Some Tips and Tricks for the Steam Deck

Steam Deck is a remarkable device. In the last few months, I had a delightful time clearing up the backlog of games I had in my Steam library, Epic Games store, EA, and Ubisoft. There were times when I encountered issues, however, and here are some valuable tools that I used to customize the Steam Deck in various ways. I will keep updating the following list as I come across new ones along the way.

How to play non-steam games

For Epic Games and GOG, I had success using Heroic Games Launcher. I heard some positive reviews about Lutris as well. For EA and Ubisoft games, I use the Origin Launcher and Ubisoft Launcher respectively.

Where to find the Origin installer

Since SteamOS is Linux-based the EA website doesn't allow downloading the Origin client from the web browser on Steam. However, you can directly download the original windows client hosted on EA Origin servers from here: https://www.dm.origin.com/download. (Don't use the installers hosted on websites not affiliated with EA Origin due to security risks.)

P.S. EA has now introduced a revamped EA app which can be found here and recommends using it instead. 

How to add non-steam game shortcuts to Steam game mode

Heroic Bash Launcher: Works for games that are installed with Heroic Games Launcher. This needs some command-line experience but conveniently takes care of downloading artwork for the shortcuts as well.

BoilR: Supports multiple game platforms (not only Heroic) but requires a little tweaking to get the artwork downloading to work. (i.e. by adding a SteamGridDB API key)

How to add custom artwork for non-steam games

If you didn't get custom artwork automatically added using the above tools, you can use SteamGridDB in conjunction with the SGDBoop tool. If SGDBoop is not working based on their instructions, you may have to run this command: systemctl restart --user xdg-desktop-portal

Other miscellaneous tips and tricks

• One of the disadvantages of playing non-steam games over steam games is that non-steam games do not automatically download pre-compiled shader caches. However, to prevent non-steam games from lagging too far behind while shader caches are being compiled during games, you can use the DXVK_ASYNC=1 launcher option.
• If you are concerned about shader caches taking too much space on the Steam Deck (as observed by the growth of the Other section in storage settings) use shader cache killer to selectively delete the cache directories that are no longer needed.
• Install ProtonUp-Qt to manage multiple versions of Wine and Proton as needed by different games
• Install Protontricks to further tweak Proton and install additional libraries required by certain games
• Install Flatseal to manage Flatpak permissions (e.g., for installing non-steam games to the microSD card)
• Check out the very helpful r/steamdeck subreddit if you need help with other steam deck issues.