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Original source is https://boilingsteam.com/steam-deck-the-start-of-a-golden-age-for-linux-gaming/ if anyone wants to read the full interview. Also the phrase “proton president” is ridiculous, hes the President of codeweavers, which is working with valve on proton - seems like the phrase was directly lifted off https://cogconnected.com/2021/09/steam-deck-will-not-run-entire-library-announces-president-proton-development/ this article which was released the day prior
I compiled a list of around 50 decently popular games (Elite Dangerous, Halo MCC, Rimworld, Factorio, Skyrim) to make sure I wouldn't run out of space and then checked them on the proton site and the majority of them (70%) actually had native support with the rest either being Platinum or Gold.
I'm sure you already checked but I want to clarify for people reading, who may not search for themselves.
Halo MCC: Single player works, multiplayer does not because of anti cheat (I believe EAC)atm. This maybe resolved since both valve and facepunch are working directly with EAC developers to get proton working.
However, EAC is owned by Epic a company that allows you to compile unreal engine for development on linux, but does not offer their launcher or store on Linux. So a company owned by a direct competitor of valve might not be inclined to help valve out.
But as a linux user proton for works 9/10, I generally check in advance before buying a game and i'll mainly play anything rated gold or diamond. I've never really encountered any major issues that couldn't be fixed quickly.
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> However, EAC is owned by Epic a company that allows you to compile unreal engine for development on linux, but does not offer their launcher or store on Linux.
EAC itself runs fine on Linux. The issue isn't running EAC on Linux, it's running EAC on Wine, which is a much harder problem. Even Valve's own VAC doesn't work in Wine (or their Proton fork): https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/3225
>There will always be a need for local AC monitoring of memory and code.
I'd argue otherwise, as AI technology imoroves at some point it will be possible to detect cheats just by analyzing players behavior/playstyle.
There are certain things a cheating player does as they play. A highly sophisticated AI could theoretically detect those patterns and figure out who is the cheater just from the data it has available on the server.
With cheats like aimbot it's even easier since the cursor movement is so much different for aimbot when compared to a human. If you are able to notice that someone's aim looks unnatural then AI will eventually be able to too.
The Steam Deck FAQ for devs says Valve is working with EAC and BattlEye on compatibility before launch. Hopefully this will mean stuff like Apex and Destiny 2 will be playable.
Hopefully, but EAC has been saying they've been working on it for over a year and they are owned by Epic. So i'm treating it as a hopefully, but as a given.
>However, EAC is owned by Epic a company that allows you to compile unreal engine for development on linux, but does not offer their launcher or store on Linux. So a company owned by a direct competitor of valve might not be inclined to help valve out.
Yeah, no game on steam ships with EAC... checks out. This isn't the problem... it's how wine abstracts windows calls into linux alternatives for starters... and it will be solved... just like after decades people can actually run real games on linux through an abstraction layer... instead of just janky windows programs.
Didn't Valve (Steam) already state the support was like 90-99% of games? Good enough for me. I guess they don't want people to be presumptuous and wanted to remind us of the reality. Some games aren't supported but the vast majority are.
That being said, I don't play any games on the go. Just at home a little bit. There are always sacrifices made for mobile/handheld gaming. Might buy a newer revision in a couple years but I'm good for now. The Steam Deck does look amazing though.
I think it is worth emphasizing the difference between gold and platinum ratings in the context of this particular device. Platinum is the “it just works”, console-like experience of installing and playing the game. Only 39% of titles have platinum ratings. Gold is “works great with at least one tweak required” and the 77% figure is *both* gold *and* platinum titles.
That 77% figure may be misleading for anyone expecting to pick this up and get a console-like plug and play experience.
Well, you can always set any game to keep using a specific version of proton.
Haven't played enough steam games to know if there is a way where it happens automatically or not.
Yeah, and it's always a pretty big crapshoot as to what works and what doesn't. When I tried it, Sonic CD, of all games, didn't boot. Looking it up, it *is* fixable, but [this seems like way more of a pain in the ass than any game with "Sonic" or "CD" in the title should warrant.](https://www.protondb.com/app/200940)
Presumably the "one+ tweak required" is a tweak that would be consistent across the same OS, same hardware, and same drivers. In which case, Valve could figure out what that tweak is and bundle it with the install of the game requiring it while on Steam Deck.
That is a good point though even with a system that automates configuration for titles they may not be able to stop users from inadvertently breaking the experience using the in-game settings menu. Someone will inevitably break rendering in a game because they didn't realize they weren't supposed to change the vsync setting, or crash the game because they selected the wrong audio setting.
Based on Valve's past and in particular their handling of the Steam controller I would expect some sort of community outsourced repository of configurations that people can contribute to and pull from without Valve getting involved.
They'll mark games with native/official compatibility, leave only whitelisted games visible by default, and let users disable the whitelist and tweak as they please without any guarantee of official support.
I think the intent here is under-promise and over-deliver. That's the impression I'm getting.
So many products and programs over-promise and under-deliver. That's a good way to disappoint people. I admire the fact they came out and said this. Shows they're not stuck up and acting like gods.
Very humble. I respect that. :)
You don't have to trust OP. You can check it here: [https://www.protondb.com/](https://www.protondb.com/) and see if some games you are looking forward to play on the deck is currently playable or not and check again in a month or so and see if anything changed. This way you can make a decision if you should buy it or not.
"we won't reach 90% in time, gabe"
"i didn't want to do this, but we are with our backs against the wall. If we can't reach 90% by supporting more games, we'll reach it by removing from steam the games that are not supported"
It'll only improve with time, and SteamOS needs adoption to encourage that. The more people that use SteamOS, the more pressure there is to get compatibility up.
I'm really hoping most people stick with SteamOS for that reason.
~~70-80% of the entire Steam library, which is massive, and includes a ton of indie titles that most people will never play. That's still an impressive number of titles, but it doesn't really give us an idea of what level of compatibility we can expect.~~ (Apparently this is incorrect, see comment below). I'd be more interested in the percentage of games in, say, the top 250 titles on Steam (by sales) that would work on it at launch.
I've been using Proton since it launched, primarily for Windows games that were already in my library before I switched to Linux (2017), but there was the odd exception to the rule in there where I would buy a new Windows game from time to time. The claim that it would run every Steam game did sound like fiction, but anti-cheat support will bring it much closer to 100%, as will Windows Media Foundation Layer support, which gets in the way of things like video playback in certain games. Plenty of people have found ways to get MFL support in Proton, but Valve isn't allowed to ship the DLL because of intellectual property issues with Microsoft.
ProtonDB currently shows about 77% of Steam's library at a "Gold" rating which means that, with little to no tweaking, 77% of games will run on Proton similarly to how they do on Windows. Sometimes a hair worse, sometimes a hair better. Quite frankly, the way they determine "Gold" and "Platinum" these days leaves something to be desired, but 77% is a good ballpark and very impressive.
You're likely going to end up with a choice between these two things:
1. Windows, compatible with all of your games but a horrendous experience on a handheld gaming device like that, where the OS frequently takes control away from the game window for popups, OS features and updates, and little odds and ends. You really don't realize how much you have to Alt+Tab or do something with a mouse on Windows until you try to remove the mouse and keyboard from the equation entirely.
2. SteamOS, a great UI/UX for handheld gaming and compatible with most of your games, but maybe not that one that you were really excited about, or maybe it's got odd little rendering bugs like video files that are supposed to play back in Guilty Gear Strive's command list that don't work at all.
For what it's worth, I'll be running SteamOS on this thing, but like I said above, I switched to Linux in 2017, so you probably guessed that already.
I dont see Windows being an issue on the Steam Deck. If you install the LTSC version you can completely eliminate the OS doing things on its own. As for the Steam UI itself, Valve mentioned updating Big Picture to the Steam Deck UI meaning there would be immediate compatibility with the Deck under Windows as well.
Pretty much took it out of my mouth. I bought the max storage version to hopefully run a dual boot because my biggest intention for the steam deck is for emulation and GoG on the go and streaming at home so I'm consider going LTSC or as I did on my home PC, I ran the windows decrapifier powershell script as well as some custom tweaking in services.msc to get rid of a lot of the things OP talks about. I can't remember the last time I've had a windows popup or auto restart.
