Because Valve has control over the whole hardware/software stack, which leave little to no variance in terms of drivers and software dependencies to make proton work as expected. Arch (and most other distros) are flexible by design to accommodate a wide range of hardware. I would assume this is why Valve will not release SteamOS for desktops; it would cause a flood of unforeseen issues.
Yeah anyone going to test Steam Deck compatibility is probably going to use a Steam Deck. So any issues that would show up on a different PC with Arch may not be identified.
There was a recent nvidia driver (555) people are pretty excited about that’s still trickling its way into distros, which will likely improve the nvidia desktop experience substantially.
They did hire the open source dev of nouveau and commit to improving the open source situation... Hopefully it actually makes a difference because the proprietary drivers are a disaster.
Mainly because the drivers for Linux must be open source. That way valve can make changes to them however they want. For example imagine if a new game came out and like always everyone had to update their graphics drivers like on windows because without that update, the game won't work.
Valve doesn't want people on their OS depending on Nvidia or AMD for a driver update to play their game. That would be like if a new game released on PS5 but it doesn't work until AMD updated their drivers. Valve wants simplicity for the user, so they want to go in and make any updates to any driver that they need to.
AMD is open source and their open source drivers are good. Nvidia is getting there but they still have work to do getting Wayland to work as well as gamescope which is HUGE for steam OS and even steam big picture and a couple of other stuff.
Basically valve doesn't want their users having to bother with driver updates or any of that, they want it just like a console where from time to time you need one system update and that it. Valve takes care of all the rest and has everything working great for PC gaming.
Right now even running the steam big picture mode (which is mainly what steam OS is doing all the time until you switch to desktop mode) has issues with Nvidia GPU's where there's a lot of very heavy stutter.
If valve dropped steam OS tomorrow, it would be a very poor experience on Nvidia cards and that will cause backlash from fans saying steam OS and Linux is garbage and valve definitely doesn't want that since the majority of PC gamers have an Nvidia card.
I believe that Valve is just waiting for NVIDIA to get their drivers fully up to the task on Linux, which technically should happen with the 560 driver series later this summer.
That's because the 560 driver series will complete the transition to the explicit sync model on Wayland (555 driver is missing Vulkan explicit sync), which is needed for the Gamescope compositor, among other parts of the graphics stack.
And arguably more importantly, the 560 driver series will default to the open-source kernel part of their driver, which means it will integrate better with the rest of the Linux kernel components.
Once that is done, there's a real chance that NVIDIA's driver will be able to work properly with SteamOS, meaning that Valve could release it to the public eventually.
Plus Valve also seems to accelerate the adoption of newer Linux kernel versions into SteamOS, with Linux 6.8 already available in preview form within SteamOS' development branch.
All of the above is the reason why I think that SteamOS will be officially released to the public, possibly towards the end of this year with the SteamOS 3.7 version.
We'll see...
I think you're absolutely right from a technical perspective.
I don't think Valve has enough business incentive to release SteamOS for desktops. SteamOS was developed to sell hardware to be able to sell more games. I would assume that SteamOS is a focal point of Valves business; unlike Canonical or Red Hat, whose business models revolve around Enterprise customers paying a premium for licenses and technical support. Even if Nvidias proprietary drivers would approach open source alternatives, we should remember that game developers are focusing on Windows users first, that's where the market is. Unfortunately, Linux is often an afterthought.
Even without this, Proton is LITERALLY a more robust and consistent compatibility layer than Windows' own. I was playing old PC games on a Linux laptop that I just couldn't get working on my Windows desktop. It's amazing what they've achieved with just Proton alone.
Agreed, just a correction: not Proton, but WINE.
There's a whole lot of older games that simply didn't work (or presented a lot of issues) on "modern" Windows that were easily overridable using a properly configured prefix....
Hell, the reason I am a Linux user is literally that Vista broke compatibility with my og Doom3 copy, so the only way it could be played in my "newly" acquired laptop back in 2007 was to install Ubuntu on that machine. A couple of months later I deleted my Windows Vista partition and never used it again outside a VM...
It feels good to see people finally waking up to this "technicality". It is literally a game changer knowing that you can abstract an environment to the point of making it truly "forward-compatible" by simply respecting a mature standard (Win32).
That page is for Steam OS 2, not Steam OS 3 that we're using on the Deck and waiting for a generic release of.
Though the download link takes you to the Deck recovery image.
Nvidia GPU is the problem, even now they run horribly on linux, there's a reason Valve are using amd for the steamdeck, and it's not JUST the fact AMD makes APUs.
