I have a Steam Deck, and I love it. It can handle 90% of my library, and it’s always improving.
I decided to try out a linux distro for my OS, because the biggest drawback has always been the hoops that I had to jump through to get games up and running. I went for Pop OS, since that seemed to be natively friendly with NVidia, and the lowest barrier for entry. However, in Steam, I see that there is a much more limited selection of games compatible with my system. Is there a way around that, to get the same selection as my Steam Deck? Or is it this way because the Steam Deck is a singular platform that is developed for based on specific architecture?
It probably should be at this point. The opposite made a ton of sense when Steam Play was new and most games didn’t work, but now the opposite is true (at least in my experience).
I think the reason it’s opt-in is so that people don’t feel like they’ve been ripped off/lied to when they buy a game thinking they are getting a native experience
Yeah, makes sense. However, that could be easily solved with a popup or something when you first launch a game that says, “This title has not been verified by Valve to run properly on your platform, do you want to continue? [ x ] Don’t show this again.”
You can buy games for any platform regardless of your Steam Play settings. They just might not show up in your library.
Which is even funnier because a lot of the times the native builds run worse, if at all, and it is typically recommended to just use Proton. Native clients unfortunately mean jack shit if they aren’t properly supported and maintained by the developers, which is why I’m not too fazed whenever people were warning that Proton will cause fewer native titles. Like, have you seen the Linux gaming market pre Proton? It was not pretty, not even with Wine, but especially with just native titles only. Can’t tell me they would rather go back to that instead of the current situation.
Could I use wine/proton to run windows games on my M2 MacBook ?
No. But Apple has built an alternative, although devs need to do some work to get their games running. That said, Mac gaming is even less popular than Linux Gaming, so don’t expect a good catalogue.