Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming Moments in Years
techspot.com
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But where it differs from pretty much any other modern software product is that it trusts you as a user - you can install games that aren't verified. It'll tell you why they're not verified (small text, no controller support) but it'll let you install them anyway. And then map touchpads and controllers to emulate keyboard and mouse if you want. You can install games that aren't from Steam store. You can go do desktop mode. It doesn't judge. It will give you good experience by default and then let YOU judge if you want to stray away from it.
It's something that Apple fans always told us it's impossible to build - a device that is joy to use by default while still respecting your wishes as a user.
Yes, phones have stronger security requirements, but why are they being secured against people using them? :)
If phones were more open, we'd be free to mod our own games and back up our own save files, but we'd have to live with every random crap app we download being able to take over the whole machine permanently any time.
Some publishers actually did remove the DRM just for the Deck version proving that DRM maybe isn't all that necessary when there's a will and manufacturer that doesn't bow down to ridiculous requirements :)
A few anticheat engines support specifically Steam Deck after working with Valve, but even then each individual game developer has to opt into it. (For example: Destiny 2 uses EasyAntiCheat which is Deck-compatible but Bungie still refuse to whitelist it on Deck/Steam OS, and warn you may get banned if you try to sidestep the block)
Modern DRMs like Denuvo actually do tend to work in Proton/Wine (aka Steam OS’s compatibility layer) because they’re a wrapper around the game instead of a driver/debugger+game setup.
It's possible to give the user full control and the ability to give apps more permissions, while still sandboxing apps by default. Consider, for example, flatpak, which can make the host filesystem totally invisible to apps but also allows the user to pass in files via the file picker or to totally expose paths by overriding its filesystem context.
To be fair, even Android apps are reasonably locked down while still making it possible to install a proscribed emulator or Firefox or whatever
Which is why I stopped playing AAA games. I'm fine with avoiding them and having a machine I can actually control.
Are these not adults? If not, is it the responsibilty of manufacturers to limit them, or the responsibility of their caretakers?
Second, that's an extremely weak argument and I question if it's being made in good faith. But in case you are: the responsibility is on the manufacturer to make a safe product. That's why we have regulations on consumer product safety. You can't sell certain dangerous chemicals. You can't sell plastics with BPAs in them. Et cetera.
The consumer, when they have the product, also has their own responsibility to look out for their own safety. But that doesn't make it ok to give them something dangerous, especially if it's something that contains dangers most people don't even understand or know about, like malware. (Most people are "aware" of malware, but they have no idea how it works or how to protect themselves from it.)
Keeping it in the kitchen, I'd say it's more like an Instant Pot that only lets you cook with Instant Pot Approved Recipe Packs. That way you'll never have food poisoning, or so says the marketing, and that's legit great novices! But if that's the only imduction cookpot available, something feels very off.
As for kids, parents are responsible for their use of stoves, cars, knives, etc. All are safe, until misused. I guess I'd like a clear line for where things are nerfed. And admit I might disagree with said line.
Unfortunately, that makes it less convenient and powerful for me to use, but I mostly don't need the power
Mac is a bit ahead of the other two, but gnu/linux (as opposed to “android linux”) is just insanely unsecure.
This isn't a property of GNU/Linux. It is very possible to have a highly secure Linux setup. That's not the way most distros operate, though, because highly secure setups tend to be user-hostile (which is the essential conundrum being talked about here, really).
They're not. They're being secured against malicious actors who can convince grandma to install a rootkit or bitcoin miner on her PC.
It's also kind of sad this only really exists because Valve are wholly independent and have "fuck you" levels of money.
The dev(s) just chose not to go that route. It makes a lot of sense why not. They don't want to betray their audience and they want to keep having fun making games. Success is not necessarily "competing" with the big companies. There's always room for more types of games.
That is only true if you have't heard about most indies. The are plenty of great indie games that just didn't manage the marketing gamble and faded into obscurity without much financial success or even making a loss, especially when you consider the developer's opportunity cost. Then there are even more where the developers gave it their best for years but ultimately failed, either releasing a mediocre game or nothing at all.
Indie game dev is absolutely not something that you should be getting into when your primary interest is financial return. The ones that make it big are a tiny minority.
GNOME? The great out the box experience... that also allows power users to deeply customize it? It is dishonest to lap GNOME (extremely popular free software) in with Apple (king of proprietary software).
And the tweak tool, sure but really the options in there should have been standard settings from the start. This is the core problem with this product.
