The people working on Valve’s Steam Deck had a lot of complicated hardware and software hurdles to overcome in order for it to just be a functional handheld gaming computer. My guess is that the biggest hurdle after everything else is probably Valve’s WINE-fork, Proton. Fortunately, Valve can continue to update Proton after the Steam Deck was released. Unfortunately, I don’t think they will undo the damage they’ve caused to the people who were porting games to Linux natively for two decades. Windows compatibility layers like Proton will also never provide perfectly accurate Windows operating system compatibility and it’s gotten to the point where Bungie is threatening to ban users who try to play Destiny 2 through Proton. That’s not entirely unreasonable from their perspective running a multiplayer game, but it stinks for Destiny 2 players.
Because the Steam Deck is “just a computer” Valve is now providing an incomplete set of drivers for Windows to run on the Steam Deck. Dual-booting SteamOS isn’t supported, neither is Windows 11 which requires TPM support, Valve says that both of those will work later on. The built-in speakers and microphone jack also won’t work for now, but Valve says that users can use Bluetooth or USB-C audio adaptors.. Valve is also calling this release unsupported “as-is,” and not offering any official support for the drivers but points users to this page to download the driver packages and this guide for restoring the Steam Deck back to SteamOS.
Destiny 2 runs on the Steam Deck when Windows is installed.
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