I built my first main gaming PC in 2017, dual-booted with Windows and whatever Linux distribution I was in the mood to try that week. In 2018 when Valve announced Proton, I laughed it off with a friend, and thought Valve were incredibly foolish expecting Wine to be viable for AAA gaming. I even said that if Valve start investing money in this, it will sink them. I should note, I was ignorant to DXVK and vkd3d-proton at the time.

Then I actually tried Proton shortly after, and I did it to justify my doubts. But aside from one game I tried, every single game in my library worked acceptably or better than Windows, with either no tweaks or very minor launch option changes. I was blown away, I was shocked that I was getting a solid 60fps in the brand new Yakuza 0 PC port, or that I could play my beloved Geometry Wars without having to boot up Wine Steam. It was magical. There was no more need to deal with a glitchy Wine Steam client, there was no more need to use Lutris, it was as simple as enabling Steam Play in the Steam Client and clicking the Play button.

I immediately wiped my drive and did an all-in vanilla Arch installation, the very same one I am using right now as I write this, and I never looked back. My library also grew exponentially since Proton was announced, because I felt more comfortable buying games knowing I didn't need to boot into Windows to play them. I had a few hundred games at most when Valve announced Proton - Now I have almost 1,700 games (which includes games hidden on the profile counter, and games no longer available on Steam). I think this is a much overlooked aspect of Proton, as I'm sure I'm not the only person who bought an order of magnitude more games on Steam thanks to Proton.

There were a few teething problems along the way, like having to compile Proton-tkg with some custom patches or use some custom Winetricks, but thanks to the strong efforts of the community (long before Proton was dreamed up) and Valve, and both coming together to support Linux gaming, the experience has been so good for so long that even my dad can play the entirety of his Steam library on his Linux PC.

The Steam Deck gets a lot of praise and attention, but the majority of my gaming is still on my Linux PC, and it's great to see Valve have not abandoned those of us who still prefer gaming on their Linux PCs. Thanks Valve, there's a reason you have taken a ridiculous amount of my money over the years.

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Finally! Some projects (such as SteamTinkerLaunch and ProtonUp-Qt) will display this already in limited capacity, but it's about time Valve showed this outside of the Store Page. Though I read some comments here and found that compatibility rating is not always visible, so here's some information that may be of interest to those users about how to get the compatibility information.

The raw compatibility rating is available locally from "~/.steam/root/appcache/appinfo.vdf" and can be parsed with something like ValvePython's VDF parser (this is what ProtonUp-Qt uses), and compatibility information is stored solely as a string placeholder that is parsed by the Steam Client (i.e. "SteamDeckVerified_TestResult_DefaultConfigurationIsPerformant"). This is probably how the Steam Client gets the Deck compatibility information. I would guess it occasionally polls and updates the VDF file based on information from the below Web API call.

It can also be fetched from a Steam endpoint "https://store.steampowered.com/saleaction/ajaxgetdeckappcompatibilityreport?nAppID=<your_appid_here>", which returns JSON and may be easier to parse (STL uses this and parses it with jq, and maps the compatibility test result strings). This will even include developer comments. Documentation can be found on the excellent unofficial Internal Steam Web API [External Link] documentation project.

If you want to know more than just Verified/Playable/Unsupported/Unknown and you want to know the specific test case results, both the VDF file and API call will just return strings that are mapped by the Steam client. However there is another community documentation project called SteamTracking which can give you the translated client strings. As it is unofficial, the up-to-date-ness of these may vary, but you can see a list of the English strings here [External Link] - Search for strings starting with SteamDeck, and replace shared_english.json with the language you're looking for. A full list can be seen in the localization folder that the linked JSON is contained in. There are some interesting strings in there that I have not seen before, such as "This game has been retired or is no longer in a playable state and is not supported on Steam Deck".

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The Godot contributors are very active in engine development and triaging issues. Over the years I have seen a growing amount of incredibly rude users piggybacking on issues to put the maintainers down, and they still plug along to make the engine as good as it can be with the resources that they have.

Huge respect to the Godot team, if I made games I would gladly throw some money their way.

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Addicting as hell, the only thing that would make this game better is a native Linux port. It uses the Godot Engine so it isn't outside of the realm of possibility in the future.

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Unfortunately Steam stills runs through XWayland so mixed-scale display setups will still have a blurry Steam client. This change is nice of the default Steam client text is a bit too small for you, though.

If you're on Plasma Wayland and have just 1 display and it's scaled, then this paired with KDE's XWayland scaling option should mitigate any sizing issues.

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Been using KDE Plasma Wayland for gaming for well over a year now to use my mixed-scale + mixed-refresh-rate setup. Wayland support won't immediately fix it, but I'm looking forward to hopefully eventual scaling support on Wine. Most applications that I use apart from Steam run Wayland native and look nice and crisp at my 150% scaling, looking forward to the same being true for Wine applications, and being able to run games at native resolution as well - though I remember an Xwayland MR that implemented this for fullscreen Xwayland windows.

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Modrinth is pretty great, maybe this will give CurseForge the push it needs to improve.

Also, Iris and Sodium are pretty great. Fantastic open source alternatives to Optifine that I have come to prefer.

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