Valve’s Proton, the reason most Steam Deck games work, has a version 10.0 beta to try

Proton, the compatibility software co-developed by Valve and CodeWeavers for helping Windows games run on Linux – and, thus, the foundation for the Steam Deck – is getting its first full version update in nearly a year. Proton 10.0 is now available in beta form, heralding compatibility fixes and improvements in enough games that I gave up bothering to do an accurate count. Loads, basically.

Changes in this milestone update range from the addressing of specific issues in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced, and XCOM 2 to the gift of SteamOS compatibility with games that previously lacked it entirely. These include Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and Batman: Arkham Asylum Game of the Year Edition, which are currently listed as Unsupported for the Deck on their respective Steam pages – once Proton 10.0 gets a stable branch launch, those ratings may need to be reviewed. Indeed, when I set Arkham Asylum to run using the beta, it worked perfectly, having failed to get past the launcher on Proton 9.

It's not just Steam Deck fixes in 10.0 either. The patch notes also promise amendments for Stalker 2, Marvel Rivals, and The Finals – among others – crashing on Intel GPUs, so the update has Linux-based desktop users in mind as well. Incidentally, Marvel Rivals had a less productive coming-together with Proton earlier this year, the software being mistakenly flagged as a cheating tool.

Some of these fixes have been included in past updates to Proton Experimental, or were beaten to the punch by Proton GE: an unofficial, custom build that takes advantage of Proton’s open-sourcedness to pack in even more compatibility tweaks. Even so, Valve/CodeWeaver’s beta builds are inherently more polished and bug-light than Experimental versions, and unlike Proton GE, don’t need any side jaunts into the Steam Deck’s Desktop Mode to get working.

Between that readiness of use and the current lack of timeframe on when 10.0 might get a stable release, the beta is arguably worth trying out now if you’ve suffered any of the compatibility problems it claims to have sorted out. Proton beta versions also work on the stable branch of SteamOS, so you don’t need to switch to the operating system’s beta branch as well, and installation is a cinch: just search for the Proton 10.0 beta in your Steam library, and you can download it from there as if it were a game.