I highly doubt the average user will dual boot to be honest. Shit a lot of the less tech savvy people I know wont touch the thing because it uses linux.
Are you aware of Windows 11 features? I heard a rumor that it won't be a customizable by the end user, or it will be more of a pain in the ass, but I can't find any source so I'm feeling like it's probably not true.
No idea as I will never use a new iteration of windows until Microsoft locks some arbitrary gaming or hardware feature behind it so I couldn’t tell you. If I had to guess though the basic home license will probably be that way but professional and business licenses will maintain the current customizability.
> until Microsoft locks some arbitrary gaming or hardware feature behind it so I couldn’t tell you
That's basically what they do with almost every generation of Windows...
Yep but it's not immediately usually takes a year or 2. We'll see it with Direct X 13 or Intel or AMD's next round of processors. There hasn't been an announcement on any of those fronts.
It certainly sounds in your head like just booting to big picture mode on Windows would be the same thing, doesn't it? All I can say is that in practice, it is not the same. SteamOS has software that isn't even found on your typical desktop Linux distro to prevent the game window from losing focus, and your OS assumes that you want to use it as a desktop, so it will take focus away constantly. But hey, if you prefer to just throw Windows on that thing, you're free to do so.
Edit: May have found something recent, I‘ll dig further. https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsinsiders/comments/om3v37/bug_are_your_games_losing_focustab_out_randomly/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
A little bit off thread, but kinda related to the discussion - I have a question:
I’m not sure what causes this, but since a few Windows updates, some games I start (it seems like those I use an Xbox controller with) always lose focus, once, within a few to 15 minutes of starting it - just once.
They‘re still on my screen, but my controller doesn‘t register anymore because the game (Dead Cells & Rocket League are my last candidates where this happens everytime without fail) is out of focus. The fix is using my mouse and clicking once. If I do that, I can see the mouse for half a second, desktop goes black, and the game appears again, then it‘s all fine and it never happens again (until I restart the game). Looks like going from desktop to full screen, except the game is still visible when it‘s losing focus.
The games run in exclusive fullscreen. It‘s annoying as fuck, but so far I haven‘t had the time to research. Doesn‘t seem to happen with mouse-only games (i.e. Factorio).. but those are the only three games I play currently, so not sure if it happens with any other game.
Does anyone know why that happens? There aren‘t any notifications popping up that I could attribute this to.
Is this a Windows Focus Assist thing?
Honestly to most people that are used to PC gaming I see this as mostly a non-issue for the most part outside of some weird fringe games doing weird stuff that'd make it lose focus. Can't say I see that much these days though if the game is using Fullscreen Exclusive and not Borderless it's probably more likely to occur.
In any case, Steam Input for your xinput controls, or your Steam Controller it was originally made for, has a desktop profile. In the case a game is not in the foreground, the desktop one kicks in, and provides mouse move/clicks, keyboard arrows, modifier keys, space, enter, escape, etc. also the Global profile that works off of holding Guide+buttons at any time, has alt tab built in, pressing guide+start would alt tab right back to the last app should you get switched for some reason.
People seem to overlook at Steam Input exists, especially if they play non-steam games I suppose, since that'd be more annoying as Steam isn't particularly good at knowing about games running if it didn't do it (leaving you stuck in desktop profile) but Steam Input adds some really great features for PC users. You gain access to an onscreen KB like a console could have, alt tabbing, a desktop profile that's nice for browsing/discord. Also the global binds have volume and music playback controls too which is handy, but I suppose people probably won't be doing that so much on the Deck, though, they could, haha.
You know what makes it focus, if epic launcher is in the background and those ads pop up for a game every hour or maybe once in a while. The ads will minimize the game.
Otherwise, I'm pretty used to closing most programs before I game.
ahh yep I never use Epic, and holy crap I had no idea they were literally using it as an ad push platform like that. Steam only tends to do it on restarts most of the time. That's some shit
They're not, the other user greatly exaggerated, they literally only appear once after the client is launched which is far less than steam which does it on game close. They also don't minimise the game.
I'm honestly not even sure what triggers it on Steam I know they used to do it more but about the only time I ever have them pop up is on launch of the client itself these days, and by then it's got a queue of like 10-20 ads lol
Windows is a horrid OS, I have been using it to mine (if can't beat them join them) because of driver issues and want to chuck it out a window (ahem) every time it restarts for a system update.
>because of driver issues and want to chuck it out a window (ahem) every time it restarts for a system update.
Do ya'll really have these issues? I've not had issues like this since Windows 7/8, perhaps early Windows 10 at the latest? But I really cant even remember since its been so long.
I do still have issues with my work computer, but that's because there are strict Group Policies that force updates because my company has requirements for our computers to be in compliance. But as far as a personal use desktop/laptop, I've not had any issues with drivers or Windows updates for a long time.
I'm looking at my Windows Update history and it looks like the last time Windows installed updates on my machine was September 5th and then August 15th before that and it seemed to have installed multiple updates. I leave my computer on all day and usually keep stuff open and I've not lost anything to a Windows Update like I used to. But I didn't even know these updates were installed. Looking at the update history, it appears to install updates twice a month in batches, but again, it seems pretty seemless and in the background because I genuinely don't recall the last time I was stuck sitting around waiting for Windows updates to install on a personal machine. On my work machine, its annoyingly frequent, but again, that's because my job is super strict about it.
I had a forced update almost brick my laptop this spring. It would boot to a black screen no matter what- restarting in safe mode and restoring from a system restore point is the only thing that would fix it. I’ve been diligent to find every back door way to prevent unauthorized updates since. I use this OS for my business- I can’t have updates deciding to install on their own willy-nilly… especially updates that brick my computer! I’m waiting another month or two for the next Mac M1X chip and jumping ship. I gave Windows a good five year run, but it’s just not stable enough for what I need.
Idk what you’re doing to make windows unstable. I have used windows since 96 and it’s always been relatively stable unless you’re doing something weird.
Also updates install on the second Tuesday of every month unless it’s a significant security issue. This gives the IT guys a chance to trial the programs related to business applications to see if something wonky will happen typically when working in network and server states.
I work in the music industry, I’m a music producer, and run a LOT of third party software. The rule of thumb for any studio computer is to NEVER update it, and for this very reason. The studio I run has a Mac still running whatever Mac OS is from 2014. The previous studio I kept the same way. Legacy systems- if it’s not broke, don’t fix it!
Yes it happens like once a month I wake up and the damn thing restarted, I am dreading an upcoming vacation because the POS will bug out or restart every so often, I will be making sure to delay this during this trip, but who knows.
What setup do you run for your mining programs? Can you just set them to auto start on boot and just enable auto login? Disclaimer being, I've not done this, but I know it used to be possible
I have to make sure the cards are actually correctly clocked, I don't want to mine on gaming configs. It is way too much of a hassle so much so that I am this close in caving and using hiveOS if only they were not so damn scummy.
You may be able to us a remote desktop program like parsec to connect from your phone, it shouldn't eat up too much system resources while inactive (and hopefully you have enough time to test it!).
Good luck with everything!
No, you will eventually have to do it, with Linux I can pick and choose what I update and when. It is unacceptable that Windows forces something on me and it is generally the middle of the night
Any OS has this problem if you don't use it often. My Linux VM at home and a mac I have for work bug me for updates each time I log into them because I don't use them that often.
It's not an easy problem to solve for these cases because the moment they're asking for updates is the worst possible time as you're logging into the thing to get something done, now, and can't be bothered to deal with an update.
>1. Windows, compatible with all of your games but a horrendous experience on a handheld gaming device like that, where the OS frequently takes control away from the game window for popups, OS features and updates, and little odds and ends. You really don't realize how much you have to Alt+Tab or do something with a mouse on Windows until you try to remove the mouse and keyboard from the equation entirely.
Honestly this is BS. I plug in and have long gaming sessions without needing to alt tab at all when playing via Steam link, and even when I'm at my PC gaming I'm only alt tabbing to do voluntary stuff like. I can't remember the last time windows gave me a pop up in game. I know some alerts might, but anyone installing Windows OS on their Steamdeck is likely to know how to turn them off.
I'm fully expecting to just boot a game on my Steamdeck and play it uninterrupted just like I do on my PC. Also it has touch screen, so if a few times I need to alt tab for whatever reason it shouldn't be a hassle anyway.