The Steam Deck is uniquely positioned to allow people to do potentially hazardous things like install software from unknown sources, and that is because it's primarily a gaming device. People aren't doing banking and work stuff on it, so what is the damage if it gets rooted? Valve could have easily screwed it up by building a walled garden anyways, just to satisfy corporate greed in the name of "maximizing ROI". Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all have their walled gardens for gaming. The fact Valve hasn't (yet) is refreshing.
You know its wrong to want to theme your distros desktop don't you? It is such a bother that you always ask your file manager to wear green. You know he doesn't like that can't you see how uncomfortable you're making him?
Prominent developers have variously spoken out against various user and distro customization suggesting that all theming and extensions be removed and even in one notable instance attempting to bully an app that supports many desktops to disable traditional tray icon functionality on other desktops using the dystopian phrasing something on the order of you should decide if you are a gnome app or a XFCE app. Another suggested that it would improve brand awareness if distros couldn't theme their version of gnome. Phrasing only a soulless marketing manager could possibly love.
There can be little doubt that IBM/Red Hat is about as hostile to diversity of options on the Linux Desktop as Apple and not without cause. There are legitimate arguable benefits to a homogeneous ecosystem. They just aren't in quite the same position to dictate options. For instance killing the extension/themeing ecosystem would have empowered forks and as few people would be running gnome as run Fedora.
Better - it treats you like an owner (which you are).
Mobile is far and away the most profitable, highest revenue segment of the gaming market by a huge margin. I can't imagine they don't want a piece of that.
Valve released a phenomonal but imperfect update to the Nintendo Switch which has sold about 1% as well. If Sony released a PlayStation Phone tomorrow, and failed to update it for years despite massive interest, then you'd see a SteamPhone.
* strong, like STRONG competition from global leaders a la Apple and Samsung
* much deeper requirements for OEM builds, otherwise they're just white labelling hardware. makes sense for the Steam Deck since the offering is the Steam software and compatibility layer.
* they're in the business of software and software support, and some light hardware support viz. the Valve Index and Steam Deck. but the average person looks at their phone 5+ hours a day and defines many of their life functions are dictated by their phone -- e.g. alarm clock, fitness tracker, music, many forms of interpersonal communication. they will drastically need to up their QA, support, and compatibility -- and those have non-trivial costs.
* OEM manufacturing has ruthless margins; they're a private org but still
* non-trivial build and launch costs
If only Valve had a world class digital marketplace...
The point is that they have one now. SteamOS is 10 years old at this point. They've undoubtedly dumped millions into it already, and done most of the wireless networking, battery performance, and UI work needed for Steam Deck. It's a pretty short leap for a company like Valve to add a 5G modem and miniaturize the form factor from there.
It's hard to get around the awkwardness of the physical button problem though: having buttons makes the phone awkward, not having them makes gaming awkward.
A games console is for games. Although there are probably some tiny fraction of people who have installed other apps on there, the overwhelmingly vast majority of people are just going to use it for games.
A smartphone is likely to have address books, email, your photos, maybe sync with your e-health devices, banking applications ... from my point of view, it's an entirely different risk profile.
So then maybe you say "no permissions are allowed for sideloaded applications", but then you're back here with people complaining that the platform owner is crippling the independent ecosystem because it doesn't allow access to the camera or the mic or the address book or whatever.
Everything else lives in a more relaxed compartment which cannot access the "secure" compartment at all.
Essentially two devices, one completely locked up, the other completely open.
Your literal argument was used for game consoles as well (Oh egads, what will happen if we allow freedom to infest our DRM protected systems?!) until Valve proved everyone wrong.
Maybe instead of spewing the same corporate profiteering arguments here, perhaps think on how we could design our software for freedom AND security and whether defending megacorp monopolies is worth the small improvement in security you're getting in return?
The anti-virus and anti-malware markets are each multi-billion dollar industries; end-point protection is a top-five information security concern for any enterprise; new and exciting ransomware incidents fill the news every week; millions of PCs contribute to botnets that deliver DDoS attacks for pay...
It might not be the apocalypse but it's pretty goddamn terrible.
In what way and why are you (well, actually a corporation with monetary interest) making a decision to lockout users because of those industries?
(Also multi-billion? Strongly doubt that.)
McAfee was taken private in 2021 for $14B https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/8/22769910/mcafee-private-i... And had quarterly revenue of $500M at the time: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/mcafee-corp.-mcfe-surpasses-...
For one endpoint security example, unless I misunderstood.
Judging by a fair number of articles, you would be mistaken
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220104005794/en/Glo...
> The global antivirus software market is expected to grow from $3.80 billion in 2020 to $3.92 billion in 2021
Did you forget that the conversation was about phones being locked down to protect against these kinds of malware?
