Steam Deck vs Windows: A Quiet Revolution in Gaming
Year of Linux anytime soon? Hah.....no.....not anytime soon.
Imagine running a AAA PC game on a tiny device - in your backpack…and it just works.
Enter Steam Deck.
Competition is good but in areas where decades-long monopolies exist, it's pretty hard. Windows has been the de-facto Operating System for PC gaming for decades now. Gamers use it and studios develop for it. That is how things have been.
In PC gaming, there hasn't been a challenge to Windows's long reign until Steam Deck came to the scene. Valve with help of open-source software and community has challenged a decade-long monopoly by developing the Steam Deck & the SteamOS.
In the past years, Steam Deck has been among the unique products that combine their unorthodox approach to PC gaming that works for the most part.
In this article, I'll talk about the Steam Deck and why I believe it is going to be a game-changer for Linux, the open-source ecosystem and gamers who want another option.
What even is a Steam Deck?
In a sentence, It's a gaming console that can fit in your hands and can run games like Cyberpunk 2077 at a smooth frame-rate on battery.
Honestly, It doesn't get simpler than that but there's a lot more to the Steam Deck than this one-liner.
My one-liner above does a good job of explaining what a Steam Deck is to the general populace but I'd say it doesn't do justice to it. In-fact, the Steam Deck is much more than just a gaming console - It's unlike any other gaming console out there. Let me give a casual rundown of its major capabilities.
Features & Specs
To begin with, the Steam Deck is a pretty powerful and portable gaming device. It uses the same architecture of CPU and GPU as the PS5 and XBOX do but it uses a custom version that is heavily scaled down and optimized for the Steam Deck. This allows it to provide an optimized gaming experience on battery.
The Steam Deck is capable of running AAA titles at playable frame-rates. It comes with a 90hz OLED Display and has a high speed Type-C USB port that can be used to charge it or drive an entire display at even higher resolutions than the Deck's native display.
The Steam Deck has a 55Whr battery which Valve says could last you around 3-12 hours of gameplay (this heavily depends upon the game and configuration in-use).
Steam Deck uses NVMe M.2 SSD for storage like the PlayStation and Xbox. Users can replace the original SSD and expand the storage. Additionally the Steam Deck also comes up with a microSD expansion slot.
Gaming console and a Desktop computer?
More than a gaming console, Steam Deck can be used as a desktop computer which looks pretty similar to Windows but is fundamentally different (more on that later).
You can switch to Desktop mode and it hides the Steam Launcher and opens up KDE Plasma Desktop where you can run desktop applications just like you would on a normal Linux computer.
In Desktop mode, you can install and run Linux applications all the way from web browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, etc to media players like VLC.
You can install third party emulators like the RPCS3 to emulate PS3 games or other emulators for retro machines. Basically you can use Steam Deck to emulate even Nintendo and PlayStation platforms and run many of their games. How cool is that?
The Issues with Launch Steam Deck
When the Steam Deck initially got released back in 2022, there were two major complaints from the users.
The Display and the Battery.
The initial version of the Steam Deck had a 60hz LCD Display. It came with a weaker Network Chip (aka NIC) and a somewhat slower RAM. The original Steam Deck also had a smaller battery.
The Fix - Steam Deck OLED
A year after the original release, Valve announced the Steam Deck OLED. It wasn't a new Steam Deck but more like an update to the original one.
It just fixed the major complaints that the users had with the original deck and included some extra improvements which we'll talk about below.
The Steam Deck OLED is basically built on the original deck. It wasn't Steam Deck 2 but it was an update to the original one. The OLED version came with the following features:
A better 90hz OLED display instead of the previous 60hz LCD display
A bigger battery (55Whr instead of the previous 40Whr)
A WiFi-6 capable network card
Faster RAM (6300 MT/s instead of the previous 5500 MT/s)
Double the storage size compared to the previous version (256GB, 512GB, and 1TB variants)
6nm CPU Architecture instead of the 7nm architecture used by the original Steam Deck
From here on in this article, When I say Steam Deck I'm referring to the OLED version since the original version is no longer in production.
How do games run on the Steam Deck?
Steam Deck is a different beast than consoles like the PlayStation and Nintendo where games are natively run because they are developed for those very platforms by the publishers. On Steam Deck, it's a totally different situation.
As things stand, most of the games are developed specifically for consoles or Windows. It's because they have the most gamers. There is no one else in between. The Linux market share is too small to be considered a viable platform to develop games for, from a business point of view.
To get over this problem, Valve made use of open source technologies that existed and refined them for gamers. They used Arch Linux (a free and open-source OS) combined with Proton - a compatibility layer based on another open source software (Wine) that Valve created to make Windows games compatible for Linux on run-time.
