From what I know, most guides on piracy on steam deck involves running the game through Steam’s launcher as a “Non-Steam Game” which kinda feels sketchy to me, since the Steam Launcher portion of SteamOS is not open source, and they could be phoning home to Steam’s servers and reporting me as a pirate. Maybe they don’t go hard on pirates for now, but at any point in the future, they could pull a Nintendo move.
If your worry is that a corporation will report you for piracy, than you have a false dichotomy. Both SteamOS and especially modern Windows are both corpo controlled platforms. You’d be far better off running something like Bazzite off the handheld if the goal is to get away from closed-source systems. You also wouldn’t have to run things through Steam to get non-steam games working, there’s other options that would still allow you to use Proton as your compatibility layer.
Bazzite uses the exact same package, for gamemode, that SteamOS does, on a handheld.
just don’t use gamemode? If anything, I imagine gamemode would be a detriment to running things outside of Steam, which is the use-case OP is looking for.
It really, really isn’t. Adding a “non-steam game” is trivial via applications like Lutris, Heroic & Bottles. That’s quite literally how I play half my games, which are pirated.
As for why you would want to in the first place, gamemode is literally the only controller-friendly launcher that exists on Linux. No one’s bothered competing. As soon as one does pop up I’d imagine Bazzite will integrate it but until such time well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh lol I didn’t know there was an alternative OS compatible with steam deck. I thought that the only Linux OS out there were all for Laptop/Desktop PCs.
TIL
SteamOS, which comes pre-installed on the Deck is Linux.
You can even enter desktop mode and use it as a PC.
The steam deck is pretty much just a PC with a built in gamepad. You can put windows or any OS you want on it.