The store page hasn’t updated yet, but you can see the Linux Steam depots on steamdb.
Was already working fine through proton, but this is great to see as well!
So I had a weird experience with this. Fedora KDE on my desktop PC and after the update the game ran terribly for me, like even the intro logo animations were chugging Looked at the game files and it had been updated to the Linux version, but I thought the Linux build was just meant for Steam Deck? Changing the compatibility settings to use proton instead fixed it straight away and had the game running fine again
Did some testing on this on Linux, Arch + KDE 6 (wayland) + Nvidia GPU. It looks like DLSS works on Nvidia hardware. I didn’t do formal benchmarks, but I didnt notice performance improvement. On my laptop it actually used roughly 10% more watts on the GPU while capped at 60fps. I don’t think I could tell the difference on a blind test. So I’ll use it anyway to do my part for hardware surveys.
Although this was Act 1, perhaps Act 3 will tell a different story.
The Steam Deck also means they can assume AMD hardware, so even if you don’t see the benefits, they might be there for someone else.
Okay now I’m buying
This is huge. I was beginning to lose hope we’d ever see a big budget high-profile non-indie get a Linux port ever again.
Edit: Maybe not that huge…
Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur’s Gate 3 supported on Linux?
Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
That’s awesome. I’ll definitely check it out later!
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.
A step in the right direction. We just gotta get the momentum going
They’re probably just saying "don’t ask us
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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That is to be expected. Which Linux should they support? Steam Deck is ok, it’s stable, new and popular. Arch? No way. Ubuntu? Yeah, no. Any other “gaming distro” some dudes built? Who would want to support that?
So what is Linux you want companies to support?
I use Arch btw.
You don’t have to support any specific Linux, valve provides all the necessary runtimes
https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/scout/README.md
But isn’t the steam deck Arch as well? So I wonder if there’s still a difference where they support just the deck specific specs…
But if it’s a Linux native build, and the deck is arch, it would stand to reason that you could at least get the build on arch. Maybe they’re doing a check against the uname or something to verify what you’re running.
Support doesn’t have to be based on a specific distro. It isn’t for any of the other ports that support us.
When you promise support, you have to take responsibility when it doesn’t work.
You can promise support for ’xyz’ distro and advertise that which is what Larian is doing however, if they said they supported Debian for example than that would open a whole can of issues as a lot of distributions are Debian based.
Would be nice to have Debian and Arch be the foundation for Linux based game development and make that the standard throughout all the other distros like SteamOS, LinuxMint or PopOS. Fedora is kinda in their own world I suppose.
I think this is perfectly fine. I dont think we should really be expecting them to provide support for the entirety of the linux platform when there is so much variation between installs. If its working on steam deck, it’ll work on linux generally.
I know native ports are important to some folks, and I know you’re one of them, but would you mind explaining why? Maybe you’ve done so in the past and I didn’t internalize it.
Larian’s own reasoning here appears to be squeezing it for more performance, and with Linux users now accounting for 6% of English-language players, I suspect more companies will find this to be worth the effort as that percentage rises and Windows becomes more of a pain in the ass.
EDIT: reworded statistic for accuracy
Proton still perpetuates Microsoft’s monopoly on graphics APIs etc.
I guess, but it also simultaneously ports thousands of games that were never going to get updated with Linux builds even if Linux became 100% of the market tomorrow; several games I have now with native Linux ports are worse than the same game run through Proton. And when run through Proton, it’s no longer hitting Microsoft code. Anyway, this outcome in this post is the kind of thing that Valve expected to happen but has happened very little thus far, hopefully a sign of things to come.
Totally. And then DirectX 13 comes out and needs to be reversed and implemented, all the while developers don’t think about Linux.
If MS get cheeky with the MZ/EXE/PE format, we could be several years behind.
I’ve been using Wine for years and I think anyone who has been using it all this time will get what I’m saying.
Just because Proton/Wine has caught up (mostly) doesn’t mean it wasn’t a long and painful journey to get there.
There was a very clear dividing line between Wine before Proton and Wine after Proton. Maybe Indiana Jones and the Great Circle doesn’t work great on Proton on day 1, but it catches up so much more quickly than it used to, because there’s an incentive to. Anyway, I don’t mean to try to change your mind, and at least I get the perspective.
Again, I think you’re coming at this from enjoying Proton today but say DX13 comes out tomorrow, it could be years before Proton is compatible.