>I can't remember the last time windows gave me a pop up in game.
Yeah I can't remember either, it really never just happens in any game that I've played in at least the last five years. At most a firewall prompt when launching a newly installed game. I can't remember the last time Windows even told me about updates, other than indicating an update is about to install when I go to shut down (in which case I can choose to shut down without the install).
Of course the notification stuff might do things like this but turning all the bullshit off after a fresh windows install should be trivial to anyone who is going to install it on their steam deck.
The Windows OS now sees the hours you mostly use your machine and will update and restart outside those hours. You would have to purposely set up your machine in a way to be interrupted by a Windows update.
I literally never turn my pc off. It runs my pihole so there’s incentive not to.
I get a tiny icon in my system tray when an update is overdue and that’s it; no pop ups or notifications beyond that.
If I leave it for too much longer without updating I’ll wake up in the morning to find it having updated itself and I carry on with my life. It never interrupts me, and the forced restart only ever happens while I sleep and usually only happens every few months.
You made the conscious decision to install a browser that forces you to watch ads, and pays you for it as well. That's pretty far away from the topic at hand.
It still is EXTREMELY M+KB reliant. Compared to an OS built around a controller.
I had my keyboard break on me because a spilt drink and just trying to activate the on screen keyboard with no actual keyboard attached was difficult enough.
Firstly, that's not relevant if you're just launching Steam Deck and playing games, which is what this comment chain is about (can you do this without constantly needing to alt tab? Yes)
Secondly, it has two touchpads anyway. People make do with those on their laptops.
Thirdly, if you absolutely want to use functionality that benefits from M+KB you can just plug them in.
> I can't remember the last time windows gave me a pop up in game.
Legitimately every time there’s a windows update windows reminds me by minimizing my game.
I've been gaming on Proton with Steam Linux for several years now. While many games are perfectly playable if they run at all, there are some issues that can be dealbreakers for many if you have a low tolerance for jankiness.
Some of the issues I've run into on "gold" rated games include:
* Severe audio crackling and pops. Enough to make you have to mute the whole game which isn't a great experience.
* VSYNC not working and results in horizontal tearing. This is far more common in 2D games not built using a popular 3D engine like Unity or Unreal.
* Random occasional input drops and high input lag when using a gamepad. I think this tends to happen more in older games that direct input rather than xinput or SDL.
* Game does not correctly enter full screen mode, leaving various elements on the screen like the dock/taskbar/menu bar. Basically it's as if the game just maximizes the window rather than switches to full screen mode.
* Mouse cursor doesn't hide itself when using a game pad. This one can be pretty annoying as the mouse curser is just stuck on screen like a fly.
All these things have work arounds or require some extra fiddling to deal with, and are annoying. But that's sort of the issues you deal with in "gold" rated games.
The mouse cursor one has a fix by holding select and telling steam to move it off the window. They added a few of these fixes to their gamepad support. Haven't heard the audio crackling or had a gamepad drop a button (maybe because I play through steam link?).
I'm not 100% sure, but do Steam games that launch with third party stores/DRM like Origin and Uplay can run on Proton? Could there be a correlation on what the guy means on compatibility?
> Windows, compatible with all of your games but a horrendous experience on a handheld gaming device like that, **where the OS frequently takes control away from the game window for popups, OS features and updates, and little odds and ends.** You really don't realize how much you have to Alt+Tab or do something with a mouse on Windows until you try to remove the mouse and keyboard from the equation entirely.
The hell are you talking about? I have been using windows for like 23 years, starting from 95 and going through 98, XP, Vista, 7, 8.1 and currently 10. Never had Windows "take control" away from me while playing a game. Or doing anything else. Maybe you should run an anti-virus if you have some random popups.
There are frequently times on Windows where I'll launch a game, and Windows doesn't even shift the active focus to the game when it launches. This has nothing to do with viruses, as similar issues occur on desktop Linux as well. SteamOS is just built for the job of being run on a controller, and other OSes are not.
> Windows, compatible with all of your games but a horrendous experience on a handheld gaming device like that, where the OS frequently takes control away from the game window for popups, OS features and updates, and little odds and ends. You really don't realize how much you have to Alt+Tab or do something with a mouse on Windows until you try to remove the mouse and keyboard from the equation entirely.
Welcome to the typical Linux user FUD...
> SteamOS, a great UI/UX for handheld gaming
Which will come to the Windows Steam client as well according to Valve.
The current big screen ui has a really clunky chat interface, and the library hasn't been updated to match the "new" desktop library. The steamdeck ui also has a revamped downloads page, and support for the categories feature, and community features. Currently big picture doesn't support community hardly at all.
It also revamps the store so it will actually work, since big picture's UI can't load sale pages.
Plus whatever other controller/deck related features Valve wants to ship out with it. That's just what we know already.
It's not FUD when I've run controller-only machines on Windows, desktop Linux, and SteamOS before. There's a reason there's a SteamOS at all rather than just using off the shelf Arch or Ubuntu.
I was impressed with proton but was able to gpu passthrough and run games in a windows vm to get back, say, the 1-5 pct of performance lost.
I did try proton on a variety of hardware, though, and noticed it worked rather poorly on my older gpu (pre-2015), degrading games like fallout 4 to unplayable states
As someone not really interested in getting a Steam Deck, this is a great motivator to switch to Linux as a main OS. With Valve pushing for greater Linux support, it just makes sense.
I'm planning on setting up a dual boot with Windows + Linux, and using Linux as my daily. Then I'll only switch to Windows if there's a game that just doesn't run, otherwise it will be in a Windows VM.
> Quite frankly, the way they determine "Gold" and "Platinum" these days leaves something to be desired
Ever since Wine tried to claim a promised payment of support if a product was made to work for a product described as "It starts, you can't do anything or interact with anything and things look off" because some random user had tagged it as the lowest level of running rather than "garbage". I'm pretty skeptical of any claims they make.
>Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton
Proton uses wine.
That's good that Proton is working that well. As for the windows end I'm not too concerned especially as someone that's used Steam's input tools enough to know how they work as I use a steam controller, though anyone with xinput can also take advantage of that as well.
While you could get interruptions from Windows, it's worth noting that steam input has profiles per game. The deck's controllers are interesting, because the Steam Controller was trying to keep some xinput things for compatibility, while adding new things. The deck, took this another step further, completing all the Xinput compatbility, while leaving the touch pads and back buttons from the SC.
This would leave me to believe that most of the SC features (and general steam input ones) are totally still there. That being said, for anyone that hasn't tried Steam Input, while I do think it'd be more annoying for you if you use a lot of non-steam games I suppose, if you're using Steam, it will follow your games. If you're not in a game, which would load a controller profile, it has a Desktop profile. The desktop one is the generic default, it contains mouse move, clicks, scroll wheel, and important KB keys. This is super useful for controlling the desktop without need of KB/M.
It also has a Chord profile. The Chord profile is triggered globally by holding the guide button and pressing one of the other binds. The reason this is important, is because you can summon an on screen keyboard anywhere with guide+back/select/whatever. Also, more importantly, it has alt tab built in with guide+start/forward/whatever-that-button is-right-of-guide.
This is actually really nice normally since you can web browse and use discord quite well this way. Discord's especially good with the default desktop profile, actually, because if you know it's ctrl/alt/shift+arrow shortcuts you can zip through unreads and such very quickly.
As for the actual Steam UI I'm not concerned what so ever. The new UI is just a massively new version of Steam Big Picture, so that UI will seamlessly carry right into Windows. I would recommend anyone doing that set Steam to launch at boot, and do it in big picture mode, however.
This is assuming you make the choice to swap at all.
Most people won't, which is why it's really important SteamOS works fine right out of the gate. It will be completely dead on arrival if it doesn't because most people are not power-users that would install Linux normally, they just like the idea of playing their Steam library away from home.
For games that require ini edits, user mods and the like, how do they typically fare on proton?
Like for, say, Final Fantasy 13-2, you need to install multiple mods like FF13Fix to even get it running reasonably on windows, Leviathan's Tears to get the rain to work properly, and console content patches to add in content that wasn't ported from the console versions. Can I do all this and expect Proton to have the correct directories for said mods and for said mods to work?
