Valve developers have announced an update to its compatibility layer for Windows games. Proton version 10.0 is available for beta testing on Steam for Linux, bringing with it several specific game fixes.
An overall improvement for gaming on Linux is arriving with this beta thanks to updates to the compatibility layer’s internals. Proton 10 includes the latest versions of DXVK and VKD3D-Proton, two translation layers that take Direct3D calls and let Vulkan on Linux implement them properly. Direct3D is the Microsoft API that games use to render 3D graphics on Windows, obviously important for the gaming experience.
There’s also an update to Xalia, which Proton uses to handle input from your gamepad, including on regular applications—not just games. It’s been upgraded to version 0.4.5, one release behind the latest (at the time of writing) version 0.4.6 of Xalia. This update enables support for a few specific games, includingFloppy HeroesandThe Takeover.
Valve listed several specific games as fully playable with Proton 10, after having been only had support in Proton Experimental:
There are several more games that saw fixes and improvements to video playback, which you can find on theProton 10.0-1 beta release notes. You’ll also be able to read about numerous other game-specific fixes, like aSea of Thieveslogin issue and aGrand Theft Auto V Enhancedlauncher hanging problem. So if you’ve been having trouble running a specific game with Proton on your Steam Deck or Linux gaming PC, you should check that list to see if your issue’s been resolved.
Proton 10 is based onWine 10, which was released in January 2025. That update, Wine developers said, “represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes.” It brought modern upgrades like better high-DPI support and the Wayland display server protocol enabled by default, so it’s nice to see all that work being brought over to Proton.
Wine is the OG compatibility layerfor running Windows software on Linux, and Valve has contributed to it while developing its Wine fork, Proton. It’s the Proton compatibility layer that makes Windows games playable on the Steam Deck when using the Arch Linux-based SteamOS.
If you want to give Proton 10 a try yourself on your Steam Deck or other Linux-based gaming setup, you’re able to go to a game’s Properties window in Steam, hit the “Compatibility” tab, and look for “Proton 10.0-1 (beta)” in the list of compatibility tools.
When you launch, you’ll have to wait for Proton 10 to download. Of course, since it’s in beta, there’s a good chance you’ll run into issues, which you can report onthe official Proton GitHub page.
