Is SteamDeck safe(er) compared to Windows?

[Borzymir Koredański]

I have a privilege to own OG SteamDeck. As far as I know it's running on Linux-ish system and there's thread here saying Linux is safe.
Is nProtect less invasive on SteamDeck? And are "backdoors", mentioned here on Anti Cheat forum, present on Linux / SteamDeck?

[Rah Gashapon]

If I am correct the Steam Deck runs Helldivers 2 under Proton, that means no backdoors. Running under Proton implies that the game and GameGuard is contained "in a box" that opens and closes when you play the game.

So no, no backdoors or weird stuff. You can experience some crashes though, this game loves crashes from what I've seen.

[LongTimeAgo]

It's definetly more safe. Not because it's a Steamdeck (its merely a PC after all), but because it uses Linux.
User @Kobold made a good thread on here and converted some people to switch over the Linux (or atleast dualboot with Windows) to play the game safely with nPGG contained to bare minimum. I also got Linux Mint because of his explanations. I dont have the game yet due to my concerns and principles with nPGG. (But thats another story)

The game runs under Proton. The following summary or short description might not be fair to everything this fantastic piece of software entails, but the gist of it is as follows:

It's a boxed layer that basically makes the game think it is running under windows. It contains everything necessary (or redirects to the) files necessary to be able to run Windows Executables/games. You can almost compare it to an emulator of sorts. Since nPGG is only able to solely access everything Windows related, it simply cant get its hands on anything through the Proton layer.
Even better: Proton merely assigns a 'folder' on an ext4 disk as its root folder that would also be in Windows, anything running under it cant search for anything deeper than that assigned """root""" folder.

[c41c]

Originally posted by LongTimeAgo:

Proton merely assigns a 'folder' on an ext4 disk as its root folder that would also be in Windows, anything running under it cant search for anything deeper than that assigned """root""" folder.

This is somewhat correct. The Proton C: mount is bound to the compatdata C folder however your entire Linux root is still mounted under Z: so the game executables can be run inside Proton. Valve could only mount the steam directory but they chose not to for some reason

You can verify that Proton mounts your root directory by looking at a game's prefix with ProtonTools.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3179056702
Using a sandboxed install of Steam such as the flatpak version can help reduce this problem provided you tweak the permissions granted to flatpak steam using a tool such as Flatseal, as by default flatpak steam is not restricted from viewing your full filesystem.

[GatoMancer]

Originally posted by Borzymir Koredański:

I have a privilege to own OG SteamDeck. As far as I know it's running on Linux-ish system and there's thread here saying Linux is safe.
Is nProtect less invasive on SteamDeck? And are "backdoors", mentioned here on Anti Cheat forum, present on Linux / SteamDeck?

Yes SteamDecks' OS is Linux using Proton to play the games. The Linux Client for Steam has Proton integrated into the system for ease in launching titles.

GameGuard does "operate" in Linux using this but it's limited in what it can and can't do. It can NOT access or modify anything core to the OS.

If it did that'd be considered a security vulnerability and the Linux devs would attack that hole quick. Linux developers take security of the OS very seriously as Unix/Linux is used on a large number of servers out there. Desktop editions are the same OS just having a different software bundle.