There are far more willing and paying customers on Apple products.
https://www.dotcominfoway.com/blog/apple-leads-android-with-...
I ended up buying one of those Anker laptop USB PD chargers, and they can recharge the Deck twice over, so I could actually spend nearly 8 hours fully utilizing the Deck's power without being tethered at all.
Good mobile battery life with 'intense' graphics is an unsolved problem, Apple is not immune here.
It's not like you do your 2 hour gaming sessions while moving around all the time. If you're sitting down, a thin wire to a decent size power bank isn't going to interrupt your gaming.
I guess what I am saying is it is sort of like the Steam Deck but based on a tablet instead - and can pretty easily be hacked into a tablet instead. The Steam Deck is much more locked down but they MUST have been hugely inspired by the success of the Switch when making the Steam Deck.
Personally I think I am excited for when we might get something a bit more of a hybrid of the two - if ARM does indeed take off on Windows and Linux more then we may end up with a device that can sometimes take a full ARM stack with all of its power advantages and then also run standard older OS processes as well.
No, it's a totally custom OS. Custom kernel, custom user space. They run the BSD network stack off on the side, but so did Windows up until Vista.
Yes, but we all know that's a 320B dollar (so far) lie.
I never knew I wanted a Valve phone and tablet, but now I do.
It goes much further than that! It allows you to install arbitrary software so one can even set the Heroic launcher up [0] and play your games that happened to be bought in other platforms!
As soon as someone has an issue with something that's not officially supported by the OS, Steam/Valve is not going to help them. There's a reason why it's impossible to build something like this for Apple. They don't want any devices that they can't support until they're past their life cycle.
There is an annoying bug that if you play a game using a bluetooth controller, put the steamdeck to sleep, then resume later, controller support is dropped in-game. This basically makes the sleep feature useless.
My wish as a user is that it behaves at least as well as last-gen consoles do. I had no problem putting my PS4 / Switch games to sleep and pick them back up later.
The true magic (imho) is the compatibility layer allowing the hardware to run a large swath of PC/Windows games.
Does this happen when the game is launched thru Steam? Or when the game is launched outside of Steam? Because I assumed the Steam controller/gamepad translation layer could handle that.
When woken back up, steam will recognize the controller (so you can use it to navigate the UI), but the running game will revert back to keyboard and mouse.
Using the controls on the steamdeck itself also does not work in game (only the touchpad that emulates the mouse).
So you have to resort to quitting the game and re-launching it.
It was pretty annoying finding this out in the middle of an epic Vampire Savior run.
A look at their privacy policy by Mozilla was something of a mixed review. (https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/steam-d...). They said the policy didn't raise any huge privacy concerns, but that the policy was vague, Valve was unresponsive to questions ("We emailed Valve three times with our privacy and security questions and haven’t heard back from them"), and that ultimately Valve reserves the right to collect and share (read sell) "anonymous" data, aggregated or not, with third parties.
I expect them to track what games you play and when, but what about desktop mode? If you run applications or browse the web how much of that activity is collected by Valve? Anti-cheat software works with the steam deck and that too is often highly invasive recording files on your system or other running processes.
The device also comes with two internal microphones, and I'd probably want to remove them (hopefully that's as easy as it is for PS5 controllers) and has bluetooth which is hopefully easily disabled while traveling.
> Valve does say they can process anonymous data and they may share anonymous data, aggregated or not, with third parties. This is a fairly common practice and doesn’t worry us too much.
But rather that they don't make sure they're providing an ecosystem that, to their standards, protects the user from data collection by others:
> Here’s the bad news about the Steam Deck though. We can’t confirm it meets our Minimum Security Standards because we can’t confirm it uses encryption or if Valve has a way to manage security vulnerabilities.
If that's a concern, it would likewise be on any computer, I would imagine. I mean isn't the Steam Deck basically a regular e.g. desktop computer turned handheld? It's not an issue specifically about the Steam Deck unless you compare it to more closed platforms like the Switch instead of other regular computers.
And the user does have the option to harden the system, like they can any computer:
> There is a lot written out there on the internet about how to set up encryption on the Linux-based SteamOS yourself. However, we don’t think that users should have to go through that to protect their data.
Like they say, it's a matter of lacking convenience to not have that level of hardening by default.
But again, why is this an issue here, when most people using Steam from their desktop computers probably don't use encryption either.
Encryption is important because of how portable the device is. I've never lost a gameboy/DS/switch, but I know plenty of people who have. It's bad enough to lose your games, but if you're doing non-gaming things on the device it's a problem. It took a while before Valve added a pin to protect your device too, but they have.
Given that there's effectively no such thing as anonymous data, I'm really surprised they said this.
