That's really neat. I always wanted to get one, but have hard time substantiating it given that I already have Nintendo. can anyone talk from experience if it was worth it?
If you're happy with your Switch, maybe you don't need anything else. If you want to do PC gaming on the go, the Steam Deck is massively worth its cost.
I have all 3 of the major consoles since their respective launches and a well-spec'd gaming machine from 2019. In the year I've had the Steam Deck, I've played more games on it than all other systems in my house combined. Second place goes to the Switch. I can't even remember when I last turned on the Xbox. I've also started and finished more games this past year than the couple years prior to getting the Deck.
There are a couple things I've noticed that makes me play the Deck more. First, being able to play on the couch while others are watching the TV helps a lot, although this is also true of the Switch. Also, emulation is so easy on the Deck, I find myself picking smaller sessions of older games (mostly SNES and GBA).
I have a couple of other hobbies that consume my free time. Since getting the Deck, I've allocated more time to playing games on the Deck and a bit less from the other hobbies.
I'm not sure what would make me buy the next generation of other consoles. It'd need to be something fairly compelling, but I don't see a gap in my personal gaming that's going unfulfilled. I think I could slim down to just the Deck or its successor for the next gen (and maybe the gaming PC, depending on performance).
One significant attribute that I suspect separates me from many other gamers is that I have nearly zero interest in games that are heavily oriented towards online multiplayer, like most FPS. This keeps social network effects from pulling me into any one of the consoles. Some of these have games cross play, but that wasn't the majority a few years ago.
The last time I picked up my Switch after having spent some hundred hours with my Steam Deck, I noticed that the Switch has so much worse ergonomics and speakers than the Steam Deck. If I have the choice between the two, I’d always pick up the Steam Deck.
I have both and the switch has been relegated to stay connected to the tv in case the kids want to play together on it.
Since the steam deck can also play all my switch games plus a lot more, this is what I tend to use and carry around for my personal use. The only problem was installing and letting them know that they can play roblox and minecraft on it so now they constantly want to use it instead of their switch.
If you’re only gonna use it for gaming then maybe stick to the Switch. That being said, the Deck is definitely more versatile because it’s just a little PC - you can do far more than the Switch will let you.
Also, having access to Steam’s frequent discounts - a lot more frequent and generous than Nintendo’s - is really nice. EDIT: forgot to mention - there’s also the fact that you can get other game stores to work, you can even install Windows if you really want to.
I also trust PCs more than Nintendo when it comes to future portability and compatibility: I know for sure I’ll be able to play all my PC games in the next iteration of the Deck, and other PCs of course, and even if Valve folds I’ll be able to use the Deck for whatever I want. You can’t say that at all for the Switch - eventually Nintendo will pull support and bring down the store like they did for the 3DS, and they even patched it one last time to make jailbreaking harder! For a DEAD console!
EDIT: A point in favor of the Switch though: games come in cartridges so if you don’t want to trust online stores in the long term then that’s something to consider.
All this being said, I found the Deck to be a little too underpowered for my use case - it struggles with some of the games I like to play. I ended buying a Razer Blade 14 with a 4070 and an AMD chipset. Not as portable, but still very portable, plenty performant and with great battery life.
Personally i think the deck is plenty powerful, if you consider its price point. The blade 14 is not a comparatively priced laptop, and neither are any gaming laptops currently available, because the deck is most likely sold at cost or at a loss by valve.
Right when it came out, I was looking for a laptop I could use on the train to game and do some compute with without breaking the bank and it's one of the best price/performance ratios out there.
The whole verified thing can't be trusted. I tried to play CyberPunk on my deck. The on-screen text is unreadable, the framerate is highly unstable and all in all it's just a bad experience. I ended up signing up to nVidia Geforce Now and finished it on there. Hogwarts legacy was just as unplayable, textures failing to load, bad framerates, bugs and crashes. I don't have the deck anymore because I can't trust that "verified" games are going to be playable.
That's just Hogwarts Legacy though, and nothing specific to the Steam Deck. It was an awful buggy mess no matter where/how you played it and the devs basically did next to no bug patching post-launch.
That said, I did play the entirety of the game on the Steam Deck and it was totally fine. The bugs were unrelated to the Steam Deck.
Lucky you. Many of us were not so lucky. My save file is somehow permanently bugged and as of halfway through the game I could not collect any more of the hidden scrolls and the devs just close my bug tickets without any communication or clarification as "duplicate" of some other tickets which were entirely unrelated and was never fixed.
