Get better Steam and Proton gaming

If you’re at all interested in gaming on PCs, you’ve probably 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.

Ah, but that brings us back to the age-old Linux gaming conundrum of support, 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 optimising the results, is what we’ll be looking at in this tutorial.

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’ for Ubuntu or ‘Nonfree’ on Fedora. Having done this, you can, for example, install Steam on Ubuntu as simply as typing sudo apt install steam-installer.

If you’re running a DEB-based distribution, but you can’t find the Steam installer in the official repositories, you can obtain the) and install it with the usual dpkg-i [name of archive] as the super user.