https://www.pcgamesn.com/valve/steam-controller-shipment-leak

14 tons of Steam Controllers appear to have just arrived in the US, hinting at imminent release date

The traditional first program for a language is one that displays the text “hello, world”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello,_world

A “Hello, world” program is usually a simple computer program that displays on the screen (often the console) a message similar to “Hello, World!”. A small piece of code in most general-purpose programming languages, this program is used to illustrate a language’s basic syntax. Such a program is often the first written by a student of a new programming language,[1] but it can also be used as a sanity check to ensure that the computer software intended to compile or run source code is correctly installed, and that its operator understands how to use it.

https://riptutorial.com/excel-vba/example/13182/hello-world

Now, you might want to do something more-elaborate too, but maybe make that the second program rather than the first.

I don’t produce music, but for transcription, you might look at Rosegarden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosegarden

If you want nondestructive editing, my understanding is that you might want Ardour rather than Audacity. I personally find Ardour’s UI a bit confusing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardour_(software)

Gotcha.

Luanti says that it requires a Intel UHD Graphics 630 GPU or comparable. That’s significantly more powerful than Intel HD 2500:

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-UHD-Graphics-630-Desktop-Coffee-Lake-i3-vs-Intel-HD-2500-Desktop-105-GHz/m359294vsm7696

…though I agree that Luanti and Minecraft-type games in general are fun to try if you haven’t.

That being said, for anything in Ubuntu, I mean…there’s not much penalty to try it, aside from the download time. It’s free, so…shrugs

I mean, that’s not a problem if you’re playing it in Steam – will just transparently work, unless you have an ideological desire to run a Linux-native binary.

But I don’t know if the system requirements will work.

Lethal Company’s system requirements on Steam says that it requires a NVIDIA GForce GTX 1050.

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-HD-2500-Desktop-105-GHz-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1050/m7696vs3650

The GTX 1050 is an order of magnitude more powerful than an Intel HD 2500.

Ah, gotcha. Well, so, for Metal Slug in particular, I’m pretty sure that there’s Metal Slug releases on Steam.

Yeah.

https://store.steampowered.com/search?term=metal+slug

If you’re wondering about a Steam game, you can check ProtonDB to see comments from Linux users as to any compatibility issues.

https://www.protondb.com/search?q=metal+slug

The Steam installer is in Ubuntu. So install that, run it, and stuff in Steam should be available.

For MAME, I can’t personally recommend a frontend. MAME iteself is already packaged in Ubuntu. You’re going to need the ROM files, which are floating around out there on the Internet (probably something like mslug.zip, mslug2.zip, etc, and there will probably be some dependent ROMs for the system in question. checks Probably called neogeo.zip, the system ROMs, since it’s a Neo-Geo game. On my system, the roms are stored in ~/.mame/roms (the tilde representing one’s home directory, if you’re not familiar with the convention).

RetroArch is also an “emulate many different types of hardware” emulator in Ubuntu, and you might consider it to be more-approachable; it can apparently also act as a frontend for MAME, though I haven’t used it as such.

For games kind of like Metal Slug…hmm. I haven’t really played much in that line recently, though they used to be popular in the 1990s. These recommendations are gonna be pretty old, but I guess side-view platformer shooters, like Contra. Bionic Commando. You could probably emulate these, and I’d guess that they’ve likely also seen Steam releases. I’m wildly out of date when it comes to current games in the genre, though. “Metroidvania” games might fit this too; they tend to be a more-slow-paced genre, with backtracking and traveling all around a large map while a character gains abilities and powers, but they do the side-view shooter thing, but they have the platforming and shooting aspect. Those have seen a lot more development in recent years.

Older Contra games:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1018020/Contra_Anniversary_Collection/

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=1628%2C5379&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

There’s a list of Metroidvania 2D platformers on Steam sorted by user reviews; I’ve generally found Steam review score to be pretty accurate as to how much I like a game (though there are a few exceptions). I…actually own a copy of Rain World, though I haven’t played it, but that should run on your system and I’ve seen a lot of people praise it, and it’s highly-rated there. It is considered to be difficult (which arcade Metal Slug games aren’t, if you throw enough quarters at them).