From another perspective (rarely spending more than 20$ on a game) I am surprised how often games just work, no matter if they are officially supported or not. I rarely check to be honest, they just work.
Of these 'smaller games', the ones that didn't work and I had to return, the majority was made with unity and full of bug reports for windows as well.
Is the on-screen text unreadable because the screen is too small, or is it a different issue? Of course not all games will be suitable for such a small screen. On my big-screen Linux PC, Cyberpunk works absolutely flawlessly. Well, not entirely flawlessly; I think I've had three times that it crashed, and when it does, it hangs the compositor until I kill the Cyberpunk process. Could be an X11/Wayland issue.
The text was really small but also garbled/twisted in weird ways. Looking back it may have been an upscaling issue possibly, I don't know, I just expected a "verified" title to run well and be playable with default settings.
I played Cyberpunk 2077 through its entirety on the Steam Deck. The text is not "unreadable". It's not even the smallest font I've seen on the Steam Deck. You might want to visit your eye doctor. Framerate could have been better but it was a more solid experience than Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas on PS3 which were playable too. Or really countless other games of that era. Verified doesn't mean perfect. It just means it's not a PITA to use, all content works and runs well enough.
Agreed. I only played Cyberpunk on the Deck for a few hours, but I was impressed how well it ran. 40fps worked fine for long stretches, and the text size wasn't an issue in the slightest.
I wouldn't be surprised if ASUS is getting kickbacks from Microsoft, since the ROG Ally is quite aggressively priced despite coming with a Windows 11 license, and it comes with a 3-month trial of Xbox Game Pass. And it'd make sense why Microsoft would support device manufacturers - the Steam Deck is really dangerous to Microsoft's Game Pass vision since you can't really use it out of the box there.
broad software library - all those free epic games store games, game pass, etc. And those companies are comfortable releasing a windows device - there's no downside to them at all.
SteamOS isn't yet available for non-Valve handhelds, mostly because that means Valve would need to support a variety of hardware. They've stated they're trying to make it more broadly available now that the OLED has shipped.
The games were designed for Windows, using Windows APIs.
It is 2024, and yet almost no studio targeting Android/NDK cares about GNU/Linux, in spite of the same game development APIs being available on both platforms, leaving Windows emulation/translation as the only way to get modern GNU/Linux games.
I was under the impression the tipping point might be around adoption of Vulkan in game engines. If enough do that, would that make it simple enough to make a Linux/universal build?
That is the usual mentality in FOSS circles, the 3D APIs are a tiny portion of what makes a game engine when placed the set of bullet point of what something like Unreal must be able to deliver to a team, while targeting all these backends,
"Windows PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, macOS, iOS, Android, ARKit, ARCore, OpenXR, SteamVR, Oculus, Linux, and SteamDeck."
> "Windows PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, macOS, iOS, Android, ARKit, ARCore, OpenXR, SteamVR, Oculus, Linux, and SteamDeck."
Yes, I understand backends. Why isn't a new target for graphics that supports some of those backends at least some of that effort reduced?
In the eyes of the average gamer, it doesn't really matter what are the technologies running under the hood as long as the games run when they press "play".
>It is 2024, and yet almost no studio targeting Android/NDK cares about GNU/Linux
Anti-cheat. Shooters use a variety of kernel-mode anti-cheats that mostly work pretty well, and those require Windows. Developers are hesitant to support userspace Linux anticheats since they're not as effective.
The Counter-Strike community, for instance, plays competitive games on FACEIT which uses their own Windows-only kernel-mode anticheat because they don't consider Valve's VAC to be good enough. So despite CS being a Valve game, you can't realistically play competitive games on SteamOS. Valve's native competitive mode, Premier, has already been dismissed as full of cheaters.
I love mine, I'm not sure why anyone would play verified AAA games on it though, they drain battery, cause heat and fan noise, when I can play thousands of indie games for hours, emulators (with EmuDeck, with the convenience of speeding up most of them so I can skip through slow & grind-heavy parts), use it as a media center, or connect it to a KB, mouse and monitor in desktop mode.
I'd never install Windows on it, in fact, I've uninstalled Windows months ago from my gaming desktop that has a RTX 2080 S on it, and installed Debian + KDE (on Xorg for now because Wayland + Nvidia is... complicated). It's probably mainly thanks to the efforts of Valve with Proton (but also all projects that they rely on, like WINE, DXVK, etc.) that I can now play 90% of my games on Linux, some with tinkering in launch options. Please let there be more Linux in competitors, even though Valve's is fine, we need developers to understand that MS Windows is not the only target anymore.
