I'm a little disappointed that Valve is focused on Proton only. This can also play native Linux games. A well written native game should perform better, and, more importantly, get better battery life.
Maybe Valve is going about this the right way. Focus on Proton now, and if it takes off, game devs will make the effort to do a native port.
Proton is the answer to the chicken-and-egg problem of linux gaming. No one will make games for it because no one games on Linux because no one will make games for it. With Proton and this, they’re trying to bootstrap a Linux gaming community. From there, native ports will happen when the community is large enough to be worth optimizing for.
Idk. You still get your game to run on both the Deck and Windows if you write for Windows, whereas it'll only run on the Deck and a few bless Linux installations if you write for Linux. There must be a pretty big performance gap (or some financial incentive) to convince devs to switch, and it almost can't be performance: then Deck will simply not take off.
Sadly, some of the native linux game versions that I've tried were worse(less performant or unstable) than forcing Steam to run the proton version, since they don't get as much dev effort. I'm perfectly ok with this for now, given how well proton already runs. We'd need to find ourselves in a primarily-linux-gaming future first.
Maybe Valve is going about this the right way. Focus on Proton now, and if it takes off, game devs will make the effort to do a native port.