From my understanding Steam Decks come with SteamOS preinstalled on them. Yet when you look at the list of games on steam that are compatible with Linux + SteamOS, its a small fraction.
But what confuses me is this page
https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck/mygames
It shows your games that are compatible with the Steam Deck which has a Linux based OS. And almost my entire library is compatible with the Deck. Can someone help me understand how this is possible? If games are compatible with the Steam Deck, why wouldn’t they also work on Ubuntu for example?
Games that have native Linux versions are uncommon, but Steam on Linux includes a program called Proton, which provides a Windows-compatible environment so that games made for Windows can run without being manually ported. It isn’t exactly the same, so some games don’t work quite right, which is why not every game is compatible with Steam on Linux.
Any game that’s compatible with the Steam Deck should run fine on any other Linux system, as long as the underlying hardware is powerful enough.
Thanks for clearing this up. It makes me think I’ll be switching to Ubuntu sooner than I expected.
expired
What limitations are there from running a game in Linux within a Windows environment?
Im Linux inexperienced and just curious and drunk and like blahaj.zone people they seem to know their shit
Games that work are generally exactly the same. If you sit down in front of a Pc already running the game you cant tell the difference.
Sometimes you need to fiddle a bit to get a game working. Sometimes you click play and you play. Some developers dont want you to play their games so they dont work (anti cheat).
Most things work very well. Some games are more fun to get working than playing the game in my experience.
https://www.protondb.com/
It differs per game. The game I play works flawlessly.
The only games I’ve had not work are games with invasive anti-cheats: many competitive fps games and hoyoverse games.
Not all competitive games fail tho, overwatch, for example, does work using bottles.
If the game is reasonably well-coded, there’s not going to be any obvious difference between a game running on Windows, a game running native on Linux, and a game running using Proton.
I mean yeah, you could have some performance impact (usually light, occasionaly not so), maybe video not playing (some games use video formats for cutscenes which can’t be distributed on Linux installs), or maybe issues with windowing (Tropico 6 has an weird bug where the game mouse pointer has a bit of offset compared to the real one, until you change screen size).
But in most cases, if it works, it works the same.
As someone that swapped to running Linux full time on home rig, yes proton on Linux works great.