Steam Proton will no longer forget the entire reason it exists if you have a humungous library, as of the most recent client beta

The thing about Linux is: it’s cool, and very interesting and beautiful people use it. I’ve been running Fedora 43 on my main machine for a few months now and, to be honest? It’s easy. Almost boringly easy. I got into all this expecting to have to wrestle the OS’ peccadilloes into submission, but aside from minor tinkering to get proprietary Nvidia drivers and codecs installed, it’s been smooth sailing.

Imagine my disappointment. And now, as of the most recent Steam beta update, there’s even less Linux weirdness to deal with when you slip free of the shackles of Windows. As of yesterday’s Steam (and Steam Deck) client beta update, Valve has put paid to a bug that meant the platform would sometimes forget it can run Windows games on Linux. Cut it some slack; it’s 23 years old.

The bug in question afflicted users with especially large libraries—though Valve doesn’t say how large—and would “result in Proton games showing up as ‘Not valid on current platform'”. Which rather defeats the whole point of Proton—Valve’s fancy, WINE-based compatibility layer that lets Windows-only games run on your Linux distro of choice.

Which is rather good news. Also bundled into the beta are fixes for the client’s downloads view “when moving game entries between scheduled and queued sections,” gyro fixes, repairs for “an issue with Switch Pro Controller Home LEDs turning on when disabled,” and those rascally ABXY button options should no longer go missing from your configs.

The gradual tilt toward Linux is probably the most interesting thing happening in tech right now, if you’re me (which I assume you are). As Windows gets more and more insufferable, increasing numbers of people are saying to hell with it and sticking some flavour of Linux on their machines, often Bazzite, Nobara or some other gaming-specific distro in our neck of the woods.

Is it the end for Windows and the beginning of the era of total open-source dominance? Well, no. But even folks that have previously paid no mind to Linux are starting to have to pay attention. That’s healthy and, as a beautiful, neophyte Linux-er, pretty dang cool.