Want to run Windows on the Steam Deck? Well now it’s not a mostly-pointless exercise.
A pile of outlets have run a lot of benchmarks on the Steam Deck (we haven’t gotten one yet). However, one of the big question marks surrounding the Steam Deck’s gaming performance has been the effect, whether good or bad, of its choice of operating system. See, despite being a gaming PC at its heart, the Steam Deck doesn’t ship with Windows. It ships with SteamOS 3.0, which is based on Arch Linux. Using a very clever interception library called Proton, it can run Windows games with native or perhaps even better-than-native performance, at least in theory. In practice, well, that remains to be confirmed, but early tests do show that many (if not most) games run very well indeed.
