A touch, yes. I'm much happier being reliant on steam than Microsoft. They're not incredibly indispensible either, you can do this stuff without them.
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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We definitely are, Valve has single-handedly made Linux a viable gaming platform, but in the process became indispensable. Thanks to Gabe they've been rather good in that respect. However, whoever replaces him might not be as good as him.
They can't replace him with a suit. There should be a shaman council that speaks with his spirit to make further decisions for Valve after his passing or retirement (they can just speak directly in this case).
I've been trying to not use Steam on linux for a while now unless necessary (I have too many games there). GoG + Heroic keeps me pretty sane. Otherwise it's Lutris for starting them (which I'll agree is VERY clunky but you can get things done). I think we're actually getting over the hill of "Linux gaming means Steam" that we've been on since the SteamDeck launched.
While it’s working fine for now, what do I do if I’m offline and Steam decides this is one of those days offline mode doesn’t work? What if I get banned from Steam?
This is a pretty valid-ish concern I would say. It's one of the reasons I'm using GoG mainly now (which yes, still buying licences so similar concerns just maybe not as great or maybe I'm kidding myself)
GOG is legit though. You can archive those offline installers and they’ll work forever (barring future OS incompatibilities etc). For the titles that support it I use the Linux installers otherwise I just run Galaxy through Steam for the time being since it reduces the amount of wineprefixes I have to configure with Steam.
I wouldn't say we're over-reliant on Steam, but maybe on Valve to some extent.
If Valve would suddenly stop all their work on/around Linux, that'd certainly affect Proton and also things like the open AMD GPU drivers. Sure, others would likely continue their work (it's not like they're doing it all alone now anyway), but Valve certainly brings a lot of expertise and also commercial interest.
I do not game on Linux exclusively, but I am very comfortable with this situation. Imagine being reliant on epic games instead. Valve is actively working on gaming on Linux and they should earn some money for the efforts, software doesn’t maintain itself… yet.
i miss going to a store and getting a game in a box with a manual :(
Then reading the manual on the bus home or in the backseat of the car. 😊
I still go to the local GameStop sometimes and pick up a used Switch title I’d like to keep and play again in the future before they all dry up. Sadly they come with no manual.
I’m afraid I’m fooling myself though and that one day when I dig out the Switch after not using it for a couple of years it will be a swollen mess of a fire hazard (with mega stick drift) and all those physical copies will be worthless without cartridge-dumping hardware and emulators.
Let's just hope Gabe never dies or retires....
They'll streamline better over time. These open source WINE frontends/orchestrators may as well have 2 eras, before and after Proton. Before Proton they had little developer interest so development was slow. After Proton, influx of users and more developers interest in working on open source Linux gaming tools and Lutris rapidly got better and Heroic popped up. PlayOnLinux got left to historic obscurity in the history of Linux gaming
So I'm not concerned about Steam reliance. Everything outside of Steam is so much easier because of Valves open source contribution and the growth of the community. Pretty much because of Valve, Lutris/Heroic/etc became better at a faster pace and will continue getting because of what Steam did for Linux gaming in the past decade
No, because it's open source. Keep on chuggin
Has anyone had any luck replicating their Proton setup outside of Steam? Or simply just running a Proton game outside of Steam after getting it set up using Steam?
I have run many Windows games outside of Steam.
I prefer to set up each one manually: Create a Wine prefix, install the game (or copy it from an existing installation), install a few key libraries like DXVK and a Visual C++ runtime, make a launch script with game-specific environment settings or launch options. Tools like Lutris and Bottles can automate much of this, in case you need a little help or just find a GUI more convenient.
This is my usual approach to non-Steam games (especially GOG), but even Steam games can be convinced to work offline with the help of a Steam emulator. It wouldn't work with a game encumbered by DRM (e.g. Denuvo) unless a cracked version could be located, but in my experience, that's a minority of Steam games that I categorically avoid in the first place.
So, I'm not worried about my game library vanishing if I ever lose access to Steam for whatever reason. Most (if not all) of it could be recovered with a bit of effort.
I use Heroic more than I use Steam. It comes with a wine manager built in for Proton-GE, and if you have Steam Proton installed it can access that too. I use Proton Plus to get GE-Proton on Steam but I don't even have to do that for Heroic.
I use Steam only for games purchased from Steam and Heroic for Epic, GOG, etc..
Heroic makes it much easier to manage games. Custom prefixes for each game with winetricks, mangohud checkbox, environment variables and so on. If the interface was better/modern with some sort of tabbed layout, I would use it for my Steam games as well.
As the only platform that cares about gamers I would say it's your only choice under Windows also. Unless you pay for boxed versions and then rip/crack them so your not messing with physical media constantly, but then disk space becomes and issue fast.
This is fair but I’m also worried about introducing a new dependency for a game that normally does not rely on Steam.
