Of course they don’t, it would be crazy to say they would support all the different possible distros and configurations that people might run, when the majority of users are in steam deck. But that doesn’t mean it won’t run, just that if you have issues, they don’t promise to fix them. Seems reasonable to me.
BG3 already ran well enough on Linux, so I imagine this will only make it run better, official support or not.
I'd expect it to work anyway. Under Steam at least. There is nothing special about the Steam Deck/SteamOS that's not available on other distros when running Steam, afaik.
Well, most game companies will only tell you the game only works on something very specific, say Ubuntu 24.04, and everything else is untested/unsupported. That doesn't exclude the game will work perfectly fine on other distros, which is usually the case.
Proton version will always work better if someone does not show an example and encourage the usage of native support. With Proton you are guaranteed to never reach the optimal potential, or get full advantages of the Linux/Wayland ecosystem. While with native versions you have at least the chance to get in there.
It is like judging someone for taking an advantage of the new CPU instructions that accelerate processing because general instructions are already good enough.
Native doesn't automatically mean better - quite a few examples of games running better on proton than with native executables(and yes then we can start arguing that it just means the native port is done poorly, but I'm just saying don't assume native will always run better).
It seems like a similar argument around the popularity of third party engines, whether studios should use Unreal, or whether they have the expertise/resources to change to and use another engine, or make their own bespoke engine, and if that will produce better results.
I think that is not fair comparison. Proton adds additional layer which can be completely removed and affects the runtime performance. Switching different game engine changes the layer implementation, instead of removing.
When Proton started to get good, there were multiple stories of small game studios just dropping their bespoke Linux builds because the Windows->Proton version ran much much faster and required zero effort from them.
That'd be nice, though at the moment I hope that if the update instead breaks something on Linux -- a distinct possibility --, I can go back to the Proton version which has been working pretty much perfectly.
Something I wonder is if this new version is a linux build specifically targeting the deck hardware+OS setup, have Larian now committed themselves to following whatever Valve does in future for changes to that setup. In any case, they've got a fallback which is the windows version on proton, but it's inverting how Valve has trained many to behave which is to make just a windows version and delegate linux support to them.
There's also been persistent speculation about whether Valve would take on the burden of releasing SteamOS as a general distribution anyone can install on their own hardware (which I think is unlikely), which could in turn affect how Larian has to treat this port even if that is just communicating what it is and isn't.
