• Ability to import #RSS feeds and not only ActivityPub accounts: see issue 13854 in GitHub.
• Post translation, using a backend such as #LibreTranslate: see issue 12948 in GitHub.
• Merge related notifications to prevent duplicates: see issue 9729 in GitHub.
• React with emoji, as in #Misskey and derivatives: see issue 6271 in GitHub.

Issues that are already managed with an add-on, but have issues:

• Proper support for Mastodon custom emojis: the "Mastodon Custom Emojis" add-on can handle them in post content, partially, and can't handle them in user names yet.
• Handling the "NSFW" tag in federated posts: the "NSFW" add-on can detect specific words on a post, but if the post does not include them (and yet uses the "mark as NSFW" option in Mastodon), the post will be shown regardless.

Implementing new views in order to work better as a replacement for other platforms:

• Feed reader view a la #FreshRSS / #Lemmy: collapse comments and content, optionally add buttons to go to the previous/next unread item, filter by read.
• Video player /gallery view a la #PeerTube / #Pixelfed: pin media to top and comments / voting buttons to bottom.
• Dashboard view a la Tweetdeck: allow multiple columns with different filters. This might require a rewrite of the logic for each page, as each filter is currently implemented on the interface as a PHP request bound to each page load. This might fall out of scope for the default Friendica interface, and might be better served with an external web-app.

Issues that don't seem to be tracked currently, but are mostly a "nice-to-have" and have a lower priority:

• Ability to mix "what's hot" sorting with circle filtering: useful for news for example.
• Export posts in Firefish-compatible format: not mandatory, but would be handy for data migration purposes. Alternatively, one could make Firefish itself compatible with Friendica-formatted backups.

!Friendica Support