You're right, but we're playing using Proton and it's not going to be a supported way to play this game on Linux as Deadlock is going to be a linux native game.
Deadlock, like most games detect Steam Deck through "SteamDeck" environment variable. running the game with "SteamDeck=0 %command%" in launch options should work.
There's probably a reason why Steam Deck is currently unsupported whilst desktop linux can queue into games. It could be gamepad...
Try this before running your game:
sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=2147483642
If this resolves your issues, you can make it permanent by creating and pasting "vm.max_map_count = 2147483642" inside /etc/sysctl.d/80-mmapcount.conf without quotes.