At the end of the day it comes down to what the company actually does vs what they say they do.
As a former Steam Controller user: thank fucking god. The Steam Controller was never supported properly by Valve - games would be featured on the Steam store without compatibility with the Steam Controller, and after 20 minutes of trying different community configs for a new game, you'd get something good but the on-screen prompts would always be wrong.
> PRESS X NOW
When you need to press right shoulder or whatever. Yes Steam Controller was revolutionary, but it took the simplicity of console gamepads and added the fun of debugging a broken windows install.
I can't speak for Apple's fans, but as I understand it some of Apple's main user experience reasons for a walled garden were things like better power efficiency (encouraging native apps vs. battery-draining PWAs), better protection from malicious software and user error (e.g. apps can have their keys revoked, users can't mess with drivers or OS files, etc.), and the ability to enforce app privacy requirements (including non-technical requirements like privacy labeling.) And activation locks make Apple devices less attractive to thieves, and less likely to leak data.
Apple also provides tech support directly to users. Presumably the locked-down iOS devices are easier to support, which saves time for users (and money for Apple.)
You're right though that Apple's model for its gaming handhelds is basically the Switch model and not the Steam Deck model. But I doubt anyone at Nintendo or Apple would have argued that the Steam Deck was impossible to build.
Ironically Apple wasn't even planning on offering apps, they thought web apps would be enough. Until Cydia came up and showed users how great native apps can be. And now it's their greatest money maker.
Developers at WWDC 2007 hated Jobs' "sweet solution" of web apps and wanted to be able to write native apps. Jailbreakers had started probing Apple's apps almost immediately and figuring out how to create native apps, certainly before Cydia. I imagine dynamic aspects of Objective-C (and similarities between the iOS and macOS environments) may have facilitated such introspection and experimentation. Presumably they were able to generate mach-o ARM executables as well somehow before Xcode supported it.
Fast forward a year to 2008 and Apple delivered something that was more than just a dev kit or an installer - an App Store that worked with the existing iTunes Store payment systems. It also happened to be a rather walled garden.
The Cydia Store opened in 2009 and shut down in 2018.
iOS web apps weren't a completely terrible idea - Apple added things like touchscreen support as well as native widgets. Even today they have some advantages, including sidestepping Apple's walled garden. Though with the success of said garden, Apple has less of an incentive to enable web apps to compete with it.
Oh? Really? Do go on...
steam deck has the size of one and a half nintendo switch(es?).
Back when Steam Machines first came out, the expectation was that there would be a new push to get games working on Linux, which unfortunately didn't end up happening as strongly as expected. However, with how much of a success the Steam Deck was, it seems that the rush to get games ported to Linux actually is happening. I'm excited for the future.
The irony.
The Steam Deck is absolutely building that future, and I, too, am excited.
- Vista: shit
- 7: decent
- 8: shit
- 10: decent
Beyond that it was a solid operating system and one of the better Windows releases.
Most people just had shit computers, combined with "group think" regarding it's quality.
Vista64 on a moderately good system with a proper amount of RAM was fantastic for it's time.
Well yeah, a big part of the problem with Vista was the enourmous increase in resource usage compared to XP, which many PCs sold with it were not ready for. That hardware now has enough brute force to make it work doesn't really mean it is not still needlessly inefficient.
I have Windows 10 for work and Windows 11 at home and I honestly forget that they are different OSes most of the time. I just do what I need to do on my machines and the OS stays out of the way.
Sure, I could say the right-click menu out-of-the-box is slightly more annoying now, and I've sure I could come up with a list of things like that for most releases at this point. UAC was a major shift, but I needed one.
But overall, there just aren't very memorable differences between the different OSes. Aside from the fact that BSOD occurrences have steadily decreased up until Windows 10 at which point they almost stopped entirely.
I suspect the driving reason for the version number increase was to make a clear indicator of the OS's support for scheduling the new wave of hybrid core CPUs, and they simply took the opportunity to clean up some miscellaneous small things that wouldn't have been appropriate to include in a minor version release, but wouldn't have warranted a major version release in of themselves, such as changes to adding things to the file-right-click menu.
95 ok
98se great
ME... Can't even describe how awful it was
XP great
Then your selection :-)
The replacement started off as a toy turned experiment: a 12 core Gen 1 Threadripper with 64GB ECC and a Radeon Pro W5700. I wound up installed Void Linux Musl with XFCE mostly to see how useful a system-d/glibc free Linux machine can be. Turns out very useful if you install bloated Windows-style "applications" like Steam, Discord, Chrome, LibreOffice, etc using Flatpak. You can also setup a glibc chroot if need be but I have not ran into this need yet.
