Reader

In What A Deck, I wax lyrical (or perhaps rant) about a game I've recently played on my Lenovo Legion Go.

If you know me, you'll know I'm terrible with finishing games I start. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was one of those games I picked up pretty much on launch, played for maybe 2-3 hours, then forgot about.

The great thing about having a gaming portable is that I can sit on the couch and watch a bit of TV or just hang out with the wife and dogs while I play an hour or two of a game in the evening. I've been able to finish way more games over the last year and a bit since I picked up the Legion Go then I have for years – it's great!

The Performance: Decent With a Few Stutters

When I first started up the game on my Legion Go, it actually performed terribly – I was a little worried the game just wasn't going to perform (despite what ProtonDB told me). However, once I'd updated and restarted Bazzite, it ran smooth as butter at 800p, topping out at the 36 FPS frame limit I have on my handheld.

Through the playthrough I continued to tinker with the settings and eventually settled on high settings. On high, the game still stayed glued to 36 FPS most of the time, with a few occasional stutters down to high-20s in particularly busy or particle-heavy scenes.

The thing certainly eats through battery though. I don't often play unplugged, but I gave the game a brief go unplugged and I think it wouldn't last much more than an hour on high settings with the second-highest default TDP settings. I'm sure you'd get a bit more time if you reduced the TDP and quality settings, but half-rate shading caused some weirdness so probably isn't an option.

The Game: Just the Right Length

There's nothing particularly unique or novel about the premise of the game. We have another story about a Jedi Purge survivor trying to make good on their former oath in a changed and dangerous galaxy.

As Cal Kestis, you start off working as a scrapper dismantling Old Republic vessels like Venators, just trying to live a quiet life and avoid detection. After having to use your powers to save a coworker, you're faced with a visit from the Inquisitors, and barely escape with your life.

From there it's a journey spanning multiple planets, from familiar ones like Ilum and Dathomir, to new ones like Bogano and Zeffo, as Cal searches for an important Jedi Holocron before the Empire can find it. You'll find yourself going back and forth between the different planets as you unlock new abilities and work towards your ultimate goal.

I'd describe the game as Souls-lite. It takes a whole lot of cues from the Souls series, from the level up mechanics, bonfire-like meditation system, and combat which can be punishing when you make a mistake or get too greedy for that one last attack. But it's an order of magnitude less difficult than the Souls series, making it a hell of a lot more accessible to the more casual player.

It should take you around 20 hours to get through the story, which I feel is just about right, though the final location of the game feels a little rushed and could have been fleshed out a little more.

Overall: Worth a Play

If you're wondering whether Jedi: Fallen Order is worth a play on your gaming handheld – my answer is a resounding yes! It plays beautifully on Linux, it still looks great, and you'll have a lot of fun working your way though a well written, if formulaic, Star Wars tale.

It's hard to believe that it's already six months into 2025. There's a whole lot of nastiness going on in the world, and I honestly don't see it getting any better in the short term.

And honestly, that was one of the reasons I started Fediverse.Games. I wanted to create a fun, safe space for people to come together and talk about games, or just life, in.

I'm still learning the best way to be inclusive, or an ally. I'm a middle-class, cis white male, and grew up a pretty sheltered life in a traditionally blue-collar city. But I've always been of the opinion that people should always be allowed to be their authentic self without being harmed by others.

And I hope Fediverse.Games makes the world just that little bit better for those who choose to join us.

2025 Strategy Progress Report

Back in January, I put together a 2025 strategy to help shape how we continued to grow and mature our services through the year. Overall, things are tracking well against these goals.

PeerTube

PeerTube launched in April. We've had a few hiccoughs around the functionality, especially when we switched our edge gateway configuration, which broke uploads. We're also still working to introduce livestream functionality. But overall, I've been surprised at the level of uptake for this service.

We have 44 users at the time of writing this post, with seven who've made uploads to the site. I wasn't expecting to have anywhere near this many, and it's made me seriously reconsider our priorities in terms of increasing available storage. We're nowhere near hitting the storage we have available at the moment, but for the purpose of ensuring sustainable growth, we definitely need to increase what we have available.

Writefreely

Writefreely (where this is being posted!) wasn't on the list of things to work on this year. But regardless, here we are.

It's just me on the instance right now – but our registrations are open and we've love to have you, should you want some fediverse-enabled long form blogging goodness!

Reliability & Resilience

We've worked hard on increasing our availability and reducing the frequency of outages. Our efforts have largely paid off, with all of our services with uptime greater than 99.5% (and a few at three 9s). We've also implemented automated alerting so we get early notice when things go wrong.

As part of our efforts on this, we also replaced our original pair of edge gateways running haproxy with a single gateway running nginx. nginx has proven to be significantly more reliable than haproxy, and brings additional capabilities we can implement in the future as well.

