For those of you playing on Steam Deck, Baldur’s Gate 3 now also features a native Steam Deck build!
Running natively on the platform, you should now see a better framerate, lower loading times, and smoother gameplay 🙌
The store page hasn’t updated yet, but you can see the Linux Steam depots on steamdb.
I would be a little bit surprised if it doesn’t also work on Linux desktop. They’re probably just saying “don’t ask us to fix it if it breaks, we never said it would work”
The Steam Deck comes in essentially one hardware configuration with one operating system complying to one set of standards. Linux users have a higher-than-average tendency to do weird, nonstandard shit on their computers and then complain when it breaks something. On Windows, Steam OS, and Mac, if you test it on maybe 5 different configurations, you’re done. With Linux, you have to test at least four different distros (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch), two different packaging formats for Steam (Flatpak, native package), and two windowing systems (X.org, Wayland). Plus the proprietary NVIDIA drivers along with open-source drivers. That’s already 32 combinations for 2% market share.
Linux has actually hit 5-6% marketshare. Your point is still valid though, but they could always just say “It might work on other Linux builds but we can’t support them”.
Why are distros and packaging formats relevant? I don’t contest that they are, but isn’t that what the steam runtime is supposed to standardize? I’m honestly baffled by the number of native steam builds that are broken in some way on my machine despite using their preferred steam runtime.
I can’t explain the exact reasons why, but let me provide some examples.
In Cities: Skylines (which is natively supported on Linux), I had two mods installed that had different behaviour depending on whether Steam was installed through a Flatpak or whether it was installed as a native package. One of them needed to access a system installation of Mono and call it (which sounds like virus behaviour, I know), and this functionality would be blocked by Flatpak’s containerisation. The second mod was a map-drawing mod which would create maps of the in-game city and put them in a specified folder in your home directory. On the native package Steam, it would put the files in the default folder, but crashes if you tried to change the directory. Otherwise, it worked as expected. On the Flatpak Steam, it would allow you to select the directory, but no files would actually be written there. It’s easy to just blame bad code written by amateur developers, but clearly it’s a case of the same code resulting in different behaviour depending on variables like Steam’s installation method.
Also, the Sims 4, which is not native and runs through Proton, worked pretty reliably on X11 but occasionally crashes mid-game using Wayland. It was not perfectly stable in either case, but it crashed far less frequently on X11 compared to Wayland.
This is not a game, but Firefox supports touchpad gestures on my laptop on Wayland, but not on X11.
Linux has so many possible splintered ways that systems could be configured that it’s hard to support, especially when a Steam Deck native could then be adjusted to work by your userbase, without any support or testing required.
Still a win, and fair that Larian doesn’t have the budget for a full Linux release.
There is no reason they have to test it on multiple distros at all, the minimum and recommended system requirements exist for a reason. Just test it on one or two distros and list those as supported, treat anyone else the same way you would someone trying to play this game on an unsupported version of Windows like 8 or 7. If it works, great! If not - not our problem, figure it out yourself, your configuration is not supported.
Nope. If you pick the Linux version on a desktop Linux it doesn’t even have a binary, so the game can’t launch. On normal Linux you have to pick the Proton version. The Linux binary only downloads on Steam Deck.
EDIT: This is no longer true. If you simply disable the compatibility modes, the native steam deck now downloads nicely on Linux, and it runs straight out of the box for me, and with much less stuttering
I don’t like that Steam can do this. If I force BG3 to use the Sniper runtime, then it should be the same exact build that gets downloaded to the Steam Deck.
I think they fixed that, the default on desktop Linux is now the Steam Linux Runtime 3.0 and the native version of the game launches flawlessly for me on Fedora 42.
And people will ask, and will leave negative reviews when the game doesn’t work on their heavily customised setup. They are probably already writing negative reviews, just look at the comments under the OP.