I can watch Hulu and other streaming services just fine in Chrome (haven't tried FF). I can play older AAA games you would never imagine running on Linux such as GTA5 and Skyrim with ZERO configuration other than checking "run this game using proton". However I have yet to get Crysis running :-( Anything I can't get running with Wine I can toss into a VM. And I can run lots of VM's :-)
And if you really miss Windows or want some familiarity back - XFCE + Chicago95 ;-)
I also have a Nuc hooked to my bedroom TV running Debian and use a similar setup but no Steam (Its mostly a Chrome toaster).
When I used my linux laptop for gaming there is a good online database of compatibility:
Sure, it's more convenient that Valve runs Steam and can put the rating right there. But let's give WineHQ a bit of credit here. They have a database going back more than a decade now, telling you how games run on Linux.
The effects of Valve getting into Linux gaming are definitely noticeable. But the Wine team deserves a boatload of praise too. I was playing World of Warcraft back in 2007 and it was a flawless experience.
> rush to get games ported to Linux actually is happening
I'm not really sure about this. By having Proton/Wine at such a high quality, most devs are just going to target Windows. Because why bother? They will probably ensure their games run good under Wine and that's where it ends. Nowadays I'm totally okay with that. Lutris is great, Wine is actually easy to use. It's the best time to be a Linux gamer.
The Wine team deserves a ton of praise that IMO is often directed to Proton BUT WineHQ has always been a useless experience for me. It needs a massive cleanup since it contains data from ancient versions of Wine, there is barely enough information to figure out what is going on and the whole "bronze, silver, gold, etc" rating is completely subjective with people rating something "bronze" because a pixel is off in some application and something "gold" despite being unable to use some major functionality.
Sadly ProtonDB seems to be going the same way, the main saving grace right now is that it doesn't have all the baggage accumulated over decades (and it is focused on games - Wine still has to get all Win32 APIs for UIs, etc working for regular applications that Proton doesn't have to care beyond whatever little functionality is used for launchers) but still has the whole subjective thing (a favorite case of mine is Rage[0] which has lots of comment about broken textures etc with others saying that the game works fine - and it takes some searching to figure out that the people who are fine have Nvidia GPUs while the people with issues have AMD GPUs - while in a few cases, people recommend the game while at the same time mentioning the textures are broken!).
But it so often was wrong :P I tried to use wine a lot between 2007 and 2010 and constantly ran into apps that were supposed to work no longer working, because regressions happened a lot. When you play a game on steam deck and exit it periodically asks you, "This game is marked Steam Deck Verified. Is that consistent with your experience?" and they really keep tabs on it.
insert win32 is the only stable linux API blogpost
About 2/3 of Wine commits are from CodeWeavers, so praising the Steam team (CodeWeavers) is praising the Wine team.
I agree though honestly, if Proton works fine and the game runs under it, I'd much rather have that than a bad native Linux port. Plus, I have a lot more trust in Proton to keep things compatible than Windows.
WineDB did this for years, as does ProtonDB now. And both usually have tweaks and how-tos. But I'll concede its nice to see it in Steam itself.
Is it true that Windows games run better on Proton than on Windows?
But after a few days it was clear this was something special. Why? For me it's my 'forever console'. Access to my full Steam Library was one thing, but having basically every retro console at my disposal is unreal. Just last night I played a game of M.U.L.E. and StarRaiders on my Atari800 emulator. That was after a couple of rounds of MarioKart on SNES, then Pilot Wings on 64 and then some Resident Evil 4 on GameCube.
I also love that so many older PC games just work on it. I recently replayed the entire Mass Effect Trilogy on it (absolutely the best experience playing that game, something about the controls, the screen and it on my lap was just too fun). Ditto on Dark Souls 1 and 2 which I also just replayed (and yes Eldin Ring runs unreal on it, somehow).
The only real surprise is that Dead Space doesn't run on it, I have a hutch they'll get it sorted out (sorta like they did working with FromSoftware on Eldin Ring).
Lastly, the other major advantage for me is the ability to return games. This is an unheralded Steam feature that's a really great. I buy games I wouldn't even consider on PS-whatever/Xbox because you're screwed if you don't like it. Hell my 2 year old son managed to buy the new COD on PS5 by mashing the controller unsupervised for a few minutes and there is no way to return it, at least not easily; I tried for about 20 minutes before giving up.
Long/short - SteamDeck is something special, it plays a ton of modern games flawlessly including Eldin Ring, and is a retro-gaming dream-machine, plus Steam has a great library and the ability to return games after trying them is the final cherry on-top.