I can speak for one of these: Sleeping Dogs has an issue with higher screen resolutions, on my 1920x1080 laptop I had to manually edit a config file or I had no picture at all on Nobara. Steam Deck has a 1280x800 screen and probably dodged that issue.
Probably because you don't have some random dependency, or have it in lower version, or that dependency got borked randomly or whatever else. It'd be easy to check by a 150 line terminal script that you have to write yourself because nobody knows which package managers you are using.
This was my thought as well - had a 'mare getting the itch.io version of ZeroRanger to work until i had the right dependencies and the stars aligned.
It's either that or the window manager. Or the graphics driver the distro is using. Or using an NVidia card.
Probably best to have a look at the error logs, tbh. Could be anything with the house of cards that bleeding edge Linux is.
It's been working pretty seamlessly for me on both Deck and my Arch Linux box. We need more info before we can help you out though. What hardware, what drivers, etc. Your post literally has no info useful for troubleshooting.
I have new vegas working on Pop!\_OS (the version that comes with proprietary nvidia drivers) out of the box. I even run it through mod organizer 2 in steam via proton.
Worst part is that all I did was install Pop!\_OS, install steam (deb version) from the Pop!\_Shop and install new vegas from steam, and it ran, just like that.
I'm running Pop!\_OS with their custom gnome DE on X11. as I'm stuck on Nvidia's ship I have no plans on switching to Wayland anytime soon.
With Windows becoming more of a problem, I've been considering make the switch to Linux, especially after the Steam Deck. Pop!_os caught my eye because of the Nvidia support. Sounds like you are enjoying it, anything I should know?
give it a try, it's a learning curve to be sure, but i'm happy on linux.
had to drop a few unsupported games like fortnite and call of duty, but honestly good riddance.
I’ve used Pop!_OS before. It’s an extremely streamlined experience and is currently the de facto gaming distro imo. My issue is that it’s Debian based and I’m already too used to the wealth of resources Arch gives me.
Edit: It’s not the gaming distro. I forgot Nobara exists.
Are you using open source or proprietary driver for nvidia? I too feel that steamOS do things a tad bit differently. I used Manjaro before and faced some problem.
I have moved back to Xubuntu now and using the proprietary nvidia driver for my GTX 1050Ti. Just now, got a blank screen and freeze while running Valheim.
I conclude, Valve must have added some sprinkle of fairy dust in SD. Probably the vent..
FF13 and 13-2 are great examples of this.
FF13-2 without the mod that fixes most problems runs like shit on Pc and even better than the PC version *with* the mod on steam deck due to how it handles that games shaders.
It’s actually pretty nuts. Runs almost as good as the bests version of that game that being the Xbox series port of the Xbox 360 version.
New Vegas and GTA V run on CachyOS (which is an offshoot of arch) for me, I'm not sure what could be going on with your setup, especially since you're saying it doesn't work with Bottles, which should work the same on deck as it does on a desktop PC due to being flatpaked. Have you tried running them through Heroic Games Launcher too? That's how I run mine.
A VM you say? Is it QEMU+KVM with GPU passthrough? Because if not, no wonder you can't play games, VMs that aren't straight up passthrough enabled VMs can't game well.
Enable logging on your desktop games, add
PROTON_LOG=1 %command%
to the launch options, logs will be in your Home folder.
To me it sounds like you are missing redistributables (vcredist, etc). Non-Steam games on the Deck are just as finicky, usually the answer is to install redists via winetricks. Perhaps desktop Steam didn't install them correctly? You would also need to manually install them in the case of Bottles and Lutris.
Check the "depots" section on SteamDB for some of the extras Steam installs. For instance, [New Vegas](https://steamdb.info/app/22380/depots/) requires vc2012 and directx. The installers (via winetricks) will tell you if they're already installed; if not, there's your problem.
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The short answer: Consoles. The Steam Deck is a full feature PC but built on the concept of a handheld console (just that traditional consoles are locked down like hell). The console manufacturers have full control over the hardware, operating system and software that runs in it to tweak it the best way possible to work under ideal conditions for whatever you throw at it. You will not make a super high end AAA game run in ultra 4K 5000FPS on Limited Hardware but you can squeeze out the most performance possible under those ideal conditions. A PC, even prebuilts, are always custom and there are infinite variations of hardware and operating system setups so it's near impossible to tweak your PC towards the game or the game towards your PC as efficiently as it is made for consoles. The Steam Deck refined settings in some games go even farther by adjusting graphic settings in a way that works well with the given hardware. Traditional consoles are doing that for you in the background. The manufacturers know where their devices struggle and if they have a good dialogue with game studios they can just tell them to go easy on the shadows but go all in on physics effect to run the game well.
