Get better Steam and Proton gaming

Michael Reed looks at what it takes to run a large variety of games under Steam, including those designed to run on Windows.

- Michael Reed

THE STEAM INTERFACE

1 Main menu Easily overlooked, this is the menu bar. It’s mostly concerned with options to configure Steam itself.

2 Steam Sections The tabs that take you to different parts of Steam. Each entry is also a pulldown menu if you hover over it.

3 Game library controls Three filter icons to flick between: installed games, owned games and native Linux games.

4 Search The search box. If you need this, you may have too many games!

5 Game library The list of games in your library. Left-click to be taken to the game’s page. Right-click for the properties menu.

6 Run a game A button that changes between play, install and stream functions.

7 Guilt-o-meter Total play time. Keep this covered when your boss, partner or parents are present.

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.