It is a bit of weighing the convenience of Steam dealing with your catalog of games, making them all just a download away, and keeping them outside of Steam and needing to come up with your own currarion method. And if you are buying (licensing it - because apparently nobody actually owns their games) the game outside one of these storefronts, you still have DRM to deal with most likely anyway.
Just have to weigh the pros vs cons.
I mean the only good alternative to Steam is GOG but there you're not dealing with DRM.
Yes. However, before they started supporting and prefering linux, and working on proton then getting any game working on linux was a real mess and the average person couldn't do it for most games.
Sadly most other games stores in the digital space like gog don't give a shit about linux, thus there is still no galaxy on linux, nor are their preservation efforts coming to linux for a long time.
For the games that natively run on Linux I don’t see any difference in how they’re preserved. Haven’t encountered anything that doesn’t run on modern systems.
With that said they could get an easy win by making a Linux version of Galaxy and borrowing Proton to run non-Linux titles.
I have, sadly. On steam once the native linux version of a game wouldn't run but the windows one would through proton.
However, yeah I agree, they could so I don't know why they don't.
Yeah, I set up heroic launcher to play some games from GOG, but achievements didn't work when I tried it and save sync was kind of buggy. So for GOG just stuck to playing on Windows, since I do want my achievements and time tracked.
I wish other big platforms tried more in trying help escape Windows instead of just being bystanders and not even bothering with Linux launchers themselves.
Yeah, it's sad that they don't, gog really needs to get on it imo. Though have you tried running galaxy through proton?
I want that too, heck even Epic could easily make their games native to linux with a single button press but they don't want to.
Time tracking and achievements work for me. You might need to update GOG reditrubutables package though Heroic should do it automatically.
Must have gotten an update since I last used it. That's a nice change.
Yeah, it is. There is even a cloud sync feature now (though it's still in beta, mostly works). Only thing missing is limiting download speed. Apparently GOG need to do that through gogdl.
I’ve run Proton without Steam for a few games. You’ve pretty much got the same code that Steam uses and most of their changes make it upstream eventually, so they’re not holding you hostage with being able to run your games. It just might get less convenient. There are other Linux game launchers that have good compatibility.
Steam and the company behind it have done wonders for Linux. They’ve given publishers a reason to care, they are providing strength and resources to fix bugs and libraries they care about, and generally have done very well in sharing their contributions with the community.
I do think this is a valid concern that we need to keep in mind, but I don’t think that we are at risk just yet. Valve is a business but as businesses go, they’re pretty cool.
Yes. But there is nothing we can do about it more than party that whenever it turns to shit their open source contributions are able to stand on their own
Yeah, Proton runs outside of Steam in Heroic and Lutris. That's basically what the umu project is about. I think it works in Bottles as well.
Almost everything Valve has done for Linux gaming is open source and will remain even if they go away and lock everything down tomorrow.
Yeah that’s kind of huge tbh. I honestly hadn’t read that much about Proton. Like that fact that it’s open source.
Just remember all the discussions from the early days of Steam on Linux where some were miffed about running non-free software. I then figured that it was a necessary evil to have games work with less hassle. The games themselves are largely closed source as well, so it’s kind of moot that Steam is also.
Proton is mostly a fork of Wine which has been used for decades to run Windows software on Linux. Valve didn't do all the hard work by themselves.
Yeah, well familiar with wine going back over 10 years of using Linux as primary OS with the occasional foray into getting my games running on Linux. Most of this time I have just kept a copy of Windows available for games though since it's been way too much hassle getting things to run until the last couple of years.
You should be able to select "GE-Proton(Latest)" as your runner in Lutris. But if its missing for some reason, https://github.com/gloriouseggroll/proton-ge-custom
I haven’t noticed any major issues between using Lutris and Steam for the games I play.
Yeah, it’s been at least five years since I tried Lutris last time. It’s probably matured alongside Proton. Honestly I started moving all my non-Linux games over to Linux after getting a Steam deck and seeing how well the games worked without tinkering.
I don’t mind leaving my Steam games in Steam but I would like to run some of my Windows titles e.g. GOG titles, Guild Wars without relying on the Steam network being up. Is Heroic the way to go?
If Heroic doesn't work, Bottles is usually my go-to for GOG games.
Lutris is definitely the strongest contender, and is mostly based on the same compatibility technology.
Meh, I like Heroic better personally. It's a preference thing at this point between the two of em IMO
Yeah, Heroic is good but sadly it only supports gog and epic. Not everything is from those stores, sadly. Whereas Lutris supports a lot more sources.
It supports GoG, Epic, and Amazon, but it also supports installing games manually, which has worked for literally everything else for me so far.
I used to use Lutris, but in the last year or so Heroic got so good I stopped ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ah, okay, thanks for the correction!