These don’t exactly “fit in” with the rest of the list, but on Deck I’ve personally had a blast with CarX Drift Racing Online and the Sonic &ASRT Collection

This is already fixed in proton experimental bleeding-edge.

I don’t think it’s possible to filter the trending games that way, but you can filter the all-time highest rated games that way by using the “Platforms” filter in instant search: https://steamdb.info/instantsearch/?refinementList[oslist][0]=Steam Deck Verified&refinementList[oslist][1]=Steam Deck Playable

It also has an option to filter the search by year(s) and by number of ratings/followers, so you could select the current and/or previous year to see what has been trending well-received and popular in the (relatively) short-term.

Yes, a lot of games work fine without precompiled shaders. Others, like Apex Legends or Rocket League, are a complete mess (at least for the first few minutes of gameplay - it used to be much worse but DXVK 2.0 helped a lot with this). You’ve probably just only tried the games that work fine.

“Having to deal with pre-shader work” that you mentioned is a good thing. Without it, games will stutter more. And you always have the option to skip it or disable it entirely.

But otherwise, it’s a classic delimma:

Through proton, yes. The game has always worked with anti-cheat disabled (so no PvP multiplayer), but proton-compatible anti-cheat has been supported since early April, so all multiplayer functionality has worked since then.

This article is referring to a recent MCC patch that broke proton anti-cheat for about a week, thankfully it’s fixed now.