I would be a little bit surprised if it doesn’t also work on Linux desktop. They’re probably just saying “don’t ask us to fix it if it breaks, we never said it would work”
Still lame
The Steam Deck comes in essentially one hardware configuration with one operating system complying to one set of standards. Linux users have a higher-than-average tendency to do weird, nonstandard shit on their computers and then complain when it breaks something. On Windows, Steam OS, and Mac, if you test it on maybe 5 different configurations, you’re done. With Linux, you have to test at least four different distros (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch), two different packaging formats for Steam (Flatpak, native package), and two windowing systems (X.org, Wayland). Plus the proprietary NVIDIA drivers along with open-source drivers. That’s already 32 combinations for 2% market share.
Linux has actually hit 5-6% marketshare. Your point is still valid though, but they could always just say “It might work on other Linux builds but we can’t support them”.
Linux has 2.6% on the Steam Hardware Survey.
Why are distros and packaging formats relevant? I don’t contest that they are, but isn’t that what the steam runtime is supposed to standardize? I’m honestly baffled by the number of native steam builds that are broken in some way on my machine despite using their preferred steam runtime.
I can’t explain the exact reasons why, but let me provide some examples.
In Cities: Skylines (which is natively supported on Linux), I had two mods installed that had different behaviour depending on whether Steam was installed through a Flatpak or whether it was installed as a native package. One of them needed to access a system installation of Mono and call it (which sounds like virus behaviour, I know), and this functionality would be blocked by Flatpak’s containerisation. The second mod was a map-drawing mod which would create maps of the in-game city and put them in a specified folder in your home directory. On the native package Steam, it would put the files in the default folder, but crashes if you tried to change the directory. Otherwise, it worked as expected. On the Flatpak Steam, it would allow you to select the directory, but no files would actually be written there. It’s easy to just blame bad code written by amateur developers, but clearly it’s a case of the same code resulting in different behaviour depending on variables like Steam’s installation method.
Also, the Sims 4, which is not native and runs through Proton, worked pretty reliably on X11 but occasionally crashes mid-game using Wayland. It was not perfectly stable in either case, but it crashed far less frequently on X11 compared to Wayland.
This is not a game, but Firefox supports touchpad gestures on my laptop on Wayland, but not on X11.
Pretty sure both examples are just lack of perms on te flatpak
Sure, but that’s kinda the point, isn’t it?
Linux has so many possible splintered ways that systems could be configured that it’s hard to support, especially when a Steam Deck native could then be adjusted to work by your userbase, without any support or testing required.
Still a win, and fair that Larian doesn’t have the budget for a full Linux release.
Maybe it’s just because I use Bazzite and that’s so close to SteamOS, that things that work on Deck generally work on my laptop.
There is no reason they have to test it on multiple distros at all, the minimum and recommended system requirements exist for a reason. Just test it on one or two distros and list those as supported, treat anyone else the same way you would someone trying to play this game on an unsupported version of Windows like 8 or 7. If it works, great! If not - not our problem, figure it out yourself, your configuration is not supported.
That’s what they did, though, except the only distro on that list is Steam OS. And now people complain.
Nope. If you pick the Linux version on a desktop Linux it doesn’t even have a binary, so the game can’t launch. On normal Linux you have to pick the Proton version. The Linux binary only downloads on Steam Deck.EDIT: This is no longer true. If you simply disable the compatibility modes, the native steam deck now downloads nicely on Linux, and it runs straight out of the box for me, and with much less stuttering
I don’t like that Steam can do this. If I force BG3 to use the Sniper runtime, then it should be the same exact build that gets downloaded to the Steam Deck.
I think they fixed that, the default on desktop Linux is now the Steam Linux Runtime 3.0 and the native version of the game launches flawlessly for me on Fedora 42.
That’s awesome. I’ll definitely check it out later!
How can you install the Linux version? I don’t See an Option in steam.
Right click on Baldur’s Gate 3 -> Properties… -> Compatibility
You can either remove the check mark in “Compatibility” completely or set it to “Steam Linux Runtime 3.0”.
Unless your force a Proton version, the game will use the Linux version automatically.
A step in the right direction. We just gotta get the momentum going
And people will ask, and will leave negative reviews when the game doesn’t work on their heavily customised setup. They are probably already writing negative reviews, just look at the comments under the OP.
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