I'm surprised by how good proton is at running windows games on steamdeck. Because of this and nonsense like recall and the adverts in windows I'm considering just getting rid of windows all together, I'll just run mint Linux probably.
I run Ubuntu on nearly all of my machines, but I build it up manually from the Ubuntu Server installation to reduce bloat. If anyone was going to have problems with Proton on an Ubuntu machine, it's me. Yet, every game I've tried works fine. Everything from Among Us to Metro Exodus runs great.
Some games require a little fiddling, sure, but I've never had an issue that couldn't be resolved using some copy-pasting from ProtonDB. As you may have surmised from the way I set up my machines, I may have a higher tolerance for fiddling than most folks. YMMV.
I am curious about your Ubuntu setup. Any particular technical reason? Any especially thorny bits? Do you see improved performance or fewer background processes? I am well past the point of enduring this kind of OS pain, and will use the path well trodden by others.
I have always assumed that distros layer on so many extensions, customizations, etc that Gnome or KDE would be alien if naively installed.
Fully de-GNOME'ing desktop Ubuntu is Sisyphean. It's easier to build up Ubuntu Server from a plain terminal.
> Any especially thorny bits?
Nvidia drivers. Just check that all apt packages with the word "nvidia" in them have the same version number. Otherwise Xorg and/or torch will go boom.
> Gnome or KDE
I'm using neither! I have no login manager. I type my username and password into a login shell, run "startx" and that starts i3.
And yes, it is somewhat alien. GTK and Qt based applications will have no theme, so they all default to that black-on-gray circa Windows 95 look.
> Do you see improved performance or fewer background processes?
Yes and yes. With i3wm loaded, my desktop idles at about 100MB of RAM used. My desktop compares favorably to similarly-specced entries on openbenchmarking, especially in IPC-related tests.
