Somehow it's still an issue. Was a while ago now but somehow an update to dbus(?) broke Worms WMD and the publisher just never fixed it. The solution was to just run the Windows version in Proton which works fine.
I'm not certain, but WORMs WMD is a pretty old 2016 title that might predate a lot of these container runtimes being available to games other than Valve's own first party titles like Dota 2 and CSGO/CS2.
Also, Valve has recently insituted changes about how native titles work forcing existing native titles onto the scout 1.0 runtime and giving developers the ability to pick newer stable targets.
> Native titles will execute in 'Steam for Linux runtime 1.0 (scout)' by default, instead of the legacy runtime environment.
This behavior is consistent with Steam Deck and promotes better compatibility across all Linux desktop distributions.
Note that this new feature can be turned off globally with "-compat-force-slr off" on the Steam client command line.
Its also the case that the original version of this that was bouncing around in the 2010s was more of a gaint shell script hack and it was possible for games to depend upon the host system in way which could break over time. Today it is utilising stuff in the flatpak ecosystem:
That is fascinating. So if I have a Linux version of say a game or emulator, and it seems unstable on steam deck, I could try running it in this container?
Valve already runs all native linux games I believe in the scout 1.0 runtime by default unless the vendor specifies a newer linux runtime. You can override some of this behaviour by going to the games's preferences within the steam client under "compatibility". It lets you force a specific native linux runtime or run the windows version instead using Valve's fork of wine, proton.
Sometimes if there are issues with the native linux release you can quickly swap over to the windows/proton version and see if that fixes issues.
Valve are absolute heroes in trying to create stable targets for linux gaming whether that be running windows games via proton or having a stable container target for native support.
I haven't had to boot into windows for nearly a year at this point and yet still playing new games on release without much issue (occasionally had to force to use a newer version of proton).
The only games I cannot run are competitive multiplayer games that do intrusive kernel level anti-cheat, but fortunately I don't play those games. https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Yes, owning a steam deck and using proton persuaded me to get rid of windows 11 on one of my pcs. I've been using Linux for years, but always kept switching back to windows for games and general hardware compatibility. I doubt I'll switch to windows again
