Steam and Proton gaming on Linux

YOU’LL NEED THIS

STEAM

Linux

Proton

Internet connection

IF YOU’RE AT ALL INTERESTED in gaming on PCs, you have probably already come across Steam, Valve’s platform for distributing, updating and running games. Steam makes it possible to purchase a game, install it over the internet and then run it from the Steam interface.

That brings us back to the age-old gaming conundrum of support if you happen to be a Linux user, as not every PC game is designed to run on anything other than Microsoft Windows. That said, there are plenty of Steam games that will run on Linux, and quite often, a Windows Steam game can be convinced to run on Linux, even though some ‘fettling’ by the user may be required. This approach is officially supported by Steam using a system called Proton.

Getting all of these things running, and then possibly optimizing the results, is what we’ll be looking at in this tutorial.

1 STEAM POWERED

Steam itself is installed through a custom program called the Steam Installer. This makes sense because Steam updates itself and the games you install with it without relying on Linux’s own update systems. These days, the installer is in the official repositories of many Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora and their derivatives. As Steam is proprietary software you may have to enable a specific repository, such as ‘Multiverse’