How to Install Waydroid on Steam Deck: Full Guide

Thank you satan

I just lend my steam deck to my girlfriend and she games around, your aproach is 100% valid

Valve released a console, and you can use it as you wish, if you want help with installing wayland let me know, or you can search for any other tutorial online

Have fun gaming :)

Waydroid in this tutorial is running in a "cage" *so it can run under X11* which is an older system used by the current KDE version in the steamdeck.

To install it on bazzite *(under Wayland instead of X11*), it's even simpler.

   rpm-ostree install waydroid
   ```  

and

sudo dnf install waydroid

```

So if you are ussing bazzite, follow first option here

It may depend on the specific game, but I know people are specifically using the android version to run Roblox through a tool called sober.

Does this really work? On popular games?

I was fully expecting them all to have integrated the bastard Play Integrity API, they even specifically detect virtual devices with the "`MEETS_VIRTUAL_INTEGRITY`" verdict

Cave Johnson didn't die to being you the Steam Deck so you could ask "why"!

Minecraft bedrock is only accessible on Linux through waydroid or other android emulators.

There's a few other games in the mobile markets that are decent, I'm sure.

Biggest reason may be bypassing anticheat. Some games (like roblox for example) have anticheat that doesn't work on linux, but you can run the android version. As long as the android version supports controllers it can be a decent enough deck experience.

For me it usually comes to:

• Android TV to dock the steam deck on my living room and use it as such

• Some very specific games, like PvZ2, or roblox

• Specific apps like "Stremio", have a better touch screen experience under Waydroid compared to their flatpack version

Probably to run Minecraft, I’m guessing.

>Still, I believe and hope next big SteamOS update will switch to Wayland, leaving X11 behind

Same! This would be amazing, and hopefully their teamwork with Arch will see that happen sooner than later. I noticed that they fixed some CVEs in this latest stable update, so perhaps we'll see more!

SteamOS in game mode runs on wayland actually, because it's using gamescope which is a wayland compositor. My understanding is a lot of applications are still running as x11 and then using xwayland to run on gamescope though. I don't know if that can be manually bypassed to run directly on wayland or not.

Desktop mode is always using x11 though.

You are right

But in this case, the "steamos-waydroid-installer" creates a cage ( A wayland compositor running X11), and uses XWayland to render that. That creates a nested Wayland environment, with some overhead, but it works :))

Edit: The good thing is, overhead isnt nearly even a problem, since you're probably not getting the steamdeck to suffer under android emulation. Still, I believe and hope next big SteamOS update will switch to Wayland, leaving X11 behind

I read these conversations. I have no idea what's going on. I'm glad there are people who understand who are working on things. I tell myself I can still use Linux as a commoner and this back-end doesn't really matter for me. I still don't understand what the hell is going on with Wayland or X11 or systemd or Snap or BTRFS/ext4 or any of this stuff that people feel strongly about. I'll just keep my head down. My OpenSUSE PC and Steam Deck seem to be working (without doing the undergraduate degree amount of wiki reading that people say I need).

I'm curious why you'd want to run android apps on steam deck. What apps bring functionality that you don't normally have access to on SteamOS?

Would this work on Bazzite ?

How does this work? SteamOS uses X11, and Waydroid requires Wayland. `Xwayland` translates X11 calls to Wayland, but I'm not aware of any Wayland to X11 compatibility projects.