PS: Anyone want to buy a PS5?
Bayo 2 and 3 require an emulator. 2 runs well. 3 runs like ass.
And you're right because the 31st Jan Proton update fixed Dead Space and now it runs on Deck as Verified :)
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/ytgisk/guide_fla...
> Lastly, the other major advantage for me is the ability to return games. This is an unheralded Steam feature that's a really great. I buy games I wouldn't even consider on PS-whatever/Xbox because you're screwed if you don't like it
You can return games on Xbox, had better outcomes with Xbox returns than with Steam returns.
The form factor is actually perfect for pre-HD games that were built for small CRT TVs.
I am now rediscovering kid-friendly platformers with my little daughter. It's truly wonderful! (And we were even able to extricate our Stardew Valley save game from the Switch, to continue our journey on the Deck).
It is a wonderful little device!
The one thing that makes me want to get a PS5 is I really do like the PS exclusives[1] like Uncharted, The Last of Us (part 1 now coming to windows though), Horizon Zero Dawn, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian, etc etc.. And it gets enough of the cross-platform AAA games as well that I feel like I have enough of a selection to make it worth it.
I am super interested in the Steam Deck as well though. I know you can hook it up to a TV and play with a controller, I wonder if anyone here uses it that way. While I like the ability to hold and play anywhere, my ultimate preference is sitting on a couch and playing on a TV (most comfortable) and I would most likely try to use it that way
1. https://store.playstation.com/en-us/category/5bb9a9b4-f9f4-4...
HZD is on Steam and Deck Verified: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1151640/Horizon_Zero_Dawn...
You can emulate Shadow of the Colossus on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFxnGZ3suV0
It really is the ultimate gaming machine :D
I might actually! E-mail me.
The deck is heavier than the Switch, louder than the Switch (which makes no sound at all), gets hotter than the Switch (which doesn't get hot at all), has a screen that is inferior to the new one on the OLED Switch, and has the buttons in such an awkward position that I get cramps in my hand after half an hour of playing.
BUT YOU CAN PLAY ELDEN RING, you would say now. Yeah nah. All those AAA titles run like ass and/or look like ass on the deck. It's just not a feasible device for anything. For high-end titles, the PS5 wins out always. For indie titles, the Switch wins out, always.
I guess it's a really cool device for hackers who just want to mess around, though.
Seconding the ergonomics point - between the weight of the thing and the awkwardness of the buttons/trackpads, it’s easily the most uncomfortable system I’ve ever used. I get hand cramps every time I use mine for any significant amount of time - when I’m playing it in bed, I’ve even got to the point of using an external controller with it to reduce the level of discomfort involved.
I hope that the next major version of the hardware will aim for a lighter/sleeker design. The current model feels like gripping a brick for hours at a time.
That is a downside of every console/controller, though, because people have different hands. For me, the Switch is painful to hold for more than a half-hour or so because the joycons are so small. So personally I enjoy the Deck, even though it's heavy, but I recognize that it was clearly made for someone with my body type.
> All those AAA titles run like ass and/or look like ass on the deck.
Second this, though. I thought I'd finally finish Sekiro on the train when I got the deck, but the screen is too small for my old man eyes; it was not a good experience.
[0]https://www.printables.com/model/259733-steam-deck-grip-exte...
Edit: I guess it also help that while I've played Stellaris extensively on a desktop, I never played ONI outside of the deck, so I don't know what I'm missing.
I play a bunch of games where I just really want a mouse and the touchpads make that feel relatively natural in a way that joysticks just don't.
I do agree, though - the focus on the touchpads on the original steam controller was perhaps over the top, and the absence of a second stick was limiting. I think the deck gets it right: You have two of each, one for each hand.
I can play games designed for controllers, and I can play games designed for mice, and everything just works.
If I'm playing a game designed around a console experience, I want the sticks - they feel natural in that space in a way that the touchpads don't compare with.
If I'm playing a game designed for a mouse and keyboard... I definitely don't want the sticks. I want the touchpads (at least one of them). The sticks feel horrible as a mouse for these games (although sometimes one can replace WASD panning controls)
Basically - games like Rimworld/Dwarf Fortress DO NOT WORK without the touchpads. Period. The touchpads are not "alternative"... the touchpads are the reason the deck can make those games playable.
You could get mouse-level accuracy with a gamepad with a bit of practice.
The mouse and trackpad emulation of the steam controller makes it one of the best ways to control a media PC though.
The EmuDeck project allows you to easily add pre-configured emulators with games as part of the UI. I've been catching up on many PS2, PS3, Wii U, and Switch games. It plays AAA games well since it only has to render at 800p at medium / low settings. Many modern games compared to the past scale well too, and their low settings tend to still be bearable.