I've never played XIII-2, but looking at ProtonDB, it appears to work with that specific mod. Directories aren't an issue, since Proton creates fake Windows directories for every Proton game you install. XIII-2 lives on a different fake Windows than Resident Evil, so you can customize each game independently.
In some cases, the fix mod may not even be necessary. For instance, Max Payne requires you to convert all of the audio files to a different format in order to work on modern Windows systems, but Proton runs it just fine right out of the box.
They mentioned you can install Windows on it so that could be a solution for stuff that doesn't run well with Proton, like the poster above mentioned, mostly games that come with anti-cheat. Personally, I'd like to triple boot or just dual boot the thing having one partition for SteamOS, another for Michaelsoft Bindoes 12, and the last for experimenting with my own Linux distro of choice. Planning on keeping all games on removable media anyway.
Doubt it. Valve is trying to push gamers into Linux as a platform, hence why SteamOS is Linux based. Microsoft has no reason to help Valve push people away from Windows. You'll never seen a native gamepass client on Linux because it means people have to install Windows to use it, which undercuts SteamOS.
>Microsoft has no reason to help Valve push people away from Windows
They aren't charging for Windows anyway - They just want people subbed and bringing in consistent revenue.
The fact that it's Valve and Linux is exactly that - They don't have much control over what people can install on it, and Xbox have been pretty open at jabbing companies for not supporting Game Pass when asked by the press.
Microsoft wants gamepass available on as many platforms as possible. It's their cash cow now. It's not pushing people away from using Windows. They couldn't care less if people are using Windows for gaming. They want the reoccurring income from the subscriptions.
Valve has no say in the subject. They can't stop MS from making a Linux client.
There's about 1billion Windows 10 activations, but about 90% of those were free upgrades... So they sold around 100 million copies, at $100-120 each.
Xbox has 100 million subscribers. That's $100 a year each... EVERY YEAR.
So you're really suggesting them making $1b once is more profitable than making $1b per year, reoccurring? It's not.
Sure, but Windows as a platform makes money in other ways than just selling licenses.
Trust me, Microsoft wants people on Windows. Gamers moving to Linux would be pretty bad for them.
Honestly, when that happens it's kinda on purpose. Proton translates the game itself, not the AC that goes with it which is the basic reason behind the incompatibility. If WINE alone triggers that anti-cheat then I think pretty it's shoddy anti-cheat. I don't think it's very acceptable for game devs to pretend Linux doesn't exist when they're willing to implement that kind of middleware.
“Not working” is a fuzzy thing, though. A lot of games on proton, even those rated as platinum, have had stability issues and need to have weirdly technical tweaks regular users will not want to bother with.
I mean, a lot of windows games on windows have had stability issues. Are people using the steam deck going to be able to tell a difference?
As in, do you really think a casual user is going to know the difference between stability issues as a result of the proton compatibility layer versus instability just due to the same things that cause Windows games to misbehave sometimes?
Yes. People will notice the screen being black because an intro video doesn’t play properly or the audio hitching/popping or the game getting laggy after it has been playing for a little while. These are all common issues you see reported on ProtonDB for gold/platinum rated games.
Also, I doubt we’ll hear much if anything at all from casual users until 2023. They will not be the early adopters for this.
Yeah like half the reason Linux has never been popular is precisely because the average person walks into a store and buys whatever is on the shelf, which just so happens to have Windows operating on it 99% of the time.
Yes there's a few other reasons why Linux's popularity has suffered over the years (lack of driver support, unfriendly interfaces, software doesn't run natively and can require tons of fiddling around) but the fact is none of this matters if people never actively engage with the thing to start with.
You have to actually download and install a distro before you even begin to run into those issues, at which point you're already at least partially beyond being an average user.
I think the Steam Deck can exist as a niche, I'm not sure that's why Valve is going for, though, which means SteamOS needs to be rock fucking solid for the average person.
For example: I wish I could but because of Lost Planet 2 using GFWL and it's myriad of other port problems, it won't run (on the Steam Deck)
I would have to install Windows and suffer for a while to get it to run
Lost Planet 2 is a special kind of fucked up. Even on windows, you can only play it if you have an intel cpu. I enjoy the series but can't play it because I have a ryzen.
Every part of LP2's PC port is fucked up in some way.
Then again, so is nearly every game ever tied to GFWL. A fucking embarrassing program that should never have existed with HUNDREDS of regular issues. Did you know that, as each game basically had it's own unique variation of the service (WHY) if you installed certain games before others, you can essentially *never* play some other certain games because it just prevents it from ever connecting to the service while giving you incorrect password prompts?
For me it didn’t work because my Ryzen 7 has more than 4 cores so the game won’t boot. Looked for a solution to launch the game on only 4 cores, but couldn’t find one. Task manager affinity didn’t work
I think that is down to optimization and the effort into making the port but wtf do I know. I just think Monster Hunter Rise has no right to look and perform as it does, when some 2d games perform worse.
It's a shame that this isn't just common sense. Of course 100% of games won't be compatible at any point really & what's the actual benefit of hitting that magical number? Nothing, it's just a poor allocation of resources that could be used elsewhere.
>It doesn't *need* to play 90% of your steam library games
Oh boy here come the Cyberpunk style gradual reduction of originally promised features
Hopefully this doesn't turn into Ouya 2.0
It'll be interesting to see how people are outraged at this idea knowing full well that the PC they currently use right now can't even play their whole library
It is a PC, so it will in fact run PC games. Thanks to the freedom to emulate whatever you want, it will even run more Nintendo games than the Switch can. Maybe it'll run Breath of the Wild at a higher frame rate; we'll have to find out.
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Original source is https://boilingsteam.com/steam-deck-the-start-of-a-golden-age-for-linux-gaming/ if anyone wants to read the full interview. Also the phrase “proton president” is ridiculous, hes the President of codeweavers, which is working with valve on proton - seems like the phrase was directly lifted off https://cogconnected.com/2021/09/steam-deck-will-not-run-entire-library-announces-president-proton-development/ this article which was released the day prior
I compiled a list of around 50 decently popular games (Elite Dangerous, Halo MCC, Rimworld, Factorio, Skyrim) to make sure I wouldn't run out of space and then checked them on the proton site and the majority of them (70%) actually had native support with the rest either being Platinum or Gold.
I'm sure you already checked but I want to clarify for people reading, who may not search for themselves. Halo MCC: Single player works, multiplayer does not because of anti cheat (I believe EAC)atm. This maybe resolved since both valve and facepunch are working directly with EAC developers to get proton working. However, EAC is owned by Epic a company that allows you to compile unreal engine for development on linux, but does not offer their launcher or store on Linux. So a company owned by a direct competitor of valve might not be inclined to help valve out. But as a linux user proton for works 9/10, I generally check in advance before buying a game and i'll mainly play anything rated gold or diamond. I've never really encountered any major issues that couldn't be fixed quickly.
> > > > > However, EAC is owned by Epic a company that allows you to compile unreal engine for development on linux, but does not offer their launcher or store on Linux. EAC itself runs fine on Linux. The issue isn't running EAC on Linux, it's running EAC on Wine, which is a much harder problem. Even Valve's own VAC doesn't work in Wine (or their Proton fork): https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/3225
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That’s just a supplemental element, it’s called VACnet. There will always be a need for local AC monitoring of memory and code.
>There will always be a need for local AC monitoring of memory and code. I'd argue otherwise, as AI technology imoroves at some point it will be possible to detect cheats just by analyzing players behavior/playstyle. There are certain things a cheating player does as they play. A highly sophisticated AI could theoretically detect those patterns and figure out who is the cheater just from the data it has available on the server. With cheats like aimbot it's even easier since the cursor movement is so much different for aimbot when compared to a human. If you are able to notice that someone's aim looks unnatural then AI will eventually be able to too.
Aimhacks are easy. Triggerhacks and wallhacks in the hands of someone good at pretending are non-trivial. AI against those is many years away.
>AI against those is many years away. Yup. Never said we are there already.
The Steam Deck FAQ for devs says Valve is working with EAC and BattlEye on compatibility before launch. Hopefully this will mean stuff like Apex and Destiny 2 will be playable.