>I'm not sure why anyone would play verified AAA games on it though
Because people like different things.
>I'd never install Windows on it,
It's ok to love your steamdeck with linux - I don't have windows on mine either, but everyone has different things they like and that they find are ok. Lots of people have tons of free games off the epic game store or through game pass and thats ok.
>we need developers to understand that MS Windows is not the only target anymore.
Well there's an official steamdeck verification program - thats clear. It just doesn't matter to the overwhelming majority of pc gamers.
Of course, that's ok to like different things, but what I'm referring to is the people who bought a Steam Deck expecting "Verified" games to play well, when they eat through battery way too fast to play confortably in the way Valve advertised.
When I tell people I love my Steam Deck, I also warn them that it's not for everyone and that there are downsides and you have to find compromises. I know that my software developer background helps a lot with the tinkering, so the value I get is different from what non-technical people would get.
I also have an extensive Epic Game Library, mostly from free games grabbed in one click every week, and using the third-party launcher Heroic that supports Epic and GoG, I can play them on SteamOS on the Deck, sometimes with tinkering too (solved with winetricks / protontricks mostly).
And I feel that the industry as a whole would benefit from giving players a true choice in the operating system they want, and not just between GNU/Linux and Windows.
With the OLED model the lowest you'll get is maybe 1.5h on heavy games. That seems .. okay to me. It's not super great, but it's more than enough to play a more demanding game during a break or something.
I played nontrivial portions of the Dead Space and Resident Evil IV remakes on the Deck over the past year and I didn't mind it, once I got used to the low frame rates, anyway. BG3 was similarly fine until act 3, though it admittedly falls apart then.
The Deck always sees much praise on HN, so I'd like to point out it has its own share of flaws.
Major and minor annoyances I experience that come to my mind, in no particular order:
* Steam's own website is not always entirely functional from the Deck's interface, for example you can't scroll down items in the inventory. This means, for example, you can't trade TF2 weapons or manage/refund gifts;
* to my surprise TF2, a Valve first-party game, is not verified;
* not being able to alt-tab easily in desktop mode is a serious oversight;
* I feel the lack of physical keyboard in general, typing on the on-screen virtual keyboard is incredibly slow and inaccurate. As a workaround I keep a smartphone by my side for PM/group chat, but obviously this doesn't work for in-game chats;
* playing FPSs with an analog stick/touchpad/gyro against players who use a mouse is a frustrating experience;
* Steam only allows one online-connected game running per account: if you have any game running on your PC you'll have to close it first before running any game on the Deck (or play it in off-line mode);
* if you have no internet connection when booting, even if you connect later on it won't log-in on Steam unless you reboot.
* playing FPSs with an analog stick/touchpad/gyro against players who use a mouse is a frustrating experience;
That's the great thing about a deck. Just plug in a mouse! I use some Anker USB-C hub and attach the deck to a real mouse, keyboard, ethernet, and monitor when I want to do "serious" gaming. Otherwise, the deck is a great form factor for casual, void-filling gaming.
I have a steam deck OLED and I am very happy with it, but there are a few minor annoyances I don't see a lot of people talking about:
The 800px screen size is lackluster and very noticeable for that size of screen (dunno about the LCD deck). It is one of the main reasons texts are not very readable in some games. Games that use non-standard fonts (which is quite common surprisingly) and haven't been made with small screens in mind (or have an UI-size slider) have this problem a lot.
Besides the fonts the low resolution is still noticeable, but not a HUGE issue. I hope they bump it up to 1080p for the next model.
Another thing is that games don't go on suspend mode once you go to steam menus like other consoles do. The game is still running in the background (with audio and everything). In fact there is no game-suspend functionality at all, only having the device fully going to sleep actually pauses the game.
Going to desktop mode and back to steam-mode takes quite some time, making dual-use a bit annoying. It seems KDE is not actually running in the background if you are in steam mode. Which is fair enough I suppose, but the thing has 16gb of RAM, a toggle to make both load at the same time would be nice.
>Another thing is that games don't go on suspend mode once you go to steam menus like other consoles do. The game is still running in the background (with audio and everything). In fact there is no game-suspend functionality at all, only having the device fully going to sleep actually pauses the game.
