Epic Games Launcher on SteamOS: Epic confirms it’s coming

For years, running Epic’s store on a Steam Deck meant a dance of third-party launchers, Heroic, Lutris, and a prayer that the next SteamOS update wouldn’t break it. That dance may be ending. Epic Games Launcher SteamOS support is now officially on the roadmap, straight from Epic’s own mouth.

Quick recap for those who weren’t paying attention. Last month Epic shipped a Preview of its new Linux launcher, something I frankly never expected to type. It launched as an AppImage, then the AppImage vanished and a .deb for Debian and Ubuntu took its place, and the FAQ hinted at Fedora “coming soon”. SteamOS wasn’t on the list. Which, for a Linux gaming launcher, is a bit like opening a surf shop and forgetting the ocean.

Epic Games Launcher SteamOS: what Epic said

GamingOnLinux asked Epic what the plan actually was, and Communications Director Jake Jones gave a surprisingly direct answer. “The new Epic Games Launcher is still in Preview and we plan to support as many Linux distributions as possible, including Fedora, SteamOS, Cachy, Omarchy, and more,” he said, adding that they’re “testing and evaluating packaging formats for distribution” and will “restore AppImage this month”. The Verge picked up the quote over the weekend, and the Linux crowd has been chewing on it since.

Cachy and Omarchy are interesting name-drops. One is the performance-tuned Arch spin that’s become the darling of Linux gamers, the other is DHH’s opinionated Hyprland setup that half the internet loves and the other half loves to hate. Epic mentioning them means someone there is actually reading the room. Nobody at a big publisher says “Omarchy” by accident.

What they didn’t say is the word everyone wants to hear: Flatpak. A Flathub package would make SteamOS support trivial, a quick trip to Desktop Mode, one click in Discover, done. Instead we get packaging formats appearing and disappearing while they “evaluate”. If you install the .deb today, expect to reinstall something else next month.

Fortnite on Steam Deck? Not so fast

Here’s the part where I pour cold water. A launcher on SteamOS is not the same as Fortnite on SteamOS. Epic’s own words when it announced the Linux effort were that the Steam Deck “does not support the required features for our EAC v2 solution”, and that they were “actively talking with Valve”. Easy Anti-Cheat v2 wants kernel-level access the Deck’s immutable system doesn’t hand out, and I wouldn’t hold my breath for Valve to loosen that for one publisher. Plenty of Linux users wouldn’t want it anyway; “rootkit” was the most used word in the GamingOnLinux comments.

So what you’ll realistically get, at first, is the store, your library, the free weekly games you’ve been hoarding since 2019, and whatever runs under Proton without aggressive anti-cheat. Which is honestly most of the catalogue. Just not the one game Epic actually cares about.

Still, I’m more optimistic than cynical here, and that’s rare for me when Epic is involved. Between this and GOG Galaxy finally coming to Linux, 2027 is shaping up as the year the big stores stop pretending Linux gamers don’t exist. Valve built the Deck, the community built the compatibility layers, and now the holdouts are showing up late with their own launchers. Late is still showing up. (And if you’re gaming outside Windows on the other side of the fence, Mac users are getting their own translation layer too.)

My advice: don’t install anything yet. Let Epic finish arguing with itself about packaging, wait for a proper Flatpak or at least a stable release, and keep Heroic around in the meantime. It’s served you well for years and it isn’t going anywhere.

Epic took a decade to notice Linux. Give them one more month to notice Flathub.