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To check whether your favourite game is playable via Proton, you can visit. Because of this, we should expect the library of Linux playable titles to increase dramatically over the next year, whether you own a Steam Deck or not! Check your games on ProtonDB (or contribute your experiences)!
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Whilst it’s currently in beta and not all Windows titles run successfully via Proton, Valve are heavily promoting Proton support to developers as a way of enabling Steam Deck compatibility.
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Proton is open source and based on a fork of Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) which has been in development for around 28 years. This results in comparable performance to a native build of the game. This works differently to a traditional emulator approach to gaming (where you might run a virtual Windows machine and play games inside it) since it enables you to fully leverage the benefits of your PC’s hardware. Proton is a compatibility layer built into Steam, it translates Windows APIs into a Linux readable format. (Don’t judge my playtime, I was mostly playing the previous HD edition!)
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