Valve made a compatibility layer for the Steam Deck and Linux called Proton. It uses a lot of technologies, including WINE, dxvk, and more to make Windows games run well on Linux. It basically takes Windows API calls and translates them to Linux with little to no performance penalty.
Steam also has native builds for Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, and Linux how, so you can just install it. Most Linux distros have Steam right in their software manager now.
Typically, unless the game has blocked Linux with something like kernel-level anticheat, it’ll “just work” on Linux now. There is a community database called ProtonDB that has a list of games and how well they do or don’t work.
Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions.
theneverfox@pawb.social 3 days ago
Steam runs natively and uses proton for game compatibility, similar idea to wine but it’s geared for games
It’s pretty good. Most games will run, sometimes with a little jiggling to get it to work, although performance isn’t quite as good (some games are particularly rough)
I’m technically dual booting, but I haven’t launched Windows in almost a year, and there’s only been a handful of games I passed on primarily because of support
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I have a small laptop that I’m testing this stuff out on before I put together a new computer from parts I ordered before the tariffs took effect.
theneverfox@pawb.social 3 days ago
My top pick right now is fedora silverblue, I’m running it on my test bed/server and I’ve been impressed
I’m running bazzite on my main one, which is related but geared towards steam and maximizing game support, it’s pretty good and closer to “just works” for any kind of gaming device, it’s less polished but it’s still pretty good