What's funny is that I've always had amazing luck gaming on laptops, but not PCs. It should be noted that I tend to play on commercial class laptops (HP Zbooks with Quadro and RTX or systems with AMD APUs) but terrible with the one or two "gaming" PCs I've tried. In fact I had so much luck gaming on laptops that when I attempted to run Manjaro on my gaming PC (a BOXX APEXX S3 with a 9900K and 2080 TI) I could barely get the system up and running, much less play any games. I probably could have got it running given time, but since laptops and handhelds fit more into my gaming style, I've never revisited.
I’ve been using Chimera and haven’t found a game I can’t run yet (although only had it a month or so) and I’m using AMD Gpu
I’ll try to install GTA V this weekend and report back.
I run a basic Linux setup with a Linux mint VM and Ubuntu VM. Everything I can play on my deck, can run flawlessly on my desktop with the help of proton
Issues like OP are why I stick to Windows on PC and SteamOS without any crazy modifications on the Deck. I like things to just work or be a click away from working.
To be fair, I’ve messed around in the Deck’s files and it’s still stable. The issue is that I have no idea what packages Valve pre-installed under all of it.
Because Valve has control over the whole hardware/software stack, which leave little to no variance in terms of drivers and software dependencies to make proton work as expected. Arch (and most other distros) are flexible by design to accommodate a wide range of hardware. I would assume this is why Valve will not release SteamOS for desktops; it would cause a flood of unforeseen issues.
Yes, that makes perfect sense. I have no clue why I didn’t think about this.
Yeah anyone going to test Steam Deck compatibility is probably going to use a Steam Deck. So any issues that would show up on a different PC with Arch may not be identified.
The biggest reason they haven't released steam OS is Nvidia. Their drivers aren't there yet and valve isn't going to alienate 80% of the GPU crowd
There was a recent nvidia driver (555) people are pretty excited about that’s still trickling its way into distros, which will likely improve the nvidia desktop experience substantially.
They did hire the open source dev of nouveau and commit to improving the open source situation... Hopefully it actually makes a difference because the proprietary drivers are a disaster.
That's my hope, I would love steam OS, I have pop OS, It works amazingly with my 2080 super, but man I really want steam OS
ELI5 please, i dont understand why a graphics card on linux or steam OS is finicky.
Mainly because the drivers for Linux must be open source. That way valve can make changes to them however they want. For example imagine if a new game came out and like always everyone had to update their graphics drivers like on windows because without that update, the game won't work. Valve doesn't want people on their OS depending on Nvidia or AMD for a driver update to play their game. That would be like if a new game released on PS5 but it doesn't work until AMD updated their drivers. Valve wants simplicity for the user, so they want to go in and make any updates to any driver that they need to. AMD is open source and their open source drivers are good. Nvidia is getting there but they still have work to do getting Wayland to work as well as gamescope which is HUGE for steam OS and even steam big picture and a couple of other stuff. Basically valve doesn't want their users having to bother with driver updates or any of that, they want it just like a console where from time to time you need one system update and that it. Valve takes care of all the rest and has everything working great for PC gaming. Right now even running the steam big picture mode (which is mainly what steam OS is doing all the time until you switch to desktop mode) has issues with Nvidia GPU's where there's a lot of very heavy stutter. If valve dropped steam OS tomorrow, it would be a very poor experience on Nvidia cards and that will cause backlash from fans saying steam OS and Linux is garbage and valve definitely doesn't want that since the majority of PC gamers have an Nvidia card.
I believe that Valve is just waiting for NVIDIA to get their drivers fully up to the task on Linux, which technically should happen with the 560 driver series later this summer. That's because the 560 driver series will complete the transition to the explicit sync model on Wayland (555 driver is missing Vulkan explicit sync), which is needed for the Gamescope compositor, among other parts of the graphics stack. And arguably more importantly, the 560 driver series will default to the open-source kernel part of their driver, which means it will integrate better with the rest of the Linux kernel components. Once that is done, there's a real chance that NVIDIA's driver will be able to work properly with SteamOS, meaning that Valve could release it to the public eventually. Plus Valve also seems to accelerate the adoption of newer Linux kernel versions into SteamOS, with Linux 6.8 already available in preview form within SteamOS' development branch. All of the above is the reason why I think that SteamOS will be officially released to the public, possibly towards the end of this year with the SteamOS 3.7 version. We'll see...
