I’ve got a substantial library of games on GOG and Epic that I wanted to play on the Steam Deck, and I’ve used the Heroic Launcher with some success to access a lot of my libraries on those two platforms, but managing the compatibility per game is a bit frustrating and sometimes after an update things break.
Can anyone else share any success or failure stories here? The only other place I’ve seen this discussion was on Steam itself and I wanted a non-steam take on the practice of running non-steam platform games and what works.
I’ve had mixed success, but probably mostly as a result of it just being fussier to use Heroic and Lutris. Expect to go look up the game on ProtonDB and pay with settings.
Also, the downloading is less robust. I know with Cyberpunk 2077 from GoG, it took several tries before it downloaded successfully.
Overall, the experience of playing a Deck verified Steam game vs. the same game from GoG is like day and… dusk. It works, sometimes with little intervention, but expect to fiddle more.
As an aside, GoG should just support Heroic or Lutris development, and get them to have some streamlined “Community Settings” feature, letting Heroic or Lutris pull and apply an automated settings file.
This is the biggest reason for me considering wiping my steam deck and installing windows. I know that’s heresy in this community but, honestly, I don’t give two shits about my OS, I just want to play the games. If using the touch pad and a set of desktop icons (which is how my desktop pc is configured) works, fine. I’ve never owned a console and don’t need the console experience.
For now I have more Steam backlog than I can play, but when I get around to swapping the SSD…well , I’ll burn that bridge when I get there.
wiping my steam deck and installing windows. I know that’s heresy in this community but, honestly, I don’t give two shits about my OS
Can you please explain why you think this would be heresy? Because, for example, if you hypothetically figured out a way to install MacOS on the thing, you’d be applauded. No one cares what OS you installed on it.
They are probably talking about the attitude r/SteamDeck had about installing Windows. Anything even mentioning that was often downvoted to oblivion. And since Lemmy users are probably more open to open source software they were expecting that to be the case here as well.
Personally I am done with Windows. I won’t install it on my Steam Deck or my desktop PC. But I see why someone would want to do that. If I were to install Windows on my Deck because of some multiplayer games or so I would probably not even dual boot and instead focus on making the experience on Windows as good as possible.