I haven’t played Captain Commando or Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, but both look like isometric beat-em-ups. I haven’t played anything there in a long time either; I think the last game in the genre I played was probably the arcade Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, from something like the 1990s, when they were a popular genre in the arcades. Here’s a list of Steam beat-em-ups sorted by user review, though:

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=4158&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

That’ll mention the release year, and I’d guess that anything aside from new, 3D-perspective games would be fine.

In general, fast-paced, drop-in-and-play type games have a genre — albeit a very broad one, “Arcade”, and while my experience has been that it’s something of a grab-bag for a lot of different types of games.

Here’s a bunch of Steam “Arcade”-tagged games sorted by user reviews.

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=1773&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

On that list, of the games near the top, I can say that I enjoyed HoloCure and Vampire Survivors, which are in a fairly young genre of video games kicked off by Vampire Survivors — games where the main character keeps automatically-attacking and getting increasingly powerful while increasingly-powerful waves of enemies come at them. Geometry Arena. Nova Drift, which is kind of a modern take on Asteroids. Both of those have one guiding a ship around the screen dodging attacks and shooting back; they shouldn’t be particularly graphically-intensive, don’t require much from 3D hardware.

EDIT: You don’t mention them, but shmups were also popular in the arcade (maybe a little prior to the era with the games you mentioned). These have a constantly-vertically or horizontally-scrolling level with a little spaceship that shoots enormous amounts of firepower at enemies. In recent years, “bullet hell” shmups have become more-popular, which tend to have extremely large numbers of projectiles on the screen at once; not quite my cup of tea, but many people like those. Shmups have remained a genre that is very gentle in terms of hardware requirements. We have a dedicated shmups community on the Threadiverse, !shmups@lemmus.org, so if you have specific interests, they might give better recommendations.

EDIT2: Nova Drift lists Intel HD 4000 as their minimum system requirement, so I might want to forego that or be prepared to return it if it doesn’t start; I don’t know if it’ll run. Intel HD 4000 looks like it supports DirectX 11.1, and Intel HD 2500 apparently does 10-point-something in terms of hardware functionality.

Do I have to use steam?

No, but it’s a relatively-plug-and-play way to get access to a lot of commercial games.

GOG.com is another alternative, and there are a few other stores.

There are also free games in your existing distro. They aren’t generally comparable to commercial games, but they’re there.

Which tittles do you recommend for integrated intel hd2500 graphics on linux

I mean…that’s pretty broad. Maybe if you could list some games that you like, or a genre at least?

I can list games that I like, but they might fall completely flat with other people.

From a performance standpoint, that’d be probably any 2D game and…let’s see. The HD 2500 was released in 2014, and wasn’t a stellar performer at that time, so probably any 3D game that was released prior to that date?

Like, you can probably look at any list of popular older games for ideas; doesn’t need to be Linux-specific.

searches

https://gamesreq.com/50-best-games-for-weak-pcs-2025-edition/

From that list, games that I’ve played that I enjoy are Half-Life 2, Hades, Terraria, Vampire Survivors, Slay the Spire, Balatro, Fallout: New Vegas, Far Cry 3, FTL: Faster Than Light, Bastion, Transistor, Don’t Starve, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Max Payne 2, Factorio, and Rimworld, all of which you can get on Steam and have worked fine for me on Linux, but…again, it really depends on what sort of games you like. There are games on there that are popular that didn’t particularly rub me the right way (e.g. Dota 2 is popular, but realistically should be played multiplayer, which I don’t want to do. Ori and the Blind Forest is pretty, but didn’t grab my personal interest). But…they might be exactly what you’re looking for.

Also can i get a recommendation about using mame emulators.

MAME is a particular emulator, which emulates many different types of hardware. There are a number of different frontends to it — setting up MAME manually takes a bit of work, though it’s how I’ve used it — but I’m not sure what you’re asking. If you just want recommendations for an emulator and not specifically MAME, then maybe list a system that you’d like to emulate (e.g. Super Nintendo, or whatever). If you want a frontend recommendation, I haven’t used other frontends myself, though you might get recommendations from others. If you want a recommendation as to games for older systems that you could run emulated in MAME, that’s another possibility, but again, I think I’d ask what sort of games you’ve enjoyed or a genre or something.

