Valve has shipped a major new release of Proton, its Wine-based compatibility layer for running Windows games on Linux and Steam Deck, rebasing the entire project on top of Wine 11.0. The update brings over a dozen titles into playable territory, fixes crashes and rendering bugs across a wide range of popular games, and quietly adds ARM64EC builds via FEX-2604, a sign that Valve continues to invest in bringing PC gaming to ARM hardware.
The compatibility list grows substantially with this release. Classic Capcom titles including Resident Evil (1996), Resident Evil 2 (1998), Dino Crisis, and Dino Crisis 2 graduate from Proton Experimental to stable, while Gothic 1 Classic, X-Plane 12, Breath of Fire IV, and Deadly Premonition are newly playable for the first time. Flight sim fans get a double win, with DCS World Steam Edition also joining the stable roster. Valve also addressed a recent EA Desktop update that had broken compatibility with many EA titles and fixed the Steam Overlay not working correctly with those games.
Several high-profile fixes stand out. A crash in HELLDIVERS 2 during high enemy-count missions has been resolved, a rendering issue in the DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH launcher is fixed, and the REDLauncher used by Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 no longer takes an excessive amount of time to exit. VR players will appreciate restored controller tracking in Microsoft Flight Simulator and the return of No Man's Sky VR mode to a playable state. Steam Deck users get targeted fixes too, including Hollow Knight Beta no longer misinterpreting the Steam button as a left trigger and Killer Inn now launching on devices with /tmp sizes below 10 GB.
Under the hood, the component stack has been refreshed across the board. DXVK is updated from the Proton 11 support branch, vkd3d-proton pulls in the proton-20260410 snapshot, dxvk-nvapi moves to v0.9.1, and Wine Mono jumps to 11.0.0. The Xalia accessibility layer reaches 0.4.8 with gamepad support for launchers spanning BioShock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Zero Escape: The Nonary Games, and more. Support for SteamWorks SDK 1.64 rounds out an update that touches nearly every layer of the compatibility stack, alongside improvements to timezone detection, KDE window maximization, and MonoGame title compatibility.