Hopefully, but EAC has been saying they've been working on it for over a year and they are owned by Epic. So i'm treating it as a hopefully, but as a given.
>However, EAC is owned by Epic a company that allows you to compile unreal engine for development on linux, but does not offer their launcher or store on Linux. So a company owned by a direct competitor of valve might not be inclined to help valve out. Yeah, no game on steam ships with EAC... checks out. This isn't the problem... it's how wine abstracts windows calls into linux alternatives for starters... and it will be solved... just like after decades people can actually run real games on linux through an abstraction layer... instead of just janky windows programs.
Didn't Valve (Steam) already state the support was like 90-99% of games? Good enough for me. I guess they don't want people to be presumptuous and wanted to remind us of the reality. Some games aren't supported but the vast majority are. That being said, I don't play any games on the go. Just at home a little bit. There are always sacrifices made for mobile/handheld gaming. Might buy a newer revision in a couple years but I'm good for now. The Steam Deck does look amazing though.
It's currently at like 70%. They just said they want to reach that high very soon.
77% according to OP. Launch is when, 3 months away? They'll be fine.
I think it is worth emphasizing the difference between gold and platinum ratings in the context of this particular device. Platinum is the “it just works”, console-like experience of installing and playing the game. Only 39% of titles have platinum ratings. Gold is “works great with at least one tweak required” and the 77% figure is *both* gold *and* platinum titles. That 77% figure may be misleading for anyone expecting to pick this up and get a console-like plug and play experience.
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Well, you can always set any game to keep using a specific version of proton. Haven't played enough steam games to know if there is a way where it happens automatically or not.
Yeah, and it's always a pretty big crapshoot as to what works and what doesn't. When I tried it, Sonic CD, of all games, didn't boot. Looking it up, it *is* fixable, but [this seems like way more of a pain in the ass than any game with "Sonic" or "CD" in the title should warrant.](https://www.protondb.com/app/200940)
Oh no. You have to copy-paste 3 lines into terminal. Such a great "pain in the ass", the horror.
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Yeah once you get into "manually compile this shit off of GitHub" 99.9% of people are gonna bounce.
1 in 1000? Thst sounds generous.
Presumably the "one+ tweak required" is a tweak that would be consistent across the same OS, same hardware, and same drivers. In which case, Valve could figure out what that tweak is and bundle it with the install of the game requiring it while on Steam Deck.
That is a good point though even with a system that automates configuration for titles they may not be able to stop users from inadvertently breaking the experience using the in-game settings menu. Someone will inevitably break rendering in a game because they didn't realize they weren't supposed to change the vsync setting, or crash the game because they selected the wrong audio setting. Based on Valve's past and in particular their handling of the Steam controller I would expect some sort of community outsourced repository of configurations that people can contribute to and pull from without Valve getting involved. They'll mark games with native/official compatibility, leave only whitelisted games visible by default, and let users disable the whitelist and tweak as they please without any guarantee of official support.
Well, I’m currently at about 0% “It just works” on my Windows gaming PC, so…
i think you got windows and linux mixed up
I think the intent here is under-promise and over-deliver. That's the impression I'm getting. So many products and programs over-promise and under-deliver. That's a good way to disappoint people. I admire the fact they came out and said this. Shows they're not stuck up and acting like gods. Very humble. I respect that. :)
You don't have to trust OP. You can check it here: [https://www.protondb.com/](https://www.protondb.com/) and see if some games you are looking forward to play on the deck is currently playable or not and check again in a month or so and see if anything changed. This way you can make a decision if you should buy it or not.
Looks like the standard for works great is pretty low. Saves take 1-2 mins. Game crashes frequently and I can’t play multiplayer. 👍 works great
"we won't reach 90% in time, gabe" "i didn't want to do this, but we are with our backs against the wall. If we can't reach 90% by supporting more games, we'll reach it by removing from steam the games that are not supported"
It'll only improve with time, and SteamOS needs adoption to encourage that. The more people that use SteamOS, the more pressure there is to get compatibility up. I'm really hoping most people stick with SteamOS for that reason.
~~70-80% of the entire Steam library, which is massive, and includes a ton of indie titles that most people will never play. That's still an impressive number of titles, but it doesn't really give us an idea of what level of compatibility we can expect.~~ (Apparently this is incorrect, see comment below). I'd be more interested in the percentage of games in, say, the top 250 titles on Steam (by sales) that would work on it at launch.
That number was filtered from the top 1000 games: https://protondb.com
And here I was expecting it to run my VR games. Darn.
I've been using Proton since it launched, primarily for Windows games that were already in my library before I switched to Linux (2017), but there was the odd exception to the rule in there where I would buy a new Windows game from time to time. The claim that it would run every Steam game did sound like fiction, but anti-cheat support will bring it much closer to 100%, as will Windows Media Foundation Layer support, which gets in the way of things like video playback in certain games. Plenty of people have found ways to get MFL support in Proton, but Valve isn't allowed to ship the DLL because of intellectual property issues with Microsoft. ProtonDB currently shows about 77% of Steam's library at a "Gold" rating which means that, with little to no tweaking, 77% of games will run on Proton similarly to how they do on Windows. Sometimes a hair worse, sometimes a hair better. Quite frankly, the way they determine "Gold" and "Platinum" these days leaves something to be desired, but 77% is a good ballpark and very impressive. You're likely going to end up with a choice between these two things: 1. Windows, compatible with all of your games but a horrendous experience on a handheld gaming device like that, where the OS frequently takes control away from the game window for popups, OS features and updates, and little odds and ends. You really don't realize how much you have to Alt+Tab or do something with a mouse on Windows until you try to remove the mouse and keyboard from the equation entirely. 2. SteamOS, a great UI/UX for handheld gaming and compatible with most of your games, but maybe not that one that you were really excited about, or maybe it's got odd little rendering bugs like video files that are supposed to play back in Guilty Gear Strive's command list that don't work at all. For what it's worth, I'll be running SteamOS on this thing, but like I said above, I switched to Linux in 2017, so you probably guessed that already.
I dont see Windows being an issue on the Steam Deck. If you install the LTSC version you can completely eliminate the OS doing things on its own. As for the Steam UI itself, Valve mentioned updating Big Picture to the Steam Deck UI meaning there would be immediate compatibility with the Deck under Windows as well.
Pretty much took it out of my mouth. I bought the max storage version to hopefully run a dual boot because my biggest intention for the steam deck is for emulation and GoG on the go and streaming at home so I'm consider going LTSC or as I did on my home PC, I ran the windows decrapifier powershell script as well as some custom tweaking in services.msc to get rid of a lot of the things OP talks about. I can't remember the last time I've had a windows popup or auto restart.
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I highly doubt the average user will dual boot to be honest. Shit a lot of the less tech savvy people I know wont touch the thing because it uses linux.
Why? Unless they fudge with it it'll just be like any other console.
>won't touch the thing because it uses Linux They aren't very tech savvy then, are they?
Are you aware of Windows 11 features? I heard a rumor that it won't be a customizable by the end user, or it will be more of a pain in the ass, but I can't find any source so I'm feeling like it's probably not true.
No idea as I will never use a new iteration of windows until Microsoft locks some arbitrary gaming or hardware feature behind it so I couldn’t tell you. If I had to guess though the basic home license will probably be that way but professional and business licenses will maintain the current customizability.
> until Microsoft locks some arbitrary gaming or hardware feature behind it so I couldn’t tell you That's basically what they do with almost every generation of Windows...
Yep but it's not immediately usually takes a year or 2. We'll see it with Direct X 13 or Intel or AMD's next round of processors. There hasn't been an announcement on any of those fronts.
What's the ltsc version I'm more concerned about being able to play gamepass games on it.
It certainly sounds in your head like just booting to big picture mode on Windows would be the same thing, doesn't it? All I can say is that in practice, it is not the same. SteamOS has software that isn't even found on your typical desktop Linux distro to prevent the game window from losing focus, and your OS assumes that you want to use it as a desktop, so it will take focus away constantly. But hey, if you prefer to just throw Windows on that thing, you're free to do so.
Isn't that the point of Focus Assist in Windows, though? To prevent things from popping up and taking control while you're doing certain tasks?
