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Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 11, 2022
> We are back with our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much? see ratings) perfectly with Proton since they were released in June 2022 – all of them work out of the box or well enough with tweaks...
> Jonathan Blandford, who is a longtime GNOME contributor—and a cruciverbalist for longer still—thought it was time for GNOME to have a crossword puzzle application. So he set out to create one, which turned into something of a yak-shaving exercise, but also, ultimately, into Crosswords. Blandford came to GUADEC 2022 to give a talk describing his journey bringing this brain exerciser (and productivity bane) to the GNOME desktop.
> Blandford got his start with GNOME back in 1997; he is the author of the Evince PDF reader and Aisleriot solitaire card game, for example. He has moved into management over the years, so has done less programming for GNOME, but is still involved in the community. For the purposes of the talk, he said, the important thing to know about him is that he is "a passionate cruciverbalist". He has been doing crossword puzzles since he was a child, with his parents and grandparents; now he does them with his family as well. Beyond that, he had to work the word "cruciverbalist" into his talk because "people who love crosswords love words, and they love words like that".
> He started working on the Crosswords application in mid-July 2021—almost exactly a year before the talk. It is now around 24,000 lines of code, most of which is in C; "I have some regrets about that" but he was comfortable writing in C. The program has been translated into two languages beyond English—Dutch and Spanish—and the project has three additional contributors at this point.
> There were several motivations that led him to create the application. He has always thought that puzzles would make for an interesting program to write. In addition, anyone searching GNOME Software or Flathub for a crossword puzzle program would not have found one; in fact, Linux, in general, lacks for a good graphical crossword application. Writing a program for these puzzles turned out to be "a whole lot of fun" as well. But he wants its users to also experience fun; he had an overarching rule for the program: "it's a game, it has to be fun".
> As gaming on Linux continues to improve, so do the tools we use to play those games. Heroic Games Launcher is a great example of such a tool, as it gives users a native way to access and play Epic Games Store games on their Linux machines.
> One of its older releases, Heroic 2.0.0, brought major UI improvements, and this release further builds on those.
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