For people that like to tinker a bit, you can install Decky Loader and the "Pause Games" plugin that can suspend games, even automatically on focus loss.
>I hope they bump it up to 1080p for the next model.
I hope they stick with 16:10 and choose 1920x1200 instead. The extra height is nice (plus if a game only supports 16:9 and gets black bars, that just means your FPS counter can be in blank space instead of covering the game content). Also, I mostly play docked with a 1920x1200 monitor and a lot of games I play run well still.
The important part here is of course not just the Steam Deck support, but the fact that the Steam Deck is just a handheld Linux computer; if it works there, it will work on any Linux machine.
I recently switched (again) to Linux for gaming, and the experience is much better than the previous times I tried it. I don't think I've come across a game that doesn't work. Some games a few tweaks, especially non-Steam games, but quite often the solution is simply to check the "use Steam runtime" checkbox in Heroic. So non-Steam games still benefit from the excellent work by Valve.
> The important part here is of course not just the Steam Deck support, but the fact that the Steam Deck is just a handheld Linux computer; if it works there, it will work on any Linux machine.
Kind of but not that simple.. The 'secret sauce' if you can call it that is the "Steam Proton" compatibility layer for Windows graphics APIs using a combination of Wine and DXVK.
So 'any linux distro' is a bit of a stretch, in fact I'm not sure the public availability of the Proton as it was a partnership with Valve and CodeWeavers.
Edit: `DXVK` is DirectX over Vulkan which is fast becoming more performant and ubiquitous.
Yeah, but that compatibility layer, and steam itself, is available for all (PC-based) Linux distributions, as far as I know. I don't doubt you'll run into problems if you want to use it on devices never meant to run games at all.
Even non-Steam games, installed through non-Steam platforms (like Heroic, which supports GOG), still have the option of using Valve's version of Proton, use the Steam runtime itself, or even apparently importing the game into Steam (I haven't tried that yet). Valve is not monopolizing Steam gaming, but sharing this support.
That does sound good and of course valve are interested in getting it more widespread and compatibility down.
[s] My only concern is that "out of the box" is what most people expect. Not all gamers would be knowledgeable about how to compile proton for their vanilla Ubuntu. Although who knows! [/s]
Still I would love something for MacOS but looks like this would be a pain to compile.
> My only concern is that "out of the box" is what most people expect. Not all gamers would be knowledgeable about how to compile proton for their vanilla Ubuntu. Although who knows!
I'm rather amazed at how well Steam and other game platforms have been integrated into Linux. I'm using EndeavorOS, not exactly the most common distribution, but installing Steam and Heroic is just a matter of a simple command to install. Works great. Documentation is great. Easy as pie.
Unfortunately there is pretty big differences between the states of the various GPU drivers on Linux which impacts Proton. A game playable on a Steam Deck is not necessarily playable on a system with an Intel Arc A770 or GeForce RTX 4060 despite those GPUs being more powerful.
From what I understand, NVidia used to have poor Linux support, but apparently that's been fixed. In any case, I haven't run into any serious issues with my RTX 4070.
Currently Arc cards don't support DX12 games at all through Proton. Nvidia issues are a little more random but they aren't hard to find. Call of Duty WWII ran like a slideshow regardless of settings on my Geforce 1660 but ran fine on my Steam Deck.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadThere are a couple things I've noticed that makes me play the Deck more. First, being able to play on the couch while others are watching the TV helps a lot, although this is also true of the Switch. Also, emulation is so easy on the Deck, I find myself picking smaller sessions of older games (mostly SNES and GBA).
I have a couple of other hobbies that consume my free time. Since getting the Deck, I've allocated more time to playing games on the Deck and a bit less from the other hobbies.
I'm not sure what would make me buy the next generation of other consoles. It'd need to be something fairly compelling, but I don't see a gap in my personal gaming that's going unfulfilled. I think I could slim down to just the Deck or its successor for the next gen (and maybe the gaming PC, depending on performance).
One significant attribute that I suspect separates me from many other gamers is that I have nearly zero interest in games that are heavily oriented towards online multiplayer, like most FPS. This keeps social network effects from pulling me into any one of the consoles. Some of these have games cross play, but that wasn't the majority a few years ago.
Since the steam deck can also play all my switch games plus a lot more, this is what I tend to use and carry around for my personal use. The only problem was installing and letting them know that they can play roblox and minecraft on it so now they constantly want to use it instead of their switch.