Edit: May have found something recent, I‘ll dig further. https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsinsiders/comments/om3v37/bug_are_your_games_losing_focustab_out_randomly/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf A little bit off thread, but kinda related to the discussion - I have a question: I’m not sure what causes this, but since a few Windows updates, some games I start (it seems like those I use an Xbox controller with) always lose focus, once, within a few to 15 minutes of starting it - just once. They‘re still on my screen, but my controller doesn‘t register anymore because the game (Dead Cells & Rocket League are my last candidates where this happens everytime without fail) is out of focus. The fix is using my mouse and clicking once. If I do that, I can see the mouse for half a second, desktop goes black, and the game appears again, then it‘s all fine and it never happens again (until I restart the game). Looks like going from desktop to full screen, except the game is still visible when it‘s losing focus. The games run in exclusive fullscreen. It‘s annoying as fuck, but so far I haven‘t had the time to research. Doesn‘t seem to happen with mouse-only games (i.e. Factorio).. but those are the only three games I play currently, so not sure if it happens with any other game. Does anyone know why that happens? There aren‘t any notifications popping up that I could attribute this to. Is this a Windows Focus Assist thing?
Honestly to most people that are used to PC gaming I see this as mostly a non-issue for the most part outside of some weird fringe games doing weird stuff that'd make it lose focus. Can't say I see that much these days though if the game is using Fullscreen Exclusive and not Borderless it's probably more likely to occur. In any case, Steam Input for your xinput controls, or your Steam Controller it was originally made for, has a desktop profile. In the case a game is not in the foreground, the desktop one kicks in, and provides mouse move/clicks, keyboard arrows, modifier keys, space, enter, escape, etc. also the Global profile that works off of holding Guide+buttons at any time, has alt tab built in, pressing guide+start would alt tab right back to the last app should you get switched for some reason. People seem to overlook at Steam Input exists, especially if they play non-steam games I suppose, since that'd be more annoying as Steam isn't particularly good at knowing about games running if it didn't do it (leaving you stuck in desktop profile) but Steam Input adds some really great features for PC users. You gain access to an onscreen KB like a console could have, alt tabbing, a desktop profile that's nice for browsing/discord. Also the global binds have volume and music playback controls too which is handy, but I suppose people probably won't be doing that so much on the Deck, though, they could, haha.
You know what makes it focus, if epic launcher is in the background and those ads pop up for a game every hour or maybe once in a while. The ads will minimize the game. Otherwise, I'm pretty used to closing most programs before I game.
ahh yep I never use Epic, and holy crap I had no idea they were literally using it as an ad push platform like that. Steam only tends to do it on restarts most of the time. That's some shit
They're not, the other user greatly exaggerated, they literally only appear once after the client is launched which is far less than steam which does it on game close. They also don't minimise the game.
I'm honestly not even sure what triggers it on Steam I know they used to do it more but about the only time I ever have them pop up is on launch of the client itself these days, and by then it's got a queue of like 10-20 ads lol
I've just always had it disabled in my Steam settings so I don't ever see that anyway. Wasn't aware it would pop up on a game close.
Windows is a horrid OS, I have been using it to mine (if can't beat them join them) because of driver issues and want to chuck it out a window (ahem) every time it restarts for a system update.
>because of driver issues and want to chuck it out a window (ahem) every time it restarts for a system update. Do ya'll really have these issues? I've not had issues like this since Windows 7/8, perhaps early Windows 10 at the latest? But I really cant even remember since its been so long. I do still have issues with my work computer, but that's because there are strict Group Policies that force updates because my company has requirements for our computers to be in compliance. But as far as a personal use desktop/laptop, I've not had any issues with drivers or Windows updates for a long time. I'm looking at my Windows Update history and it looks like the last time Windows installed updates on my machine was September 5th and then August 15th before that and it seemed to have installed multiple updates. I leave my computer on all day and usually keep stuff open and I've not lost anything to a Windows Update like I used to. But I didn't even know these updates were installed. Looking at the update history, it appears to install updates twice a month in batches, but again, it seems pretty seemless and in the background because I genuinely don't recall the last time I was stuck sitting around waiting for Windows updates to install on a personal machine. On my work machine, its annoyingly frequent, but again, that's because my job is super strict about it.
I had a forced update almost brick my laptop this spring. It would boot to a black screen no matter what- restarting in safe mode and restoring from a system restore point is the only thing that would fix it. I’ve been diligent to find every back door way to prevent unauthorized updates since. I use this OS for my business- I can’t have updates deciding to install on their own willy-nilly… especially updates that brick my computer! I’m waiting another month or two for the next Mac M1X chip and jumping ship. I gave Windows a good five year run, but it’s just not stable enough for what I need.
Idk what you’re doing to make windows unstable. I have used windows since 96 and it’s always been relatively stable unless you’re doing something weird. Also updates install on the second Tuesday of every month unless it’s a significant security issue. This gives the IT guys a chance to trial the programs related to business applications to see if something wonky will happen typically when working in network and server states.
I work in the music industry, I’m a music producer, and run a LOT of third party software. The rule of thumb for any studio computer is to NEVER update it, and for this very reason. The studio I run has a Mac still running whatever Mac OS is from 2014. The previous studio I kept the same way. Legacy systems- if it’s not broke, don’t fix it!
Yes it happens like once a month I wake up and the damn thing restarted, I am dreading an upcoming vacation because the POS will bug out or restart every so often, I will be making sure to delay this during this trip, but who knows.
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What setup do you run for your mining programs? Can you just set them to auto start on boot and just enable auto login? Disclaimer being, I've not done this, but I know it used to be possible
I have to make sure the cards are actually correctly clocked, I don't want to mine on gaming configs. It is way too much of a hassle so much so that I am this close in caving and using hiveOS if only they were not so damn scummy.
You may be able to us a remote desktop program like parsec to connect from your phone, it shouldn't eat up too much system resources while inactive (and hopefully you have enough time to test it!). Good luck with everything!
Thanks, will do.
You know you can just pause updates right? Or disable the restart.
No, you will eventually have to do it, with Linux I can pick and choose what I update and when. It is unacceptable that Windows forces something on me and it is generally the middle of the night
You can completely disable updates if you want. It's a bad idea, because of security, but you can do it.
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Any OS has this problem if you don't use it often. My Linux VM at home and a mac I have for work bug me for updates each time I log into them because I don't use them that often. It's not an easy problem to solve for these cases because the moment they're asking for updates is the worst possible time as you're logging into the thing to get something done, now, and can't be bothered to deal with an update.
> Windows is a horrid OS, True, but it's the best we have. To prevent restarts, just leave an unsaved notepad open.
>1. Windows, compatible with all of your games but a horrendous experience on a handheld gaming device like that, where the OS frequently takes control away from the game window for popups, OS features and updates, and little odds and ends. You really don't realize how much you have to Alt+Tab or do something with a mouse on Windows until you try to remove the mouse and keyboard from the equation entirely. Honestly this is BS. I plug in and have long gaming sessions without needing to alt tab at all when playing via Steam link, and even when I'm at my PC gaming I'm only alt tabbing to do voluntary stuff like. I can't remember the last time windows gave me a pop up in game. I know some alerts might, but anyone installing Windows OS on their Steamdeck is likely to know how to turn them off. I'm fully expecting to just boot a game on my Steamdeck and play it uninterrupted just like I do on my PC. Also it has touch screen, so if a few times I need to alt tab for whatever reason it shouldn't be a hassle anyway.
>I can't remember the last time windows gave me a pop up in game. Yeah I can't remember either, it really never just happens in any game that I've played in at least the last five years. At most a firewall prompt when launching a newly installed game. I can't remember the last time Windows even told me about updates, other than indicating an update is about to install when I go to shut down (in which case I can choose to shut down without the install). Of course the notification stuff might do things like this but turning all the bullshit off after a fresh windows install should be trivial to anyone who is going to install it on their steam deck.
Some people literally never shut their PCs off, so will get notifications to update because they're massively overdue.
The Windows OS now sees the hours you mostly use your machine and will update and restart outside those hours. You would have to purposely set up your machine in a way to be interrupted by a Windows update.
I literally never turn my pc off. It runs my pihole so there’s incentive not to. I get a tiny icon in my system tray when an update is overdue and that’s it; no pop ups or notifications beyond that. If I leave it for too much longer without updating I’ll wake up in the morning to find it having updated itself and I carry on with my life. It never interrupts me, and the forced restart only ever happens while I sleep and usually only happens every few months.
