This week the first purchasers of the PC in the form of a portable console from Valve will finally be able to take advantage of the device and have it in their hands to enjoy it. However, the fact that you are running a Linux environment with Proton means that not all Windows Steam games will work. How do we know if our games are compatible with Steam Deck?
The reality is that with the huge Steam libraries we have, it becomes very tedious to check out the different games one by one. While on the face of it this would be as simple as checking compatibility under Proton, we should keep in mind that over the last year Valve has been working closely with AMD to increase compatibility for Windows games running on the Steam Deck to a much higher level. than Proton
How do I know if my games are compatible with the Steam Deck?
It’s very simple, you just have to go to this link and enter it with your Steam account, don’t be afraid of the simple fact that it is an official page from Valve itself which will give you will help to know what games you can play without performance or compatibility issues.
They also alert us to games that may run smoothly, but are not fully supported due to minor bugs. That is, the games run without serious issues and are playable in their entirety, but there are elements that Proton doesn’t emulate well enough.
Unfortunately not all games can be used on the Steam Deck and there are also incompatible ones, the page will tell us which ones as well. By the way, remember that this is no more and no less than a Work in Progress by Valve and they are testing the huge collection of games on their platform one by one, so be patient if for the moment you do not see all your list of compatible games games validated with Steam Deck
Why is my Steam library not 100% compatible?
The answer to this is that despite the fact that Valve allows us to install Windows on its Steam Deck, this is not sold with Windows pre-installed, but with a GNU/Linux distribution developed by Valve which receives the name of Steam operating system which was created for their steam engines without commercial success and which they reused on their new portable device.
To run Windows games in such an environment, an interpreter called Proton is used, which transforms calls to Windows dynamic libraries to Linux services and graphics or computer commands for DirectX into their equivalents for Volcano in OpenGL. It is not an emulation and therefore does not require a high level of power to run the games. Let’s not forget that we are not using different hardware than a PC, but rather the differences lie in the operating system that runs under the application.
Valve sacrificed the use of Windows for two reasons, the first is that they save the license per machine sold and the second is that it allows them to make the operating system as compact as possible. Does it even make sense for the email app to run in the background on a device like this? This is why the list of compatible games on the Steam Deck is smaller than on Windows.