Also, having access to Steam’s frequent discounts - a lot more frequent and generous than Nintendo’s - is really nice. EDIT: forgot to mention - there’s also the fact that you can get other game stores to work, you can even install Windows if you really want to.
I also trust PCs more than Nintendo when it comes to future portability and compatibility: I know for sure I’ll be able to play all my PC games in the next iteration of the Deck, and other PCs of course, and even if Valve folds I’ll be able to use the Deck for whatever I want. You can’t say that at all for the Switch - eventually Nintendo will pull support and bring down the store like they did for the 3DS, and they even patched it one last time to make jailbreaking harder! For a DEAD console!
EDIT: A point in favor of the Switch though: games come in cartridges so if you don’t want to trust online stores in the long term then that’s something to consider.
All this being said, I found the Deck to be a little too underpowered for my use case - it struggles with some of the games I like to play. I ended buying a Razer Blade 14 with a 4070 and an AMD chipset. Not as portable, but still very portable, plenty performant and with great battery life.
Right when it came out, I was looking for a laptop I could use on the train to game and do some compute with without breaking the bank and it's one of the best price/performance ratios out there.
That said, I did play the entirety of the game on the Steam Deck and it was totally fine. The bugs were unrelated to the Steam Deck.
finished the game on the ps5. encountered 2 minor bugs.
Of these 'smaller games', the ones that didn't work and I had to return, the majority was made with unity and full of bug reports for windows as well.
I agree it shouldn't be verified though.
Hence they don't have any issue using the real Windows, instead of having an emulation/translation layer for Win32 and DirectX.
It is 2024, and yet almost no studio targeting Android/NDK cares about GNU/Linux, in spite of the same game development APIs being available on both platforms, leaving Windows emulation/translation as the only way to get modern GNU/Linux games.
Rather how little money the studios get back, versus the amount of additional development effort in supporting GNU/Linux.
The 3D APIs will be a decent chunk of that effort, I thought.
"Windows PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, macOS, iOS, Android, ARKit, ARCore, OpenXR, SteamVR, Oculus, Linux, and SteamDeck."
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/unreal-engine-5
I don't know what this means.
> "Windows PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, macOS, iOS, Android, ARKit, ARCore, OpenXR, SteamVR, Oculus, Linux, and SteamDeck."
Yes, I understand backends. Why isn't a new target for graphics that supports some of those backends at least some of that effort reduced?
Scenegraph, assets management, scripting, fonts, 3D models, shader debugging, a myriad of visualisation algorithms, sound,game devices integration, networking, GUI framework, artists tooling, game designers tooling,...
Note that Unreal supports Linux, and even so, very few studios using Unreal bother to sell to Linux users.
>It is 2024, and yet almost no studio targeting Android/NDK cares about GNU/Linux
PC gamers aren't mobage studio's target audience.
The Counter-Strike community, for instance, plays competitive games on FACEIT which uses their own Windows-only kernel-mode anticheat because they don't consider Valve's VAC to be good enough. So despite CS being a Valve game, you can't realistically play competitive games on SteamOS. Valve's native competitive mode, Premier, has already been dismissed as full of cheaters.
I'd never install Windows on it, in fact, I've uninstalled Windows months ago from my gaming desktop that has a RTX 2080 S on it, and installed Debian + KDE (on Xorg for now because Wayland + Nvidia is... complicated). It's probably mainly thanks to the efforts of Valve with Proton (but also all projects that they rely on, like WINE, DXVK, etc.) that I can now play 90% of my games on Linux, some with tinkering in launch options. Please let there be more Linux in competitors, even though Valve's is fine, we need developers to understand that MS Windows is not the only target anymore.
Because people like different things.
>I'd never install Windows on it,
It's ok to love your steamdeck with linux - I don't have windows on mine either, but everyone has different things they like and that they find are ok. Lots of people have tons of free games off the epic game store or through game pass and thats ok.
>we need developers to understand that MS Windows is not the only target anymore.
Well there's an official steamdeck verification program - thats clear. It just doesn't matter to the overwhelming majority of pc gamers.
When I tell people I love my Steam Deck, I also warn them that it's not for everyone and that there are downsides and you have to find compromises. I know that my software developer background helps a lot with the tinkering, so the value I get is different from what non-technical people would get.
I also have an extensive Epic Game Library, mostly from free games grabbed in one click every week, and using the third-party launcher Heroic that supports Epic and GoG, I can play them on SteamOS on the Deck, sometimes with tinkering too (solved with winetricks / protontricks mostly).
