Steamtinkerlaunch is an excellent solution (and probably not as well known as it should be!) if you want to manage different version and different options of Proton within Steam (and much more than that, such as FSR settings, Reshade…). Turns out that FrostWork (the main developer) has now access to a Deck:

My wifes steam deck arrived today: after some minutes of initial configuration (system update, set passwd, enable ssh, set / read-write, install steamtinkerlaunch using makepkg and several of its (optional) dependencies) I was able to successfully start steamtinkerlaunch via terminal/icon and also was able to install Vortex with the steamtinkerlaunch settings menu. So this seems to basically work so far.

However it’s not that simple to install programs on the Deck outside of Flatpak packages:

But generally speaking using any custom system wide program installation will always be problematic on the SteamDeck, as future “firmware” updates will always delete your custom installations. This is no fun of course.

So, will we see a Flatpak for SteamtinkerLauncher? Unlikely, but…

Edit2: looks like adding automatic SteamDeck support without depending on flatpak is not too complicated, as most functions do already work as expected. So I’d say I’ll add SteamDeck support, but no idea how long it takes.

Now if you have a Steam Deck and want to try using SteamTinkerLauncher in the meantime, you can follow that WIP instructions: https://github.com/frostworx/steamtinkerlaunch/issues/431#issuecomment-1079998760

Let me also remind you to check our previous feature article about how to use some functionalities of SteamTinkerLauncher to your advantage.