From my understanding Steam Decks come with SteamOS preinstalled on them. Yet when you look at the list of games on steam that are compatible with Linux + SteamOS, its a small fraction.
But what confuses me is this page
https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck/mygames
It shows your games that are compatible with the Steam Deck which has a Linux based OS. And almost my entire library is compatible with the Deck. Can someone help me understand how this is possible? If games are compatible with the Steam Deck, why wouldn’t they also work on Ubuntu for example?
If the game is reasonably well-coded, there’s not going to be any obvious difference between a game running on Windows, a game running native on Linux, and a game running using Proton.
I mean yeah, you could have some performance impact (usually light, occasionaly not so), maybe video not playing (some games use video formats for cutscenes which can’t be distributed on Linux installs), or maybe issues with windowing (Tropico 6 has an weird bug where the game mouse pointer has a bit of offset compared to the real one, until you change screen size).
But in most cases, if it works, it works the same.