Not supported.

You cannot play Fortnite on the Steam Deck. The anti-cheat it uses is fundamentally and intentionally incompatible with Linux, the OS the Deck uses.

One workaround is to stream it, either through a service like GeForce Now[www.nvidia.com], or locally on another PC on your network.

Originally posted by seth.brodacz1:

I purchased a steam deck for my son, and he has been trying to get Fortnite to work on it. It is saying it has a network error.

STEAM OS does not support Fortnite.
Fortnite on PC has a Kernel Level Anti Cheat sofware that is running on Windows only.
STEAM OS is based on Linux.

also, it seems it may be possible to run and install fornite in linux with some android emulators, but since epic doesnt want to allow people using them, the odds of becoming permanently banned are high.

Geforce worked. Pretty easy. Thanks guys.

additionally you can install windows to an SD card for free and the driver Valve provides for windows can still run Fortnite despite being a little old at this point.

it's more work to set up but is better than streaming it in my opinion. 60fps, no streaming latency getting you killed and looks better than it does playing portably on a Switch.