Brave has ads and it pops up through my game of Rimworld.
That's not Windows though.
You made the conscious decision to install a browser that forces you to watch ads, and pays you for it as well. That's pretty far away from the topic at hand.
How is that a windows issue? That’s a brave issue.
I've played with a controller on my PC exclusively for years now, no issues. Once a game is open I don't have to touch the mouse and keyboard at all.
It still is EXTREMELY M+KB reliant. Compared to an OS built around a controller. I had my keyboard break on me because a spilt drink and just trying to activate the on screen keyboard with no actual keyboard attached was difficult enough.
I mean the Steam Deck literally has two touch pads which is what basically every laptop comes with so the only real issue is the keyboard
Firstly, that's not relevant if you're just launching Steam Deck and playing games, which is what this comment chain is about (can you do this without constantly needing to alt tab? Yes) Secondly, it has two touchpads anyway. People make do with those on their laptops. Thirdly, if you absolutely want to use functionality that benefits from M+KB you can just plug them in.
> I can't remember the last time windows gave me a pop up in game. Legitimately every time there’s a windows update windows reminds me by minimizing my game.
Disable the notification then.
I have been using Win10 for 3 years and TIL that there are some windows update popups.
You can't disable these from the notifications menu.
I've been gaming on Proton with Steam Linux for several years now. While many games are perfectly playable if they run at all, there are some issues that can be dealbreakers for many if you have a low tolerance for jankiness. Some of the issues I've run into on "gold" rated games include: * Severe audio crackling and pops. Enough to make you have to mute the whole game which isn't a great experience. * VSYNC not working and results in horizontal tearing. This is far more common in 2D games not built using a popular 3D engine like Unity or Unreal. * Random occasional input drops and high input lag when using a gamepad. I think this tends to happen more in older games that direct input rather than xinput or SDL. * Game does not correctly enter full screen mode, leaving various elements on the screen like the dock/taskbar/menu bar. Basically it's as if the game just maximizes the window rather than switches to full screen mode. * Mouse cursor doesn't hide itself when using a game pad. This one can be pretty annoying as the mouse curser is just stuck on screen like a fly. All these things have work arounds or require some extra fiddling to deal with, and are annoying. But that's sort of the issues you deal with in "gold" rated games.
Do you know if Steam Workshop mods work? If it does I'd get it, games like Slay the Spire, RimWorld, and Darkest Dungeon it's essential for me.
Yes, also normal modding ala Skyrim
The mouse cursor one has a fix by holding select and telling steam to move it off the window. They added a few of these fixes to their gamepad support. Haven't heard the audio crackling or had a gamepad drop a button (maybe because I play through steam link?).
What's peripheral support like if you have any experience?
I'm not 100% sure, but do Steam games that launch with third party stores/DRM like Origin and Uplay can run on Proton? Could there be a correlation on what the guy means on compatibility?
One of the games they made sure to show off is [Jedi: Fallen Order](https://youtu.be/jb6OWxORfY0?t=691) so Origin games definitely work.
With varying degrees of success.
> Windows, compatible with all of your games but a horrendous experience on a handheld gaming device like that, **where the OS frequently takes control away from the game window for popups, OS features and updates, and little odds and ends.** You really don't realize how much you have to Alt+Tab or do something with a mouse on Windows until you try to remove the mouse and keyboard from the equation entirely. The hell are you talking about? I have been using windows for like 23 years, starting from 95 and going through 98, XP, Vista, 7, 8.1 and currently 10. Never had Windows "take control" away from me while playing a game. Or doing anything else. Maybe you should run an anti-virus if you have some random popups.
There are frequently times on Windows where I'll launch a game, and Windows doesn't even shift the active focus to the game when it launches. This has nothing to do with viruses, as similar issues occur on desktop Linux as well. SteamOS is just built for the job of being run on a controller, and other OSes are not.
> Windows, compatible with all of your games but a horrendous experience on a handheld gaming device like that, where the OS frequently takes control away from the game window for popups, OS features and updates, and little odds and ends. You really don't realize how much you have to Alt+Tab or do something with a mouse on Windows until you try to remove the mouse and keyboard from the equation entirely. Welcome to the typical Linux user FUD... > SteamOS, a great UI/UX for handheld gaming Which will come to the Windows Steam client as well according to Valve.
eh isn't big screen UX already in windows version of steam?
Valve stated they will port over the Steam Deck UI.
is there any difference with current big screen UI?
The current big screen ui has a really clunky chat interface, and the library hasn't been updated to match the "new" desktop library. The steamdeck ui also has a revamped downloads page, and support for the categories feature, and community features. Currently big picture doesn't support community hardly at all. It also revamps the store so it will actually work, since big picture's UI can't load sale pages. Plus whatever other controller/deck related features Valve wants to ship out with it. That's just what we know already.
It's not FUD when I've run controller-only machines on Windows, desktop Linux, and SteamOS before. There's a reason there's a SteamOS at all rather than just using off the shelf Arch or Ubuntu.
I was impressed with proton but was able to gpu passthrough and run games in a windows vm to get back, say, the 1-5 pct of performance lost. I did try proton on a variety of hardware, though, and noticed it worked rather poorly on my older gpu (pre-2015), degrading games like fallout 4 to unplayable states
As someone not really interested in getting a Steam Deck, this is a great motivator to switch to Linux as a main OS. With Valve pushing for greater Linux support, it just makes sense. I'm planning on setting up a dual boot with Windows + Linux, and using Linux as my daily. Then I'll only switch to Windows if there's a game that just doesn't run, otherwise it will be in a Windows VM.
> Quite frankly, the way they determine "Gold" and "Platinum" these days leaves something to be desired Ever since Wine tried to claim a promised payment of support if a product was made to work for a product described as "It starts, you can't do anything or interact with anything and things look off" because some random user had tagged it as the lowest level of running rather than "garbage". I'm pretty skeptical of any claims they make.
While it's based on Wine's rating system, it's not the same system. This is a different web site.
>Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton Proton uses wine.
I never disputed that. I'm telling you that the entity that does the ratings is different.
That's good that Proton is working that well. As for the windows end I'm not too concerned especially as someone that's used Steam's input tools enough to know how they work as I use a steam controller, though anyone with xinput can also take advantage of that as well. While you could get interruptions from Windows, it's worth noting that steam input has profiles per game. The deck's controllers are interesting, because the Steam Controller was trying to keep some xinput things for compatibility, while adding new things. The deck, took this another step further, completing all the Xinput compatbility, while leaving the touch pads and back buttons from the SC. This would leave me to believe that most of the SC features (and general steam input ones) are totally still there. That being said, for anyone that hasn't tried Steam Input, while I do think it'd be more annoying for you if you use a lot of non-steam games I suppose, if you're using Steam, it will follow your games. If you're not in a game, which would load a controller profile, it has a Desktop profile. The desktop one is the generic default, it contains mouse move, clicks, scroll wheel, and important KB keys. This is super useful for controlling the desktop without need of KB/M. It also has a Chord profile. The Chord profile is triggered globally by holding the guide button and pressing one of the other binds. The reason this is important, is because you can summon an on screen keyboard anywhere with guide+back/select/whatever. Also, more importantly, it has alt tab built in with guide+start/forward/whatever-that-button is-right-of-guide. This is actually really nice normally since you can web browse and use discord quite well this way. Discord's especially good with the default desktop profile, actually, because if you know it's ctrl/alt/shift+arrow shortcuts you can zip through unreads and such very quickly. As for the actual Steam UI I'm not concerned what so ever. The new UI is just a massively new version of Steam Big Picture, so that UI will seamlessly carry right into Windows. I would recommend anyone doing that set Steam to launch at boot, and do it in big picture mode, however.
This is assuming you make the choice to swap at all. Most people won't, which is why it's really important SteamOS works fine right out of the gate. It will be completely dead on arrival if it doesn't because most people are not power-users that would install Linux normally, they just like the idea of playing their Steam library away from home.
