Steam Deck Is Announced

Valve announced the Steam Deck in July 2021 as a handheld PC designed to run a user’s existing Steam library. The device used a custom AMD APU combining four Zen 2 CPU cores with RDNA 2 graphics.

Its most interesting software component was SteamOS 3, based on Linux, together with Proton. Proton uses Wine and additional compatibility technologies such as DXVK and VKD3D-Proton to translate Windows APIs and DirectX graphics calls into Linux and Vulkan equivalents.

This meant thousands of Windows games could run without developers producing native Linux versions. The Steam Deck turned years of compatibility work into a consumer product and significantly improved Linux gaming by giving developers one popular, predictable hardware target.