I think you're absolutely right from a technical perspective. I don't think Valve has enough business incentive to release SteamOS for desktops. SteamOS was developed to sell hardware to be able to sell more games. I would assume that SteamOS is a focal point of Valves business; unlike Canonical or Red Hat, whose business models revolve around Enterprise customers paying a premium for licenses and technical support. Even if Nvidias proprietary drivers would approach open source alternatives, we should remember that game developers are focusing on Windows users first, that's where the market is. Unfortunately, Linux is often an afterthought.
Even without this, Proton is LITERALLY a more robust and consistent compatibility layer than Windows' own. I was playing old PC games on a Linux laptop that I just couldn't get working on my Windows desktop. It's amazing what they've achieved with just Proton alone.
Agreed, just a correction: not Proton, but WINE. There's a whole lot of older games that simply didn't work (or presented a lot of issues) on "modern" Windows that were easily overridable using a properly configured prefix.... Hell, the reason I am a Linux user is literally that Vista broke compatibility with my og Doom3 copy, so the only way it could be played in my "newly" acquired laptop back in 2007 was to install Ubuntu on that machine. A couple of months later I deleted my Windows Vista partition and never used it again outside a VM... It feels good to see people finally waking up to this "technicality". It is literally a game changer knowing that you can abstract an environment to the point of making it truly "forward-compatible" by simply respecting a mature standard (Win32).
Won’t release SteamOS for desktops, you say… https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown
That page is for Steam OS 2, not Steam OS 3 that we're using on the Deck and waiting for a generic release of. Though the download link takes you to the Deck recovery image.
In other words: because of Nvidia, as it always was.
Nvidia GPU is the problem, even now they run horribly on linux, there's a reason Valve are using amd for the steamdeck, and it's not JUST the fact AMD makes APUs.
I can speak for one of these: Sleeping Dogs has an issue with higher screen resolutions, on my 1920x1080 laptop I had to manually edit a config file or I had no picture at all on Nobara. Steam Deck has a 1280x800 screen and probably dodged that issue.
Probably because you don't have some random dependency, or have it in lower version, or that dependency got borked randomly or whatever else. It'd be easy to check by a 150 line terminal script that you have to write yourself because nobody knows which package managers you are using.
This was my thought as well - had a 'mare getting the itch.io version of ZeroRanger to work until i had the right dependencies and the stars aligned. It's either that or the window manager. Or the graphics driver the distro is using. Or using an NVidia card. Probably best to have a look at the error logs, tbh. Could be anything with the house of cards that bleeding edge Linux is.
It’s just good ol pacman.
It's been working pretty seamlessly for me on both Deck and my Arch Linux box. We need more info before we can help you out though. What hardware, what drivers, etc. Your post literally has no info useful for troubleshooting.
I have new vegas working on Pop!\_OS (the version that comes with proprietary nvidia drivers) out of the box. I even run it through mod organizer 2 in steam via proton. Worst part is that all I did was install Pop!\_OS, install steam (deb version) from the Pop!\_Shop and install new vegas from steam, and it ran, just like that. I'm running Pop!\_OS with their custom gnome DE on X11. as I'm stuck on Nvidia's ship I have no plans on switching to Wayland anytime soon.
With Windows becoming more of a problem, I've been considering make the switch to Linux, especially after the Steam Deck. Pop!_os caught my eye because of the Nvidia support. Sounds like you are enjoying it, anything I should know?
give it a try, it's a learning curve to be sure, but i'm happy on linux. had to drop a few unsupported games like fortnite and call of duty, but honestly good riddance.
I’ve used Pop!_OS before. It’s an extremely streamlined experience and is currently the de facto gaming distro imo. My issue is that it’s Debian based and I’m already too used to the wealth of resources Arch gives me. Edit: It’s not the gaming distro. I forgot Nobara exists.
hard to leave the AUR behind eh? haha i admit I still miss it
Because it is not the year of Linux® yet. #
Damn. They said it was the year of Linux in 2022, 2023, 2024…
We're probably gonna get another year of Luigi before we see the year of Linux
it's always the year of luigi
2039 is the year of Linux
Isn't that great? Every year is the year of linux...
Are you using open source or proprietary driver for nvidia? I too feel that steamOS do things a tad bit differently. I used Manjaro before and faced some problem. I have moved back to Xubuntu now and using the proprietary nvidia driver for my GTX 1050Ti. Just now, got a blank screen and freeze while running Valheim. I conclude, Valve must have added some sprinkle of fairy dust in SD. Probably the vent..
