Steamdeck + Desktop PC

Ive been thinking about getting a Valve Steamdeck as a portable gaming device. I mainly play POE1 and POE2 on my home desktop with the Windows standalone client.

Can I just log into the Steam client as normal or is there some account conversion process I would need to do if I wanted to play via Steam? I think the Steamdeck runs a flavor of Linux, is there a standalone Linux client available?

You can link your Path of Exile and Steam accounts, so that aspect isn't a problem.

And, besides - the Steam Deck is in no way restricted to Valve's store - so while it would be a decidedly worse UX, you could download the standalone client.

The Steam Deck does indeed run Linux. Path of Exile does not have any official support for Linux. The game's Steam store page includes Valve-authored information on how well the current game version runs on the Linux-based Steam Deck. This can get better or worse in response to game updates.



If GGG were to hypothetically add standard anti-cheat functionality in a future update, the game would likely be immediately dead on Linux due to most anti-cheat software digging rather deep into the Windows kernel and therefore being non-operable on Linux. This isn't super likely in the case of PoE imo, but is worth bearing in mind for other games you might want to play.