It took about 6 years for Proton to be somewhat capable at supporting DX3D 12 after 12 launched in 2014. Arguably it was closer to 7 or 8 years (that’s how long Proton took to get to the state it’s in today).
This is what I’m talking about. If MS purposefully make it difficult to reverse and reimplement (which they have an incentive to do), and game developers continue to focus and target MS platforms, we could be waiting half a decade to play those games on Linux.
I suppose I hardly noticed how long it took for DX12 to work because games had DX11 modes basically the entire time that Proton struggled with it. So again, not trying to sway you on anything, but optimistically, there’s going to be little to no games pushing any kind of envelope when a new technology like that comes along. It’s already prohibitively expensive for games to do so today, such that there are very few good games in a given year that make use of the latest tech.
Yeah but given that dxvk is a thing, a switch to dx13 would just need to be implemented there. The underlying wine layer would only need to change if the PE format changed. But even then, that would destroy backwards compatibility in the windows world… something that Microsoft’s enterprise customers would (rightfully) crucify them for.
I mean, UWP and Appx was a thing that happened. I doubt it’ll be the last time MS attempt to shift away from PE.
Consumers are being forced to 11 and it seems to be working. I wouldn’t be surprised to see MS bifurcate their consumer and enterprise offerings to accelerate shifts in the consumer space and catalyse shifts in enterprise.
MS have been keen to take stricter control of binaries on their platform for a long time now.
Appx and UWP are more packaging (like rpm, deb, msi) formats than an executable format. PE is behind everything in windows and the amount of effort required to change that seems truly Herculean, even for an organization the size of Microsoft. Heck, even executables for windows ARM were PE (as well as UEFI binaries). But even if you assume that they do go forward with something that insane, if they want developers to write software for it, they’ll have to publish the format specs so that gcc and llvm can implement them so that the tens of thousands of existing libraries could be ported
Yeah but linux native builds break even with the steam runtime…
Aren’t most games on Vulkan these days?
There’s still plenty of other Windows-only APIs that games rely on.
Unfortunately not. The vast majority of games are DX12. Even DX11 is likely still more popular than Vulkan.
A lot of engines support Vulkan builds, but the default is DX. Almost every game is DX.
The way I see it, native support means our platform is actually being supported.
Though it seems I may have celebrated too soon here…
Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur’s Gate 3 supported on Linux?
Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
For me, it shows that they actually care to support Linux. It doesn’t really materially change anything, but to does show a sign that they’re putting real effort in to support the growing Linux population, rather than just ignoring it and hoping Proton handles it.
does this mean it will perform better on the steamdeck?
Yes
No, not really. It may, but it doesn’t necessarily. WINE + Proton doesn’t really have a performance impact, so it’s not worse than running native usually. Either one could be more performant I think, depending on the situation.
to some degree a bigger deal would be if the download was smaller.
Larian should really support a native Linux build. Period, the end.
For what version of glibc?
Doesn’t the Steam Linux runtime have a static glibc version in it that doesn’t change?
Did they fix the problem where for some reason, on steam deck you can’t do local multiplayer? You need to provide a command line argument to turn on local multiplayer and I can’t begin to comprehend why they did this.
Because the game barely runs single player on Steam Deck, and they’d rather not handle a bunch of support tickets for people wondering why the game chugs when trying to make a low end system handle a lot more processing load.
Same reason they disabled local multiplayer for the Xbox Series S
Oh nice I’ll cop it on Steam Deck for the holidays.
I’m confused. It’s a Linux native build, but they call it steam deck native. Does this mean it’s not optimized for Nvidia since steam deck is AMD hardware? I’m fairly new to Linux, so the wording is throwing me off.
You have to dig a few layers deep, but it appears that they uploaded a Linux build that only downloads for Steam Decks, and they don’t seem to fully support non-Steam Deck. I haven’t verified a way to get around this, but often, where there’s a will, there’s a way. You might be able to force the game to download the Linux version from the Compatibility settings in Steam. At least at this point in time, Larian only seems interested in the Linux build for Steam Deck in particular, which I’ve never seen before.
I actually gave it a try by just disabling the forced compatability and then using __GL_13ebad=0x1 %command% in the launch options. it works with dlss. only issue for me are the frame drops that pretty much make it unplayable. i saw a post somewhere, someone was saying more power was going to their gpu on the native build. i think that’s what’s happening to me and its causing some throttling. on proton with vulkan, the game runs fine for the most part.