Steam Cloud works well in case I want to play a game on my beefier PC once in awhile. However, I also have a hidden USB-C charger/dock combo by my couch that has ethernet, and I can do steam link over ethernet with my gaming PC, and it works extremely well for that, and I can get a performance boost in some of the more demanding games.
The main issues of course are battery life, and its docking capabilities. Battery life doesn't affect me too much because I'm usually not traveling or away from a compatible charger for more than a couple of hours. The docking to a TV / monitor is a joke with the standard UI...I have never gotten it to work well, so if I need to dock I have to go into desktop mode. Even there, if I play a controller-based game, you can't always disable the onboard controller for all games. So there's definitely work to be done on that front.
Have you tried recently? When Valve released their own dock they updated the software and it works out of the box for me now. I plug in the cable and it pops up on my TV right away. The only issue I still have is if I dock while in the middle of a game -- some games don't deal with resolution/gamepad change well.
Really? I'm just using an Anker USB-C dock and it works fine, everything runs great and it allows me to charge as well.
https://www.theverge.com/23513517/steam-deck-long-term-test-...
Valve has spent nearly a year and over 100 updates showing that an early access game console can actually be worth money. Valve has finally succeeded in proving doubters wrong about Linux, creating a gadget that’s spent 35 weeks atop the Steam bestseller list and attracted support from Sony, Microsoft and more.After I got one, I 100% one game (Vampire Survivors), am close to another one (Hades) and have been playing here and there almost every day.
I bought both a PS5 and an Xbox Series X after 2021 but, despite having them for over 1 year each, I think I already played my Deck in 2 months way more hours.
The way that it instantly boots up in your game, ready to go, is amazing. If I'm frustrated with some programming task at work, for example, I pick it up, fire Hades, play for 1 or 2 stages for 5 minutes and my brain is reset.
It is not perfect, obviously. It is bigger in person than it looks on pictures or videos, specially with the case (it takes 30% of a backpack, for example).The battery lasts very little on demanding games. When putting on a TV or monitor, the lower resolution will show. When plugging it in, you don't really get any boosts.
However, it is such a great experience overall. I was playing very little because I never wanted to go to the sofa, turn the console on, stay seated, wait for it to power, etc... With the Steam Deck, I'm in and out in literal seconds, anywhere.
I bought one truly expecting to barely play it like I was playing my consoles, but the opposite happened.
I truly thing that the Steam Deck is the start of a new era. I can't wait for the Deck 2, the "Linux" console likes and such. I'm sold.
That would instantly make the M1-series machines the greatest gaming machines in the world. All that power with an emulation layer in between, allowing every macOS user to play any game made only for Windows.
People have literally stopped developing their Linux-native game versions because the Proton-Windows -emulation is so much better.
This is a bit of an exaggeration. A laptop running a binary through two separate emulation layers is not going to provide a better experience than any dedicated gaming PC.
Not if you're comparing it to a fully tricked out gaming PC.
I meant it in the sense of, "it takes the place of and serves almost all the same purposes in usages as..."
Ultralight laptops can match or exceed it in [burst] performance, but that's table stakes. They aren't designed for gaming, and if you try to play games on one you will understand that very quickly.
So it really depends what you play.
FWIW in my case, it is much better than my laptop from only a year prior.
Gaming wise, the onboard GPU is pretty adequate for 720p (or the 800p of the native display), resolutions beyond this like the 1080p or greater found in most monitors are going to make a lot more games struggle.
1080p is 2,073,600 pixels (2.25x 720p)
1440p is 3,686,400 pixels (4x 720p)
If performance scaling was linear, and given that the Steam Deck targets 30fps (up to 60), any game running at 30fps is going to be dropping to roughly 13fps at 1080p at the same settings.
Generally, 7th-gen console era games and earlier can often play at 1080p60, 4k30, or 4k60 depending on the demands. Newer games make compromises. FSR and TSR (upscaling from lower internal resolutions) effectiveness depends on the game.
Even better, its only $399! I think its a great deal at only 50 bucks more than the OLED switch model personally.
https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck
By all accounts, the entry level model with a large microSD card performs just as well in games as installing on a more expensive model with a larger built in SSD. The only other feature you miss out on really is the most expensive config has an additional antiglare coating. The CPU/GPU configuration is exactly the same on all models.
I actually ordered the most expensive config, but with what I know now and having tried a friend's entry model, if I ordered again tomorrow I would just buy the 399 one with a cheap microSD card. Some folks even prefer the extra contrast of the display without the anti-glare coating.
