Ableton on Steam Deck Linux

I got a steam deck with the idea that I would try installing windows on an SD card and run Ableton to sequence my hardware synths but it turned out to be easy to get it running smoothly directly in steam os. I installed it using an app called bottles which creates wine installations for windows apps on linux. Bottles can be installed directly from the Discover App Store in steam desktop mode and bottles has a configuration for installing Ableton. You just download the Ableton installer exe and point the bottles Ableton installer at it. The audio buffers where initially set very high but I lowered the out put to 512 samples and it’s running without any glitches. I set it up connected to a hub with mouse keyboard and monitor and plan to use it with a controller. To my surprise, once I disconnected it from the hub I found it to be actually usable with the steam decks controls. You would definitely want a keyboard, mouse and or midi controller to do anything serious with it but I thought it would be unusable as a handheld. It probably looks a little more awkward in this video because of the angle I had to hold it from where I propped my phone up but combination of thumb trackpad and various buttons for mouse buttons, arrow keys, shift, alt etc.. works well enough to do some casual couch jamming.