This is not a drill: All-timer weirdo game Deadly Premonition now playable on Linux as of Valve's most recent Proton beta, plus 17 others and your EA library (until EA breaks it again)

Proton—Valve's Windows-to-Linux compatibility layer that makes so much of your Steam library work on Steam Deck and Linux desktops—got a new big number today, in the form of the first Proton 11 beta release.

This one incorporates goodies from (the also recently released) Wine 11, on which Proton is based, and you might already have seen that it marks the first glimpse of an Arm64 version of Proton that Valve intends to put to use in the Steam Frame.

But it's also, well, a new Proton version, one that you can put to use right now on your nearest Linux thing, and it brings with it a whole bunch of newly playable games. Games like the recently-Steamified original versions of Resident Evil 1 and 2, Shogun: Total War, and—this is the big one for me—Deadly Premonition.

Deadly Premonition is one of five games that Valve has marked as entirely "Newly playable" on this latest iteration of Proton (I'll include the full list down below), while the others are part of a 13-strong list of games that have previously been playable via Proton's experimental branch but are now safely ensconced in a—relatively, this is still a beta—more stable version.

Aside from the playable games, Proton 11 also includes fixes for yet another busted EA App release that prevented a lot of EA games being playable (and makes the Steam overlay work with them, to boot), fixed Crimson Desert's intro video, repaired a glitch that made Metal Gear Solid 2 hang after the end credits, and plenty more.

I'm always rather impressed by how varied the spread of games are that get fixed, tweaked, or made playable in Proton updates. It's not just the new hotness; if you were desperately hanging around waiting for someone to fix alt-tabbing in the original Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, Proton 11's beta finally grants that wish.

But like I said, for me the big one is Deadly Premonition. It's a kind of Resident-Evil-meets-Twin-Peaks thing, it's Swery's magnum opus, and its PC port has always been utter dogwater—a game I was prevented from 100%ing by the fact that reloading an old save to tick off my last couple of side quests invariably crashed it, and which has long required a mod called DPFix to enter a state of semi-stability. I'm very curious to see if it joins those ranks of Windows games that somehow run better on Linux. Early reports are positive.

Here's the full list of changes.

Proton 11 beta 1 patch notes

• Now playable (previously worked with Proton Experimental):
  • Universe Generator: The Golden Sword
  • DCS World Steam Edition
  • Resident Evil (1996)
  • Resident Evil 2 (1998)
  • Dino Crisis
  • Dino Crisis 2
  • From Dust
  • Blaite
  • Don't Die Dateless, Dummy!
  • METAL GEAR SURVIVE
  • Warhammer: Vermintide 2
  • Metal Fatigue
  • SHOGUN: Total War.
• Newly playable:
  • Unknown Faces
  • Gothic 1 Classic
  • X-Plane 12
  • Breath of Fire IV
  • Deadly Premonition
• Fixed video playback in She Sees Red.
• Fixed rendering of certain symbols with Ukranian language option in Chambers.
• Enabled text-to-speech accessibility feature in Pentiment and Grounded.
• Fixed voice chat in Phasmophobia lobby for desktop players.
• Improved rendering of Rockstar Launcher popups.
• Fixed Sea of Solitude showing black screen on Proton.
• Fixed many EA games being unplayable after a recent EA Desktop update.
• Added support for SteamWorks SDK 1.64.
• Fixed Steam Overlay not working correctly with many EA games.
• Improved emoji support in Idle Trillionaire.
• Fixed intro video playback in Crimson Desert.
• Fixed Rei and the Floating City not being playable with gamescope.
• Fixed mouse movement behavior in Call of Duty 2.
• Fixed rendering issue in launcher of DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH.
• Fixed a crash in HELLDIVERS 2 happening in high enemy-count missions.
• Fixed random hangs in Killer Inn.
• Fixed Killer Inn not launching on Steam Decks and other machines with /tmp sizes lower than 10GB.
• Fixed Killer Inn not being able to connect to Square Enix account.
• Fixed graphical gliches in Duck Game that happen with newer Wine Mono versions.
• Fixed REDLauncher (e.g. as seen with Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3) taking a long time to exit.
• Fixed Hollow Knight Beta update wrongly registering Steam Deck's Steam button as a left trigger.
• Fixed controller hotplug not working for 8BitDo Ultimate 2C and other controllers that expose multiple HID devices.
• Fixed Xalia intermittently failing to start when game is launched.
• Fixed small memory leak with The King of Fighters XIII Global Match video playback.
• Improved timezone detection.
• Fixed video playback in 我打不过漂亮的她们.
• Fixed lag spikes caused by Steam overlay being opened for prolonged time.
• Fixed VR controller tracking in Microsoft Flight Simulator.
• Improved VR support so that No Man's Sky VR mode is playable again.
• Fixed black blocks in dialog windows created by ARC Raiders and The Finals.
• Fixed glitchy video playback in Satisfactory.
• Fixed Rec Room not being playable after a recent game update.
• Fixed The King of Fighters XIII Global Match freezing when playing videos from the gallery.
• Fixed intro video not looping in Blazblue Centralfiction.
• Made more games using MonoGame playable.
• Improved support for Kodi media player.
• Added System Voice support for multiple languages in Phasmophobia.
• Fixed KDE window maximization support.
• Fixed Brighter Shores window resizing support.
• Improved Space Engineers dual monitor support
• Fixed scaling issue with Arma: Reforger when changing window modes.
• Fixed Dungeon Siege tools showing up at character's feet.
• Improved focus loss behavior with RoBoRumble.
• Fixed rendering issue in Hellsinker. launcher.
• Fixed stutter from keyboard input in Titanfall 2.
• Fixed audio playback when playing intro videos in BIRDCAGE.
• Fixed hang after METAL GEAR SOLID 2: Sons of Liberty end credits.
• Fixed Disintegration getting stuck on the first loading screen.
• Fixed CHRONO TRIGGER flickering in windowed mode with certain resolutions when using Gamescope.
• RAGE no longer has focus issues when Alt-Tabbing on KDE Wayland.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition (2009) no longer has problems minimizing after Alt-Tabbing.
• Resident Evil 2 should no longer have issues when changing resolutions on GNOME.
• Call of Duty: WWII should no longer fail to render properly in fullscreen native resolution on setups with dual monitors.
• Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition no longer has issues with keyboard registration after refocusing the game.
• Updated Xalia to 0.4.8:
  • Added controller support for the MC Visual C++ 2010 redistributable installer.
  • Improved gamepad binding support for Graze Counter.
  • Added controller support for launchers of the following games: Red Faction®: Armageddon™, Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 - Episode II, Hellsinker., Disney Bolt, STAR WARS™ Starfighter™.
  • Fixed Xalia wrongly selecting option from unfocused tabs in Rayman: Raving Rabbids.
  • Added controller support for DirectX Runtime Components installer when launching BioShock for the first time.
  • Added controller support for launchers of the following games: Rocket Knight, Puddle, Zero Escape: The Nonary Games, Metal Slug XX, Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition, Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY, LocoCycle, Ys SEVEN, Resident Evil (1996), Resident Evil 2 (1998), Resident Evil 3 Nemesis (1999), Dino Crisis, Dino Crisis 2.
• Rebased on top of Wine 11.0.
• Added FEX-2604 for ARM64EC builds.
• Updated vkd3d to vkd3d-1.19-139-g30b93dcea8b0.
• Updated dxvk to v2.7.1-467-g83e503b4ae6d from Proton 11 support branch.
• Updated dxvk-nvapi to v0.9.1.
• Updated Wine Mono to 11.0.0.
• Updated vkd3d-proton to proton-20260410