Support us on Patreon
PayPalFor GDC 2026, Unity revealed expanded official support is coming for Steam. This includes Native Linux, Steam Deck, Steam Machine and more.
To save you from having to watch through the video, I grabbed a coffee and noted down what they said. Directly from James Stone, Unity Platforms Team, here's what they said:
One thing I can talk about now is that we're bringing official Steam support into Unity. Now, I know you'll say "But I already ship games to Steam" and that's true. Thousands of developers have had success on Steam with Unity. The thing is, prior to Platform Toolkit, we've never actually officially supported Steam in the past. It's always been up to developers to integrate Steamworks themselves, and publish and support their titles on that platform historically.
And on Steam Deck, many of you have been finding success with Proton. But I think we can do better with a native solution. So, as I mentioned before our strength is highly performant native runtimes. So moving forward we'll provide not just build targets for Steam but also Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine. We'll also look to make targeted enhancements to our Linux runtime to provide native performance increases and remove the need for developers to rely on Windows through Proton.
And look, as great as Proton is, it's simply something we don't have any degree of control over or ability to support. And we've actually made some native improvements to the Linux player that targets the Steam Deck hardware. Offering a potential improvement in performance over a build running on Proton and that's actually available today.
You can watch their full video below the Steam part starts around 40:11:
Direct Link
What do you make of this news? Quite exciting to see such expanded Linux support coming. Good news for developers too. Looks like Native Linux is back on the menu - at least for developers using Unity.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
See more from me
You can also find comments for this article on social media: 
Quoting: StellaYou are completely right about the historical mess of native ports, but the "unstable Linux API" (or rather, [ABI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_binary_interface)) argument is based on an outdated architecture. Twenty-five to ten years ago, the ecosystem tried and failed to unify around the "[Linux Standard Base](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base)," which never actually provided a stable target for developers as it shifted goalposts continually. The Linux kernel itself has always been fiercely stable (adhering to the strict "we never break userspace" rule from Linus Torvalds himself), but what broke games in the past was the chaos of fragmented userspace dependencies, such as the glibc mess with conflicting "GNU-isms" across versions, and competing multimedia servers across different distributions.But I think we can do better with a native solution.I hard disagree with this statement. Pretty much all existing Linux games suffer from various problems ranging from complete inplayability over control and gameplay/visual issues as well as crashes. Running games over Proton is vastly preferable to Native most of the time because the Windows API is much more stable than the Linux API. I myself have had so many issues with native ports that the Proton versions never have, that I've given up on them completely
Today, modern native Linux gaming bypasses that problem entirely through a completely new approach. First, the Steam Linux Runtime ensures games no longer rely on your host operating system's libraries. Instead, they run inside a frozen, containerized environment, completely bypassing the software rot that used to plague Linux ports. Second, hardware translation has finally been standardized. The universal adoption of PipeWire has permanently fixed the decade-long multimedia nightmare, elegantly replacing the deeply fragmented ALSA (ugh), PulseAudio, and JACK stacks with a single, unified audio and video pipeline. Combined with the newly stable SDL3, even older native games are retroactively forced to play nicely with modern Wayland desktop environments without the original developer having to update a single line of code. Proton/Wine is an incredible tool, but a properly packaged native game running within this modern architecture is now just as stable as a Windows binary, with zero translation overhead.
Quoting: GustyGhostI've been playing Linux native games (Unity, no less) that I had bought ten years ago without any issue. What is there left to improve?i think the devs had to do somethings manually because the engine didnt fully support linux, or if it did the add'ons didnt, so there is that, maybe they can do something about that?
Quoting: PyronickProton/Wine is an incredible tool, but a properly packaged native game running within this modern architecture is now just as stable as a Windows binary, with zero translation overhead.i saw this movie before, we dont have an great track record of backward compatibility and we cant know if its fixed now, we have to wait 10 years from now and if the things made now still work, that means we have backward compatibility... for things made years ago, but current stuff might still have issues, as new libraries are used that may not have the same track record.
in any case if wine can be stable then there is some stable basis somewhere, until it doesnt because any distro can break stuff on purpose, but the ones who do would be punished by the lack of users... i mean everyone loves snaps right?
in any case, even if an game work, the mods for it may not work, if an mod rely on changing something on a binary to work, and the linux version has an different binary because its native, we cant expet this mod to work unless we run the windows version of the game on wine insted of native, so yeah, wine/proton will still be used even in a future where all the games support linux natively.
anyway, do we still need an audio interface for professional usage? or pipewire does the job?
How to setup OpenMW for modern Morrowind on Linux / SteamOS and Steam Deck
How to install Hollow Knight: Silksong mods on Linux, SteamOS and Steam Deck