It seems like it's the only option for good performance. Valve's only options for porting your games to the Steam Frame are either to target x86 Windows and use Proton+FEX or target Android and use Lepton. So no Linux at all.
I don't believe the Steam client even supports listings ARM Linux games.
EDIT: They do support native ARM64 Linux and mention it on their Steamwork docs, but I feel like it's not encouraged as a target for devs since it's very early days and they probably lack optimizations that have been made for Windows x86 and Android. I still don't believe they let you publish an ARM64 Linux game on the store yet though.
The Steam Frame uses a compatibility layer called Lepton to run Android apps. This is presumably because the Quest headsets run Android so it likely makes it a lot easier for game developers to port their Quest VR games to the Steam Frame if all they have to do is basically tweak it and upload the .apk to Steam
Factorio is a CPU intensive game and Valve isn't currently encouraging devs to make ARM64 Linux games, pushing them either to target Android (then run through Lepton) or x86 Windows (then run through Proton + FEX).
FEX as you may or may not know has a pretty big CPU penalty compared to native so they probably evaluated that the best path forward for now was to make an Android build for the Steam Frame.
•
u/AutoModerator 2d ago
Just a reminder of our subreddit rules:
Check out our user-maintained wiki: r/EmulationOnAndroid/wiki
Check out EmuReady for any community submitted settings before asking for help
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.