this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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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?

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[–] wolo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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.

[–] Metal_Zealot@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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

[–] Cynoid@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

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.

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