Financial Security & Sustainability

We also implemented two different donation platforms to give those wishing to donate multiple options to do so – so you can now donate to us with Liberapay and Ko-fi.

We don't have any donors at present – and that's okay. We're able to cover all of our expenses with no issues. But donations will allow us to grow sustainably and offer more services.

In Summary

It's been a wild ride over the last six months. I hope you'll continue with us on our journey!

My first experience using Linux was probably around twenty years ago, when I installed Ubuntu on my laptop (thanks to the people over on the Transport Tycoon IRC channel waaaaaayy back in the day).

Using Linux was a very different experience back then to how it is now. It didn't look the best, and getting non-native games to work was a pain. Of course Wine was still a thing back then and WineHQ's AppDB provided the same resources and reviews as it does today, but compatibility was far more limited then it is today. So it was an interesting experience trying it for the first time, but I fairly quickly switched back to Windows.

Over the years I've switched back and forth between various Linux distros, Windows versions and even a short period running with OSX on a Mac mini.

Regardless, I've still used at least one Linux-based PC consistently through the years – usually a lightweight laptop I use sitting on the couch in front of the TV of an evening (like I'm doing right now, in fact).

But over the years the proposition of Linux as the basis of a gaming PC has changed markedly. Wine's capabilities have continued to grow. Valve's contribution to the Linux gaming ecosystem through Proton (and the follow on upstreaming of a fair amount of their work into Wine itself) has allowed the ecosystem to develop in leaps and bounds.

When the current generation of gaming handhelds hit the market, I was immediately interested. The AMD chips that power these devices are pretty amazing – plenty of CPU cores and very capable iGPUs as well! I decided on the Lenovo Legion Go – it seemed to me like the best balance of price, performance, features and availability in Australia at the time.

But despite the device coming loaded with Windows 11 by default, it never even entered by head to run with Windows on the device. In fact, I never even booted to Windows. Straight away I decided to go with a Linux install, using Bazzite.

If you're unfamiliar with Bazzite, it comes from a broad family of community developed immutable Fedora flavours under the banner of Universal Blue. I'll talk about why I love Universal Blue in more detail in a future post, but to put it simply, it provides simple desktop images that make managing your install simple, regardless of whether you're a newbie or an expert. I firmly believe they're the future of increasing mainstream Linux adoption.

Bazzite was originally a bit weedy on the Lenovo Legion Go (as can be expected on a new piece of hardware, running an OS it wasn't specifically designed for). But over the last 18 months it's grown into a first class device, support wise.

And for a while I watched my last Windows device, my desktop gaming computer, continuing to grind slower and slower starting up and running, despite being (both when I put it together and still today) a fairly top end piece of tech. It's frustrating watching a device get slower and slower for seemingly no reason, so I thought why not, let's give Linux a go.

For the most part, using Linux (via Bluefin, Aurora and finally onto Bazzite) on my gaming computer has been almost entirely a pain-free experience. The vast majority of the games run with fairly similar (or better) performance, and as a whole it's a pretty set-and-forget experience, in comparison to how it was all those years ago when I first gave Ubuntu a try.

Don't like Steam? Use Lutris to integrate all of your other gaming services into your PC. There's Heroic Game Launcher for managing your GOG, EGS or Amazon libraries. There a whole ecosystem of (mostly) open source software to do pretty much anything you want to do with your games.

But there's the one thing that prevents Linux from being the perfect gaming operating system. If you guessed I'm referred to Kernel-level anti cheat, you'd be absolutely correct. And unfortunately, the big publishers are relying on it more and more. That's another conversation for another day, but there's a great resource available at Are We Anti-Cheat Yet to tell you if a game in your library (or one you're considering purchasing) is supported from an anti-cheat point of view in Linux.

So, as a whole, I'm pretty happy with my experience switching to Linux as a gamer. There's limitations of course, but overall I think Linux provides a very well designed and performant experience for the gamer these days.

Just a really quick blog post to let everyone know that we're currently working on our next service – WriteFreely!

WriteFreely is a simple, long form blogging service that integrates with the rest of the Fediverse via ActivityPub! It's written in Go (which I love!) and is still in fairly early development.

A note on the sign up process – WriteFreely only allows the use of MailGun at the moment for transactional emails, which doesn't work with our set up (I had a few issues with their customer service team in the past and ended up moving to a different service). What that means is that automated password resets will not be possible at the moment – so make sure you keep your password safe!

I (Bob) will be using this instance for any long form personal writing I'm wanting to do, as well as for long form official communications from the Fediverse.Games team about any of our services.

There's still some tweaking to be done on this instance to fully optimise and get it ready for true production usage, but we'll be working on that over the coming weeks.

Let's put our hands together for WriteFreely and welcome it to the Fediverse.Games family!

Bob