And I feel that the industry as a whole would benefit from giving players a true choice in the operating system they want, and not just between GNU/Linux and Windows.
I played nontrivial portions of the Dead Space and Resident Evil IV remakes on the Deck over the past year and I didn't mind it, once I got used to the low frame rates, anyway. BG3 was similarly fine until act 3, though it admittedly falls apart then.
Major and minor annoyances I experience that come to my mind, in no particular order:
* Steam's own website is not always entirely functional from the Deck's interface, for example you can't scroll down items in the inventory. This means, for example, you can't trade TF2 weapons or manage/refund gifts;
* to my surprise TF2, a Valve first-party game, is not verified;
* not being able to alt-tab easily in desktop mode is a serious oversight;
* I feel the lack of physical keyboard in general, typing on the on-screen virtual keyboard is incredibly slow and inaccurate. As a workaround I keep a smartphone by my side for PM/group chat, but obviously this doesn't work for in-game chats;
* playing FPSs with an analog stick/touchpad/gyro against players who use a mouse is a frustrating experience;
* Steam only allows one online-connected game running per account: if you have any game running on your PC you'll have to close it first before running any game on the Deck (or play it in off-line mode);
* if you have no internet connection when booting, even if you connect later on it won't log-in on Steam unless you reboot.
-Signed, a overall happy owner of a Steam Deck.
That's the great thing about a deck. Just plug in a mouse! I use some Anker USB-C hub and attach the deck to a real mouse, keyboard, ethernet, and monitor when I want to do "serious" gaming. Otherwise, the deck is a great form factor for casual, void-filling gaming.
The 800px screen size is lackluster and very noticeable for that size of screen (dunno about the LCD deck). It is one of the main reasons texts are not very readable in some games. Games that use non-standard fonts (which is quite common surprisingly) and haven't been made with small screens in mind (or have an UI-size slider) have this problem a lot.
Besides the fonts the low resolution is still noticeable, but not a HUGE issue. I hope they bump it up to 1080p for the next model.
Another thing is that games don't go on suspend mode once you go to steam menus like other consoles do. The game is still running in the background (with audio and everything). In fact there is no game-suspend functionality at all, only having the device fully going to sleep actually pauses the game.
Going to desktop mode and back to steam-mode takes quite some time, making dual-use a bit annoying. It seems KDE is not actually running in the background if you are in steam mode. Which is fair enough I suppose, but the thing has 16gb of RAM, a toggle to make both load at the same time would be nice.
For people that like to tinker a bit, you can install Decky Loader and the "Pause Games" plugin that can suspend games, even automatically on focus loss.
https://github.com/popsUlfr/SDH-PauseGames
I hope they stick with 16:10 and choose 1920x1200 instead. The extra height is nice (plus if a game only supports 16:9 and gets black bars, that just means your FPS counter can be in blank space instead of covering the game content). Also, I mostly play docked with a 1920x1200 monitor and a lot of games I play run well still.
I recently switched (again) to Linux for gaming, and the experience is much better than the previous times I tried it. I don't think I've come across a game that doesn't work. Some games a few tweaks, especially non-Steam games, but quite often the solution is simply to check the "use Steam runtime" checkbox in Heroic. So non-Steam games still benefit from the excellent work by Valve.
I don't think I'll go back to Windows this time.
Kind of but not that simple.. The 'secret sauce' if you can call it that is the "Steam Proton" compatibility layer for Windows graphics APIs using a combination of Wine and DXVK.
So 'any linux distro' is a bit of a stretch, in fact I'm not sure the public availability of the Proton as it was a partnership with Valve and CodeWeavers.
Edit: `DXVK` is DirectX over Vulkan which is fast becoming more performant and ubiquitous.
Edit2 : Proton's repo - https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton
Even non-Steam games, installed through non-Steam platforms (like Heroic, which supports GOG), still have the option of using Valve's version of Proton, use the Steam runtime itself, or even apparently importing the game into Steam (I haven't tried that yet). Valve is not monopolizing Steam gaming, but sharing this support.
[s] My only concern is that "out of the box" is what most people expect. Not all gamers would be knowledgeable about how to compile proton for their vanilla Ubuntu. Although who knows! [/s]
Still I would love something for MacOS but looks like this would be a pain to compile.
Edit: You can ignore 75% of that
You just install Steam.
Guess you can disregard all the above! My bad