Linux in The News 6-20-22

Last Updated on June 20, 2022 by KC7NYR

Valve Releases Proton 7.0-3 with Support for 19 Games to Play on Linux, More Improvements
Proton 7.0-3

Valve today released Proton 7.0-3 as the latest stable version of its compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components to improve your Linux gaming experience.

Arriving one and a half months after Proton 7.0-2, the Proton 7.0-3 release is here to add support for more Windows games that you can now play on your GNU/Linux distribution through Steam Play/Proton.

These include Age of Chivalry, Beneath a Steel Sky, Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamer Edition, Cities XXL, Cladun X2, Cursed Armor, Flanarion Tactics, Gary Grigsby’s War in the East, Gary Grigsby’s War in the West, Iragon: Prologue, MechWarrior Online, Small Radios Big Televisions, Split/Second, Star Wars Episode I Racer, Stranger of Sword City Revisited, Succubus x Saint, V Rising, Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide, and We Were Here Forever.

Of course, Proton 7.0-3 also includes various bug fixes to improve support for games that were already supported. These include Castle Morihisa, Deathloop, Elden Ring, Final Fantasy XIV Online, Mini Ninja, Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition, Resident Evil Revelations 2, Street Fighter V, Sekiro: Shadow Die Twice, The Turing Test, The Legend of Heroes: Zero No Kiseki, and WRC10.

In addition, it fixes video playback in the Disintegration, Dread X Collection: The Hunt, EZ2ON REBOOT : R, El Hijo – A Wild West Tale, Ember Knights, Outward: Definitive Edition, Postal 4: No Regerts, Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, Solasta: Crown of the Magister, Street Fighter V, and The Room 4: Old Sins games.

Among other changes, Proton 7.0-3 adds support for xinput controller reordering on the Steam Deck, improves text rendering in the Rockstar Launcher, addresses a bug in the S&box platform and game development toolkit to allow it to find games to join, and improves steering wheel detection.

Under the hood, the Proton 7.0-3 ships with dxvk-nvapi 0.5.4, Wine Mono 7.3.0, and DXVK 1.10.1-57-g279b4b7e software. For more details on the changes implemented in this update and to download the source tarball, check out the release notes on the project’s GitHub page. Meanwhile, you can update your Steam installations to Proton 7.0-3 via the Updates tab in the Steam Client.

 

Mozilla Just Made Firefox the Most Secure Web Browser for All Users
Mozilla finally enabled a privacy protection feature that potentially makes it the safest web browser at the time. Do you think so?

Mozilla Firefox is one of the most secure open-source web browsers available.

Undoubtedly, you get the freedom to customize it to harden security, which is why Tor Browser utilizes Firefox at its core.

And, also one of the reasons why I keep coming back to Firefox.

Now, Mozilla has finally enabled a new feature for all desktop users, making it the most secure browser (or as they claim).

Here, I’m not talking about anything new, but an existing feature in Firefox, i.e., Total Cookie Protection. It was introduced with Firefox 86 last year, but it was not enabled by default for all users.

Total Cookie Protection for all users

Whether you are using Windows, Mac, or Linux, the Total Cookie Protection is being rolled out to everyone, making it one of its core features enabled by default.

Initially, to use the feature, you had to enable the strict mode (Enhanced Tracking Protection). But, now, you no longer need to do that.

What is it?

In case you are curious, Total Cookie Protection isolates every website with its cookies. Cookies are small bits of data sent to your browser by a website.

So, the cookies will not be shared among websites, thereby, preventing cross-site tracking.

Separate cookie jars will be created for each website you visit.

Mozilla’s blog post explains more about it as:

Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to only that website. No other websites can reach into the cookie jars that don’t belong to them and find out what the other websites’ cookies know about you — giving you freedom from invasive ads and reducing the amount of information companies gather about you.

So, Is it a big deal?

Even with all the privacy tracking protection and content blockers in place, cross-site tracking is a problem that not everyone is aware of.

Hence, with cross-site cookie interactions, a lot of your personal activities and habits can help a digital tracking company build an online profile of yours.

But, with Mozilla Firefox, enabling the feature by default on top of all other privacy measures by Firefox, ensures that you should get the most private experience.

And, all that without needing to tweak anything, which should make things convenient for any privacy-centric user.