The Proton Compatibility layer as it's called has greatly improved with time and now it allows users to run Windows games on Linux with little-to-no performance overhead in many cases. Initially the list of playable games was pretty small with just a couple hundred games verified but with time it grew and now the catalogue of playable games has grown to tens of thousands of games.
What games are playable on the Steam Deck?
On Steam Deck, there are 4 categories of games on Steam. These categories suggest how the games would perform on the deck.
Below I'll explain the 4 categories of games on the Steam Deck:
Verified - These games run seamlessly on the Steam Deck with full functionality
Playable - These games require some configuration from the user but are playable with the Steam Deck (things like adjusting graphics settings manually)
Unsupported - These games are known to not run on the Steam Deck, VR games or others that just can't be run by the Steam Deck's hardware
Unknown - Valve hasn't tested these games and these may or may not work with the Steam Deck. These require manual user input
Source: https://www.protondb.com/
Not all games are playable on Steam Deck but a fair amount of them are. Back when Steam Deck officially launched there were less than 500 verified games on the Steam Deck. In a matter of 3 years, the number of verified and playable games combined has increased to more than 19,000 games on the Steam Deck.
And this doesn't mean that only Steam Deck can play these games. You can expect other handhelds that ship with SteamOS to play the same number of games. Any Linux operating system can also be used to play these games using the open-source Proton compatibility layer.
Who is the Steam Deck for?
Now that we've talked about much of what is shiny about Steam Deck let's discuss things that aren't that shiny for most. We should first understand that Steam Deck is a relatively new device. It's just 3 years old. The way it runs games is fundamentally different and a complex way to run games.
Steam Deck's main challenge was running games that were only built to run on an unsupported platform without the help of game developers. While they have succeeded in great part there are some things one should consider before going for a Steam Deck.
You shouldn’t expect a traditional console experience from the Steam Deck. You might get it but you shouldn't expect it. Consider Sony's PS5, you grab a game and it's guaranteed to run on your console because it's made for it. That is not the case with Steam Deck. The user can sometimes have to get a bit hands-down with their Steam Deck and fix issues that can be minor or major depending upon the game.
Among some of the popular games anti-cheat has been a big issue that has been in the way of running those games on the Steam Deck. Let me go into a bit detail on that:
Anti-cheat games
Anti-cheat is a software package bundled into games that detect if a person is cheating the game. These software use privileged positions in an Operating System to detect unfair play and report that to the game developers.
Most of the games with proprietary anti-cheat software don't work with Linux, which means they don't work with the Steam Deck atm. Popular games with anti-cheat include Call of Duty, Fortnite, Valorant, etc.
There are a couple of reasons many anti-cheat software aren't ported to Linux:
Less Demand before Steam Deck - There wasn't much demand from the players' side for games to be run on Linux. Developers never thought of porting anti-cheat to Linux as a priority before Steam Deck
Built specifically for Windows - Most of the anti-cheat software is built for Windows and porting it is not an easy task because of the de-centralized nature of Linux distros with different customization options
Fears of Reverse Engineering - Some anti-cheat creators are fearful that releasing their software on Linux would mean that their software could be reverse engineered more easily than in a closed environment like Windows
This does not mean that all games with anti-cheat software don't work on Steam Deck. In-fact some developers have started to support their anti-cheat for Steam Deck. Valve has also worked and has been successful in porting many games on Steam Deck that once weren't possible to run because of their anti-cheat limitations.
To conclude, you must first research if the games you want to play are supported on the Steam Deck. Even if your games are playable there can be some minor bugs that you should be expected to deal with. You also should be ready to take over when things need some configuration or adjustment that is not officially provided or isn't easily accessible.
What makes Valve's approach special?
Steam Deck isn't the first handheld. Many successful ones have come before it but Valve is the first company to bet on Linux for mainstream gaming and turns out they've been pretty successful.
What's unique about Valve's approach is that they've taken existing open-source software, worked hard on optimizing them for their platform and helped create a whole ecosystem and developer community in the process. This has a far-reaching impact both in-terms of the way games are played and developed both for Windows and Linux platforms.
SteamOS
The Steam Deck uses a custom Linux-based operating system for the Steam Deck instead of Microsoft Windows, along with a number of open-source elements that make gaming on the Linux possible.
To make gaming on Linux a reality Valve not only had to work on the compatibility layer that allows it to run Windows games on Linux, it also had to work on a number of other areas like open-source graphics drivers, software packaging, Linux Graphics optimizations, game-specific optimizations, etc.
The Proton compatibility layer, itself being open-source, has acted as the foundational brick for many other community flavors of gaming-specific Linux distros (distros are flavors of Linux OS customized for a specific audience). Bazzite, a community-run Linux-based OS uses Proton to run games providing more extended functionality and customization.