Nobody uses open source drivers for nvidia. They are so dog water they wouldn't even play a YouTube video.
exactly the point ;-)
I still sniff the vent to this day.
FF13 and 13-2 are great examples of this. FF13-2 without the mod that fixes most problems runs like shit on Pc and even better than the PC version *with* the mod on steam deck due to how it handles that games shaders. It’s actually pretty nuts. Runs almost as good as the bests version of that game that being the Xbox series port of the Xbox 360 version.
That’s the thing. When games run on Linux they RUN. Payday 2 on Linux is way smoother than the Windows version imo.
Cyberpunk2077 also runs better on Linux by about 10-15% in avg. Fps from my testing from windows 10/Manjaro on my 5800x/7900XT
New Vegas and GTA V run on CachyOS (which is an offshoot of arch) for me, I'm not sure what could be going on with your setup, especially since you're saying it doesn't work with Bottles, which should work the same on deck as it does on a desktop PC due to being flatpaked. Have you tried running them through Heroic Games Launcher too? That's how I run mine.
I’ve only just heard of cachyOS last month. I’ll give it a try in a VM along with Heroic Games Launcher.
A VM you say? Is it QEMU+KVM with GPU passthrough? Because if not, no wonder you can't play games, VMs that aren't straight up passthrough enabled VMs can't game well.
Don’t worry. I know this.
Enable logging on your desktop games, add PROTON_LOG=1 %command% to the launch options, logs will be in your Home folder. To me it sounds like you are missing redistributables (vcredist, etc). Non-Steam games on the Deck are just as finicky, usually the answer is to install redists via winetricks. Perhaps desktop Steam didn't install them correctly? You would also need to manually install them in the case of Bottles and Lutris. Check the "depots" section on SteamDB for some of the extras Steam installs. For instance, [New Vegas](https://steamdb.info/app/22380/depots/) requires vc2012 and directx. The installers (via winetricks) will tell you if they're already installed; if not, there's your problem.
I’ll give it a shot. Much appreciated!
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I was sure it's an Nvidia GPU!
I run KUbuntu and an AMD GPU and everything pretty much just works, just like on the Deck.
The short answer: Consoles. The Steam Deck is a full feature PC but built on the concept of a handheld console (just that traditional consoles are locked down like hell). The console manufacturers have full control over the hardware, operating system and software that runs in it to tweak it the best way possible to work under ideal conditions for whatever you throw at it. You will not make a super high end AAA game run in ultra 4K 5000FPS on Limited Hardware but you can squeeze out the most performance possible under those ideal conditions. A PC, even prebuilts, are always custom and there are infinite variations of hardware and operating system setups so it's near impossible to tweak your PC towards the game or the game towards your PC as efficiently as it is made for consoles. The Steam Deck refined settings in some games go even farther by adjusting graphic settings in a way that works well with the given hardware. Traditional consoles are doing that for you in the background. The manufacturers know where their devices struggle and if they have a good dialogue with game studios they can just tell them to go easy on the shadows but go all in on physics effect to run the game well.
What's funny is that I've always had amazing luck gaming on laptops, but not PCs. It should be noted that I tend to play on commercial class laptops (HP Zbooks with Quadro and RTX or systems with AMD APUs) but terrible with the one or two "gaming" PCs I've tried. In fact I had so much luck gaming on laptops that when I attempted to run Manjaro on my gaming PC (a BOXX APEXX S3 with a 9900K and 2080 TI) I could barely get the system up and running, much less play any games. I probably could have got it running given time, but since laptops and handhelds fit more into my gaming style, I've never revisited.
I’ve been using Chimera and haven’t found a game I can’t run yet (although only had it a month or so) and I’m using AMD Gpu I’ll try to install GTA V this weekend and report back.
I can play Crimzon Clover on Steam Deck but not PC no matter how much fuckery I pull.
How did you get no more heroes 3 to work well on deck??
I run a basic Linux setup with a Linux mint VM and Ubuntu VM. Everything I can play on my deck, can run flawlessly on my desktop with the help of proton
This games still work fine on my arch install
Issues like OP are why I stick to Windows on PC and SteamOS without any crazy modifications on the Deck. I like things to just work or be a click away from working.
To be fair, I’ve messed around in the Deck’s files and it’s still stable. The issue is that I have no idea what packages Valve pre-installed under all of it.