I mean, you will almost certainly be able to build machines that outperform the Steam Machine 2 in bang-for-buck if Valve isn’t subsidizing it, which they said that they won’t. If not at release, then a few years in, because a console-style periodic hardware release model will lag whatever’s at the bleeding edge.

The desktop I’m typing this on isn’t gonna be cheaper than the Steam Machine 2, but it is unquestionably going to be more powerful.

But that’s not gonna be what the Steam Machine is for — you could always build a DIY gaming PC, unlike with consoles. It’s an open platform. I had a media PC plugged into my TV with a TV interface card a quarter-century back. What Valve is gonna be aiming for is going to be ease of use, the “you plug it into your TV, plug it into power, turn on gamepad, play games that target Steam Machine 2” thing. That’s where consoles have been able to pick up users that haven’t done the PC.

QUIC works hand-in-hand with HTTP/3’s multiplexed connections, allowing multiple streams of data to reach all the endpoints independently, and hence independent of packet losses involving other streams. In contrast, HTTP/2, which is carried over TCP, can suffer head-of-line-blocking delays if multiple streams are multiplexed on a TCP connection and any of the TCP packets on that connection are delayed or lost.

SCTP was going to do that too. It hasn’t seen much uptake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol

Features of SCTP include:

• Delivery of chunks within independent streams eliminates unnecessary head-of-line blocking, as opposed to TCP byte-stream delivery.

I’m rather concerned about what I do when my Surface Pro 7 dies

Well, most of what I’ve seen expects memory prices to be coming down in 2028. So if it’s got two years of use in it, you’re probably good.

If you’re desperate for a laptop sooner and cheaper, you can get used laptops on eBay (well, maybe somewhere else if you’re not in the US; dunno what the used PC market is like globally).

Yeah, I thought about changing it, but…the problem is that while the base game is playable now for $0, the overwhelming bulk of the game’s content is in expansion packs. Like, I don’t think that people really buy and play just the base game; it’d be more like a demo.

EDIT: A similar game might be DCS. I mean, yes, technically the base game is free, and you get (checks) a WW2 fighter and a Soviet ground-attack jet. But…basically that acts as a demo, and everyone is going to go out and get at least their favorite aircraft, and most of those aircraft cost about as much as a full-priced video game does. Hell, a couple of them are $80 each.

Yeah, but thanks for the heads-up!

I should totally put release date on there too. Just a sec, will add on a column with that.

I think that a bigger story there is the dominance of F2P games.

EDIT: Added release year after @Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world mentioned age.

EDIT2: And country of origin, while I’m at it.

EDIT3: Note that the release dates on some of these are a bit apples-to-oranges. For example, Escape From Tarkov only had its 1.0 release in 2025, but had been widely-played well before that, so maybe “availability” would be more interesting than “release”. World of Warcraft Classic only split from World of Warcraft in 2019, but both games have an origin in World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004.

Followed by a lot of Jira.

It was clear that more use of Bugzilla would cure many of society’s ills.

Yall know that ‘Fallout’ was originally turn-based?

And there’s still the Wasteland series, which is what the isometric Fallout games heavily derived from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jo2BKNtKDI

This guy recommends Overload. I haven’t played it, but…

My main requirement was for the touchpad to actually have physical tactile buttons, fuck that whole solid slab of touch thing, I want 2 proper clicky buttons.

I’m in the same boat, except I want three for Linux, where the third button is more-useful than in Windows, and there are very, very few laptops that have that any more — a few Thinkpad models. I finally gave up on it, just accepted that I was going to have a laptop without same, though you can get USB touchpads with physical buttons if you want to haul one around (and I keep one in my car for just this reason — sometimes it’s worth hauling out).

But I want a Kenshi like game set in Morrowind.

Honestly, I’d like a Kenshi-like game set in damn near any setting.

Like, the Kenshi setting is interesting, but in terms of gameplay…it’s essentially unique from a gameplay standpoint. I’m still a bit amazed that nobody has made other games in the genre.

There is a sequel that is being worked on and will come out someday…