In the PC gaming space, Microsoft Windows has a monopoly with it having more than 90% of the share. There is no competitor. Ever since long ago, Valve has shown concerns about this. That is why for the Steam Deck, Valve has chosen to build their own OS using Linux that is tailored specially for gamers.
SteamOS is Valve's long-term threat to Microsoft's monopoly in the PC gaming space. Valve's work on Proton has helped build a whole community of open-source enthusiasts working together to make gaming on Linux better for everyone else.
To make SteamOS a viable option for gaming Valve has contributed to the development of open-source operating systems, improving the Linux kernel, and improving open-source device drivers. This in-turn has not only benefited Valve or just the Steam Deck but the whole Linux ecosystem both in terms of gaming and graphics intensive applications.
Third Party Handhelds
Valve has started working with other OEM manufacturers like Lenovo to ship SteamOS with their handhelds. Valve has plans to partner with other manufacturers to ship SteamOS with their handhelds too.
Recently, Lenovo announced their Legion Go S. It is a handheld that was released with two versions - One came with Windows, the other with SteamOS pre-packaged by Lenovo.
Reviews for the Legion Go S have started to come up and the SteamOS variant is getting praise for better performance of games with 5-15% performance at a lower system overhead meaning better battery and better functioning features like sleep functionality when compared to Windows version of the Legion Go S.
One more thing to note is that the SteamOS version of the Legion Go S is cheaper than the Windows version because Linux is free and doesn't require a license to use unlike Microsoft Windows which increases the overall cost of the device because of its paid license.
Other handhelds like the Switch 2 have also been influenced by Steam Deck's performance in a portable form factor. The Switch 2 has made substantial performance improvements over the last generation which likely was influenced by the Steam Deck.
The Steam Deck has caused a wave of other handheld devices like the Legion Go, MSI Claw and ROG Ally to be released. In the future, Valve plans to partner with more OEMs to ship SteamOS with those newer handhelds.
My experience with gaming on Linux
I wish I could do a hands-on review of the Steam Deck but at the moment I don't own one. While I can't give much hands-on impressions on the Steam Deck I can certainly talk about Steam Deck's impact on Linux because I use Linux as my primary OS - for work and personal use.
A couple of months ago I really wanted to play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I love this game. It's an old game, even older than me but I enjoy it. This game was released back in the days for PlayStation2 originally but also has a PC release. It was never developed for Linux.
To play GTA San Andreas in 2025, one has to have Rockstar Games Launcher running which is only available for Windows so no Linux support. Now, I've been using Linux for a couple of years and I’d say that I'm fairly comfortable using it. At that time, I wanted to run GTA on Arch Linux.
I went on to install Rockstar Games Launcher through open-source implementations like Wine and even Proton without the Official Steam Launcher and faced a plethora of weird issues all the way from installation to launching the application. I guess I spent a couple of days and got nowhere. There was just one error after another.
While I was researching for some error that I don't even remember now, I found out that one can just install the Steam Client that is available for Linux, enable the Steam Compatibility layer inside it and install any third-party game launcher that he may want.
I straight up grabbed the Rockstar Games Launcher exe file, fed it to Steam while having enabled the Proton compatibility layer and it worked like a charm. I had to do zero configuration to get it working. And a couple of minutes after the install, GTA San Andreas was running on my potato laptop. I was surprised how I was able to experience gaming on Linux with this minimal effort.
Anyone who has used Linux for some time knows that you don't expect graphics intensive applications to install easily in a single click especially when they were not developed for Linux in the first place.
After getting GTA San Andreas to work on my machine is when I realized how much this whole ecosystem has improved by Valve's contributions to not just the Steam Deck but rather the whole open-source community using Steam on their Linux distros.
So What’s Next?
For a long time, in Operating Systems, there was no choice for gamers other than using Windows. Most people use it and most developers develop games for it. That's just how things have been for quite some time. But Valve through Steam Deck has proved that there can be another way, a better way through open-source.
Valve built Proton on existing open-source software that was being maintained by contributors. They not only improved it but built something that has literally put a huge impact in the gaming scene and is a long-term threat to a monopoly as big as Microsoft Windows.
Valve, while embracing an open-source friendly approach, has not only built and improved the gaming ecosystem for their platform, they have directly helped improve the existing Linux gaming ecosystem. The community flavors of Linux that spun out after SteamOS are pretty active with extended functionality.
As SteamOS makes its way to handheld consoles from other manufacturers and if they ever release a general version of SteamOS for everyone to use - It would be a big win for Linux, Open-Source and gamers all over the world.
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