SDL 2.0, unlike 1.2, uses the zlib license, which means you can build a static library linked directly to your program, or just compile SDL's C code directly as part of your project. Some of these installation instructions happen to work with 1.2, however, on the platforms we cover. It can be installed on legacy platforms that SDL2 doesn't support, such as Mac OS 9 or Windows 95, but settling for 1.2 would not be a drop-in replacement for 2.0.

You will need to download the source code first for most of them, unless prebuilt binaries are available. And that percentage is heavily weighted towards the more popular titles on the store.How to install SDL varies depending on your platform. Whilst this includes games that already included native Linux support, it still roughly doubles the catalogue of available games on Linux. ProtonDB is a site that aggregates gamers’ experiences into an easy-to-view database that lets you look up how well a title performs on Linux.Ĭurrently, there have been close to 150,000 reports submitted, resulting in 17,000 titles confirmed to run well. To check whether your favourite game is playable via Proton, you can visit. Because of this, we should expect the library of Linux playable titles to increase dramatically over the next year, whether you own a Steam Deck or not! Check your games on ProtonDB (or contribute your experiences)! Whilst it’s currently in beta and not all Windows titles run successfully via Proton, Valve are heavily promoting Proton support to developers as a way of enabling Steam Deck compatibility. Proton is open source and based on a fork of Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) which has been in development for around 28 years. This results in comparable performance to a native build of the game.

This works differently to a traditional emulator approach to gaming (where you might run a virtual Windows machine and play games inside it) since it enables you to fully leverage the benefits of your PC’s hardware. Proton is a compatibility layer built into Steam, it translates Windows APIs into a Linux readable format. (Don’t judge my playtime, I was mostly playing the previous HD edition!)

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