Thus, Valve has a serious financial interest in making Proton the best it can be. Steam overhauls notifications, UI elements and the in-game overlay Valve has turned on hardware acceleration for Mac and Linux users, too. The Steam Deck ships with SteamOS, Valve’s own Linux distribution. Unlike the game studio that produced your favorite game, Valve is highly motivated to make sure more games can be played on Linux. That extra layer might seem unnecessary when you already have a native port, but you’re likely to have a better experience with Proton. It’s Valve’s own compatibility layer meant to enable you to play Windows games without needing to use Windows. When you try to launch a Windows-only game in Steam on a Linux PC, Proton is what Steam runs in the background to make sure it works. The simple fact is that the Linux crowd is much smaller than that of Windows and Mac, so the incentive to please Linux users with a complete and polished port is far less.

There’s a good chance the game studio dedicated far less time and money on the Linux version as compared to the Windows or Mac edition. When you choose the native port, whether with or without Steam Linux Runtime, you have to be aware of studio limitations.

Steam link linux