They took their sweet time but both the project lead Ryan Houdek as well as Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais (username Plagman here in the comments) have now come out saying that FEX-Emu was not just sponsored by Valve but is actually their project and that they approached suitable developers with the idea who they have been paying for the development: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/12/valve-have-been-fundin...
They missed that window when Sierra was still the publisher for Half-Life. Besides, Valve is not a publicly traded company and Gabe Newell as former manager at Microsoft has no interest in getting back together. Valve is betting everything on Linux right now to be more independent from Microsoft.
> Valve is betting everything on Linux right now...
They've been working on Linux support since at least around the time that Microsoft introduced the Windows Store... so for the last twelve years or so.
And, man, a couple of months ago I figured out how to run Steam as a separate user on my Xorg system. Not-at-all-coincidentally, I haven't booted into Windows in a couple of months. Not every game runs [0], but nearly every game in my library does.
I'm really gladdened by the effort put in to making this work.
[0] Aside from the obvious ones with worryingly-intrusive kernel-level anticheat, sometimes there are weird failures like Highfleet just detonating on startup.
I used to game on Linux back in the late 2000s through Wine. And I always found the mouse support to be jarring, even if I could get support to a decent level, for some reason the mouse input was never quite as fluid as it should have been.
And now I'm reluctant to move back to Linux for gaming, even though they've clearly come so far. I guess I should just go ahead and give it another shot.
Stating my bias up front, I've been using Linux since Windows Vista, and I'm a fan. That said, I have experienced the same things you did whenever I needed to run Wine for... well, anything. It was clunky as hell.
You should absolutely revisit. Proton has changed the game. Literally the only game I've tried that was remotely difficult to play in SteamOS is Minecraft, likely because Microsoft owns it now. But I was able to get that working too (if anyone's wondering: you want Minecraft Bedrock Launcher, which is in the Discover store if you're on the Steam Deck and here[1] if you're somewhere else; basically it downloads and runs the Android version of Minecraft through a small translation layer, which is essentially identical to the Windows version).
Speed also is greatly improved from previous solutions. Games played through Proton are often very close in terms of performance to playing them natively.
ProtonDB has a feature where you can give it access to your Steam account for reading and it'll give you a full report based on your personal library: https://www.protondb.com/profile
And I find if anything it tends to the conservative. I've encountered a few things where it was overoptimistic but its outweighed by the stuff that was supported even better than ProtonDB said.
In the late 2000s, I played a few things, but I went in with the assumption it either wouldn't work, or wouldn't work without tweaking. Now I go in with the assumption that it will work unless otherwise indicated. Except multiplayer shooters and VR.
I use steam with Monado to play VRChat on Linux, it surprisingly just works. There are many options to do this nowadays like wired PCVR headsets (The HTC ones are really well supported under Linux) or ALVR if you have a Quest. The only tricky part is setting up steam to use Monado instead of Steam VR but there is documentation on that. I even had some success with running Beat Saber under FreeBSD once using Monado and Wine.
All the more reason for Microsoft to make a play now while Valve still at least somewhat depends on them.
And Gabe won't be around forever and the guy is already over sixty. Statistically he's got about two decades left to live and not all of that will be at a level where he can lead Valve.
True, there is uranium everywhere. Yet Russia still has a 40% marketshare on enriched uranium because enrichment is the difficult part, just ask the Iranians.
What a koinkidink, I just saw a news about a research platform for exactly that (okay, it's for ships but still) starting now, with the idea being to use surplus offshore wind electricity which otherwise would go unused: https://www.dlr.de/en/tt/latest/news/2025/synthetic-fuel-fro...
I see what you did there.