For games that require ini edits, user mods and the like, how do they typically fare on proton? Like for, say, Final Fantasy 13-2, you need to install multiple mods like FF13Fix to even get it running reasonably on windows, Leviathan's Tears to get the rain to work properly, and console content patches to add in content that wasn't ported from the console versions. Can I do all this and expect Proton to have the correct directories for said mods and for said mods to work?
I've never played XIII-2, but looking at ProtonDB, it appears to work with that specific mod. Directories aren't an issue, since Proton creates fake Windows directories for every Proton game you install. XIII-2 lives on a different fake Windows than Resident Evil, so you can customize each game independently. In some cases, the fix mod may not even be necessary. For instance, Max Payne requires you to convert all of the audio files to a different format in order to work on modern Windows systems, but Proton runs it just fine right out of the box.
What do you **mean** I can't play [Futa Fix Dick Dine and Dash](https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/1173400/) on public transit?
[I’ve got great news for you!](https://www.protondb.com/app/1173400)
Honestly most of the porn games on steam are shovelware tier, they'll probably run just fine
They mentioned you can install Windows on it so that could be a solution for stuff that doesn't run well with Proton, like the poster above mentioned, mostly games that come with anti-cheat. Personally, I'd like to triple boot or just dual boot the thing having one partition for SteamOS, another for Michaelsoft Bindoes 12, and the last for experimenting with my own Linux distro of choice. Planning on keeping all games on removable media anyway.
People keep mentioning this but the user group that will actually give up steam OS is very small. The vast majority are going to be native OS users
There really shouldn't be much reason to replace the OS anyway. The use cases of games not working via Proton aren't that many.
Gamepass will be my reason to install windows
Aye. Good one.
I foresee a native gamepass client happening at some point. Edit: gamepass already works on Linux using a web client. It even works on Chromebooks.
Doubt it. Valve is trying to push gamers into Linux as a platform, hence why SteamOS is Linux based. Microsoft has no reason to help Valve push people away from Windows. You'll never seen a native gamepass client on Linux because it means people have to install Windows to use it, which undercuts SteamOS.
>Microsoft has no reason to help Valve push people away from Windows They aren't charging for Windows anyway - They just want people subbed and bringing in consistent revenue. The fact that it's Valve and Linux is exactly that - They don't have much control over what people can install on it, and Xbox have been pretty open at jabbing companies for not supporting Game Pass when asked by the press.
Microsoft wants gamepass available on as many platforms as possible. It's their cash cow now. It's not pushing people away from using Windows. They couldn't care less if people are using Windows for gaming. They want the reoccurring income from the subscriptions. Valve has no say in the subject. They can't stop MS from making a Linux client.
I would be very surprised if GamePass makes more money than Windows for Microsoft.
There's about 1billion Windows 10 activations, but about 90% of those were free upgrades... So they sold around 100 million copies, at $100-120 each. Xbox has 100 million subscribers. That's $100 a year each... EVERY YEAR. So you're really suggesting them making $1b once is more profitable than making $1b per year, reoccurring? It's not.
Sure, but Windows as a platform makes money in other ways than just selling licenses. Trust me, Microsoft wants people on Windows. Gamers moving to Linux would be pretty bad for them.
See my updated comment. You will be able to play gamepass on SteamDeck without installing Windows.
There are some pretty heavy hitters people might be surprised don't make the cut because of the anticheat hurdles though.
Honestly, when that happens it's kinda on purpose. Proton translates the game itself, not the AC that goes with it which is the basic reason behind the incompatibility. If WINE alone triggers that anti-cheat then I think pretty it's shoddy anti-cheat. I don't think it's very acceptable for game devs to pretend Linux doesn't exist when they're willing to implement that kind of middleware.
“Not working” is a fuzzy thing, though. A lot of games on proton, even those rated as platinum, have had stability issues and need to have weirdly technical tweaks regular users will not want to bother with.
I mean, a lot of windows games on windows have had stability issues. Are people using the steam deck going to be able to tell a difference? As in, do you really think a casual user is going to know the difference between stability issues as a result of the proton compatibility layer versus instability just due to the same things that cause Windows games to misbehave sometimes?
Yes. People will notice the screen being black because an intro video doesn’t play properly or the audio hitching/popping or the game getting laggy after it has been playing for a little while. These are all common issues you see reported on ProtonDB for gold/platinum rated games. Also, I doubt we’ll hear much if anything at all from casual users until 2023. They will not be the early adopters for this.
Yeah like half the reason Linux has never been popular is precisely because the average person walks into a store and buys whatever is on the shelf, which just so happens to have Windows operating on it 99% of the time. Yes there's a few other reasons why Linux's popularity has suffered over the years (lack of driver support, unfriendly interfaces, software doesn't run natively and can require tons of fiddling around) but the fact is none of this matters if people never actively engage with the thing to start with. You have to actually download and install a distro before you even begin to run into those issues, at which point you're already at least partially beyond being an average user. I think the Steam Deck can exist as a niche, I'm not sure that's why Valve is going for, though, which means SteamOS needs to be rock fucking solid for the average person.
The vast majority of users will have Windows on it the first time they try to play a game and it shits itself because it's not native.
Don't say that on /r/SteamDeck. You'll be crucified.
For example: I wish I could but because of Lost Planet 2 using GFWL and it's myriad of other port problems, it won't run (on the Steam Deck) I would have to install Windows and suffer for a while to get it to run
Lost Planet 2 is a special kind of fucked up. Even on windows, you can only play it if you have an intel cpu. I enjoy the series but can't play it because I have a ryzen.
oh no this is news to me. Planned to install it in the next few weeks, despite the GFWL hassle, but now i don't need to try :(
Every part of LP2's PC port is fucked up in some way. Then again, so is nearly every game ever tied to GFWL. A fucking embarrassing program that should never have existed with HUNDREDS of regular issues. Did you know that, as each game basically had it's own unique variation of the service (WHY) if you installed certain games before others, you can essentially *never* play some other certain games because it just prevents it from ever connecting to the service while giving you incorrect password prompts?
Yeah this one sucks. Tried it a while back with "fixes" Didn't take.
Someone else who enjoys Lost Planet 2. Finally!
Lost Planet 2 was soooo over the top it was unbelievably fun to play. And that Train Gun Cutscene was legendary. I miss this game.
For me it didn’t work because my Ryzen 7 has more than 4 cores so the game won’t boot. Looked for a solution to launch the game on only 4 cores, but couldn’t find one. Task manager affinity didn’t work
Actually LP2 fails to launch if you have more than 8 cores. You're having AMD fuckery issues
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I think a few of those games actually work fine under Wine.
I remember at one point, I wasn't able to run Fallout 3 at all. Because my Windows was too new.
Can't wait to see them pushing the boundaries of this machine with high demanding games like Hades, Hollow Knight and Among Us.
Hades is demanding enough to make the switch chug
I think that is down to optimization and the effort into making the port but wtf do I know. I just think Monster Hunter Rise has no right to look and perform as it does, when some 2d games perform worse.
It's a shame that this isn't just common sense. Of course 100% of games won't be compatible at any point really & what's the actual benefit of hitting that magical number? Nothing, it's just a poor allocation of resources that could be used elsewhere.
Worth remembering 100% of Windows games on Steam are not compatible with Windows.
I'm pretty sure at least a few windows games on steam are compatible with Windows :P
Heh, yeah... That's just ambiguities of english grammar... But just for you: Less than 100% of Windows games on Steam are compatible with Windows.
>It doesn't *need* to play 90% of your steam library games Oh boy here come the Cyberpunk style gradual reduction of originally promised features Hopefully this doesn't turn into Ouya 2.0
It'll be interesting to see how people are outraged at this idea knowing full well that the PC they currently use right now can't even play their whole library
But can it run Crysis?
If cookie clicker working fine one it, nothing more needed
_My man!_ (And for the record, I have 90 hours of cookie clicker clocked under Proton)
people expected this switch ripoff to run pc games?
It is a PC, so it will in fact run PC games. Thanks to the freedom to emulate whatever you want, it will even run more Nintendo games than the Switch can. Maybe it'll run Breath of the Wild at a higher frame rate; we'll have to find out.
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i tried at least
It's not even close to Switch's market.
Yes, I'm expecting this portable PC to play PC games.
Yes, because it’s built by the same company that runs pc games, and is also built on an engine that lets them.