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My handheld gaming console is also my portable Linux workstation
Quoting: My handheld gaming console is also my portable Linux workstation —
It feels like every year someone trots out the "year of the Linux desktop" trope, but when the Steam Deck released, it felt like it was more than empty words. Valve spent considerable effort making that a reality, and nowhere is it more evident than in the Proton translation layer. This would have been the "secret sauce" for any other gaming company, kept under wraps in proprietary code. Except Valve made it all open-source, freely available for anyone to use, change, tweak, and enjoy.
Gaming is often cited as the reason that people wouldn't use Linux, as it has never gotten the support from game studios to flourish. But with Proton, almost every Windows game can run on Linux without changing a single line of code.
Now, this wasn't my first rodeo with Linux. I'd used it almost exclusively for years, on an old HP EliteBook that was falling apart. But that laptop couldn't run games even at peak performance, and all I needed was a desktop environment to browse the web and use chat apps like mIRC. Since then, I'd become used to playing games on more powerful Windows desktops, and didn't want to switch away, but Proton (and the ease of the Steam Deck) made it possible again.