[easton]

Unless it’s a 32-bit Mac come January or a machine running windows < 8, in which case you’re screwed until you buy new hardware.

Which I’m fine with, but it’s not like Valve is magical somehow. If your machine isn’t still getting Chromium builds they can’t build Steam for it, you still need to buy new hardware. And the game consoles (less) often let you play old games on new hardware.

[slowhadoken]

My Deck just runs all those old windows games using proton. I mean, Windows subsystems runs Linux. You don’t even need VMs anymore. It’s not magic it’s just portability.

[easyThrowaway]

Steam Deck compatibility is spotty at best for DirectX-8 games and older.

A few of those have been updated by the publisher to ship with DDrawCompat, nglide or dgvoodoo, but at large they require some tinkering to get them in a running state.

Excluding those who will never, ever work again due to copy protection systems (e.g., all those Games for Windows Live that never received a patch, those EA games still shipping with Securom) of all my games, circa 15-20% of them crash on boot. Nearly all of them are pre-Dx8 games, which basically run correctly only running on a recently unsupported configuration by steam, Windows 7 32bit.

[slowhadoken]

With a little fiddling most of those DirectX games work on the Deck. Again not perfect but absolutely functional. And never say never, fans find solutions to dead games all the time.

[kiwijamo]

The majority of my steam collection is games that will not run on the steam deck or Linux. Out of 15 I have, only three works on. YMMV but doesn't look like 'all' these windows games unfortunately. May be more of an issue with the type of games I like, i.e. Civilisation, Age of Empires, etc.

[doix]

Civilization and Age of Empires definitely work on Linux. Or atleast civ 5, AoE2:DE and AoE4 all work. I strongly suspect most of the other versions work as well.

I actually haven't encountered a single game that doesn't work on Linux that's available on steam. I'm sure they exist, but I personally haven't hit any.

My biggest annoyance was when I tried to play Diablo 4 and had to mess about with the Blizzard launcher. Really made me appreciate how fool proof Linux gaming has become with Steam nowadays.

[slowhadoken]

I have over three hundred games purchased on Steam, Windows games, and ROMs (GB to PS3) and I’ve only experienced one or two issues and it wasn’t the Deck’s fault. I play indie games on it all the time too. Now games are being made with the Deck in mind.

[slowhadoken]

Maybe try adjusting the frame rate, wattage, and/or GPU frequency.

[Dalewyn]

>in which case you’re screwed until you buy new hardware.

Windows 10 runs on anything that will emit a clock signal, and Windows 11 can be forced onto hardware it doesn't officially like.

I don't like Windows 7 support being dropped either, in large part because the dropping comes due to CEF used by Steam, but it's not like the hardware concerned becomes useless with no way out.

[Aerroon]

>Windows 10 runs on anything that will emit a clock signal

It runs extremely poorly on low power hardware. Poorly enough that I consider it unusable. Windows 7 ran fine on the same hardware previously.

[Dalewyn]

Seeing as we're talking about games, low power hardware isn't necessarily relevant.

[mathgeek]

We’re talking about games still being playable years later though, so there is an argument that older hardware is relevant (relatively speaking, anyway).

Games built for Windows 95 not being playable because your hardware can’t efficiently run Windows 10 is a relevant discussion.