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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.