Wait, I played bg3 on my steam deck over a year ago and it ran just fine. So what’s the difference here? Is this new thing specifically made to run on the steam deck whereas before I was just lucky that bg3 ran on the steam deck?
What you played on your Steam Deck before was a Windows build run through Proton. It’s not really luck that it ran before, but with a native build, you can start tweaking the way things work in Linux to optimize for what the Linux version is using. They must have seen the performance gains to be worth the time investment.
Oooh I see. I might download it on my steam deck then again if it means performance improvements because I’ve been wanting to play on the go. Thanks for explaining!
Ooh, I think it’s time for me to finally buy this game, hopefully in a way that signals my support for this action.
It blows my mind that I haven’t played BG3, btw. The original saga of 1 + 2 + expansions is S-tier nostalgia deep in my heart right along with the other big PC and console RPGs of the 90s. i’ve just been in one of those phases of life where I am focused on other things and not playing many games at all unless my family gets me to jump into something light and co-op.
And when I say focused, on a scale from 1 to 10 I’m talking ADHD hyperfocus.
Just to let you know, BG3 plays completely different than the original saga. It sounds obvious as I type this but BG3 really doesn’t compare. The tone and humor just isn’t the same. Really the only thing that connects to it are certain characters and map names. I would honestly just consider BG3 a really good spin-off game rather than considering it a mainline Baldurs Gate game. Hopefully you aren’t too disappointed, it’s still a very good game. I just have a hard time including it in the Baldurs Gate saga.
I appreciate the opinion!
I pretty much know that stuff, and it’s probably another small reason I haven’t played it yet. But also knowing that, I wouldn’t expect the turn based CRPG feel or anything like.
Well and also, BG1 EE and BG2 EE work great for me in Linux (I think they have native versions so no surprise) so I can get a shot of the real shit whenever I want, lol.
Having a couch PC with its own monitor(s) able to swing in and out of the way without taking over the TV is a game changer. I can play BG while hanging out with my family and pause it at any time.
You should!
Not sure about your family’s ages, but it’s not that NSFW and so pretty/cinematic your family could watch it like a TV drama. Or play coop with you (as it is coop).
Also, it really does live up to all the hype. I never played 1-2, heck I don’t even like turn-based games and prefer scifi over D&D fantasy, and BG3 blew my mind.
Oh there’s DEFINITELY some NSFW parts that show A LOT, . but the game definitely lets you know when they’re about to happen/ have to look for it
That is true lol, I forgot about the sexy scenes. And some of the horror.
Isn’t there an in-game toggle?
For explicit scenes and nudity. I honestly could barely tell that the nipples had been censored though.
Wasn’t expecting a high profile game to get a native Linux build, especially so much time after release, but I’m glad to see it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stadia_games
Of course, Stadia builds were not released to the public.
It would be awesome if they released it on GOG too
Woul be nice if GoG had a linux client
They promised one years ago, definitely coming soon
They should sponsor HGL. No need to reinvent the wheel, and the project could always use the money and fame.
They have a deal with Heroic to give them a portion of revenue for stuff purchased with their affiliate link. Not quite sponsorship but it’s a lot more than nothing, which seems to be what Epic is offering them
Heroic Launcher fulfils the basics for it.
It’s hot enough off the presses that the Steam store page doesn’t even know about it yet, so it’s possible it propagates to GOG, too.
The official post on the website says that there’s currently no support for other native Linux platforms besides steam deck, so maybe a bit further down the road with the next patch.
Hell yeah… Zero regrets paying full price for this game.
This is technically true, but they specifically state that they
don't support Linuxin their faq.
This is “just” a SteamDeck build.(I actually tried to run it on debian, but it didn’t want to start. That said, I invested 0 time, maybe it was just a minor thing. no idea)
I actually tried to run it on debian, but it didn’t want to start.
SteamOS is Arch based, Debian is well Debian based. Makes sense for it not to work, shame nonetheless.
Steam packages its own Linux runtimes and seldom uses system dependencies. Maybe SteamOS has a different runtime for Steam Deck though.
Like i said, i just changed the runtime and clicked run, and that was it. it is very well possible that it could work with 30 seconds of brain-involvement.
does it break mods or not work with mods for the windows version?
I assume that would depend on the mod. Some depend on custom DLLs, those will only work on Windows. The ones that you just droo into the Mods folder will probably work.
Not yet in GOG, though.
