Are you confused on why there's many different versions of Valve's Proton? The compatibility layer that runs Windows games on Linux / SteamOS and Steam Deck. Here's a little guide on what it all means.
Experimental is its name for a reason. It’s for testing fixes which may or may not fix an issue that they’re investigating. If the fix doesn’t cause any immediate issues they’ll then push it to stable.
So you should really only use Experimental if you have a game or game update that just came out and isn’t running correctly in Stable.
To simplify these are the TLDR ranking:
Stable
Next (ie: Release Candidate, last bug fix check before pushing to stable)
Experimental (ie: Beta, latest fixes that are being tested)
Bleeding Edge (ie: Alpha, automated merges for the latest submitted code from devs, things can easily break)
Hotfix (For quick bandaid fixes for specific popular games that just released or just updated with some breaking incompatibility.)
If you take a look at ProtonDB, there are many, many examples of people just saying “switch to Experimental”. If Experimental is changing all the time, then this doesn’t make a lot of sense.
If a fix hasn’t made it to Stable yet, then switching to Experimental is the appropriate action to get the game functioning. Just keep in mind that if a ProtonDB review is old but mentions Experimental, then most likely the fix is in Stable by now and switching to Experimental might not be needed anymore. In those cases I’d try the latest Stable first, and then try Experimental if that doesn’t work for some reason.
Keeping note of specific Proton versions is more important if someone says that an older Proton version works better than new ones for reasons. Or if they’re using a forked version of Proton, like GE-Proton, it’s important because that fork explicitly includes things not in normal Proton, like exotic video format support that Valve can’t normally include for legal reasons.
Experimental is its name for a reason. It’s for testing fixes which may or may not fix an issue that they’re investigating. If the fix doesn’t cause any immediate issues they’ll then push it to stable.
So you should really only use Experimental if you have a game or game update that just came out and isn’t running correctly in Stable.
To simplify these are the TLDR ranking:
Stable
Next (ie: Release Candidate, last bug fix check before pushing to stable)
Experimental (ie: Beta, latest fixes that are being tested)
Bleeding Edge (ie: Alpha, automated merges for the latest submitted code from devs, things can easily break)
Hotfix (For quick bandaid fixes for specific popular games that just released or just updated with some breaking incompatibility.)
Thanks.
If you take a look at ProtonDB, there are many, many examples of people just saying “switch to Experimental”. If Experimental is changing all the time, then this doesn’t make a lot of sense.
If a fix hasn’t made it to Stable yet, then switching to Experimental is the appropriate action to get the game functioning. Just keep in mind that if a ProtonDB review is old but mentions Experimental, then most likely the fix is in Stable by now and switching to Experimental might not be needed anymore. In those cases I’d try the latest Stable first, and then try Experimental if that doesn’t work for some reason.
Keeping note of specific Proton versions is more important if someone says that an older Proton version works better than new ones for reasons. Or if they’re using a forked version of Proton, like GE-Proton, it’s important because that fork explicitly includes things not in normal Proton, like exotic video format support that Valve can’t normally include for legal reasons.