The microSD cards are hot swappable too - you can carry a bunch with different games installed if you wanted, the Deck OS instantly repopulates your game library with the contents of whatever card you just inserted.
OP was probably talking about CAD. Base model is C$ 499.00 and the switch is C$ 299.99.
*Edit: OLED switch is C$ 349.99
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxLB5khCmGo
But you can of course install your own distro or whatever you want. Windows is officially supported by driver, people also confirmed OpenBSD works too. It's pretty much a real computer not just a console.
Last time I was this motivated was when I learned you could program for a PSP with just C code (only to learn that PSP have been discontinued by then, and quickly losing motivation shortly after).
It is a good device as it is, but for me the cherry on top would be a NanoSIM slot; I would pay extra for one with a NanoSIM slot, just to be able to connect to internet without requiring an existing wifi network.
But I understand it's kinda out-of-scope for a gaming device.
[1] I mention screen here because, for my use case, now I don't have to buy a screen for my RPI, and can instead mess around with the Steam Deck.
The form factor is outstanding—the biggest thing it really needs is a higher resolution OLED display. Performance is great (pretty steady 40fps at medium settings) when I play locally, but it's even better when I stream from my gaming PC with a 3090. I don't even use my gaming PC for anything other than streaming to the deck now.
That said, I really hope Valve do the version bump with a synchronous release of a new Valve Index (VR) and Steam Deck, using the same APU. (That'd be a rare sign of organizational maturity from Valve, though.)
But maybe do the Switch thing and release an OLED version?
What seems less clear to me is if they will ever address the abysmal battery repairability[1], until which I will not be purchasing.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+Battery+Replacement/...
I currently have a Nintendo Switch OLED which is fantastic in many ways, and I also have an AYANEO Air, which has a beautiful OLED screen too. The Air is also an equally good (or arguably even fuller, given Windows 11 + WSL) "desktop" experience compared to the Steam Deck, which so many people around here are touting as a feature. It also uses hall effect triggers and joysticks, so drift should never be a problem, ever. The Air is also the size of a Switch Lite, so even smaller than my Switch OLED, but the Air has a full x86-64 processor and 16GB of RAM running Windows smoothly, which is just crazy to behold.
Whenever I can use the Switch OLED for a game, that is the best available portable experience: whisper quiet, long battery life, never gets hot, the kickstand is incredibly good, and I can always take the controllers off when I want to put the Switch on a table. The only exception is a few titles that had truly terrible ports, but those aren't common in my experience at all. HD Rumble is also a really good implementation of controller rumble. With the Switch, it is also possible to buy physical versions of many games, and sell those when you're done, which really isn't possible on the Steam Deck or the AYANEO Air.
The AYANEO Air is great for using Steam In-Home Streaming or playing some of the titles that I can't play on the Switch (like Horizon Zero Dawn or the various Halo titles), but the battery life isn't as good, the controllers aren't detachable, there's no kickstand, and (like the Steam Deck) it is a much hotter and louder device.
Either the Switch or the AYANEO are small enough to throw in a carry-on bag (important because I don't think I've checked luggage a single time in the past decade), whereas the Steam Deck is like trying to bring a second, chunkier laptop (4x the thickness of my M2 MacBook Air, for reference), which just does not work with the size restrictions on a carry-on bag when you're also bringing a real laptop, clothes, chargers, and everything else needed to travel.
My wish list for Steam Deck 2.0 is basically: it would be physically smaller (but shrinking the bezels would allow the screen to not shrink as much as the device), the screen would be OLED like my other handhelds (and implicitly more color accurate), perfect driver support for Windows 11, hall effect controls, and the screen would support Variable Refresh Rate, which seems like a killer feature that no handheld has bothered to implement.
It's also completely baffling to me that the AYANEO Air has a full 2280 NVMe SSD in a chassis the size of a Nintendo Switch Lite, but the Steam Deck only manages to fit a 2230 in a chassis that's probably twice the physical volume. Given how much more I use my Switch than my Air, I've considered selling the Air, but it does still offer some unique capabilities.
They have a fullscreen console-like interface you can choose to launch, but it's completely unnecessary apart from controlling the TDP of the device. So, I just use the normal Windows desktop, and launch games just as if it were any other Windows computer. You could also use the Steam Deck's game launcher interface on Windows, which is now available on any Windows computer as an alternative to the traditional Steam Big Picture Mode.
The Switch has a large variety of comfort grips available for people who want a larger device, which also lets the user choose how it is larger, instead of forcing a one-size-fits-some approach. Here's one chosen at random that appears to have great reviews: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085VHHLGK
That's exactly why having a smaller device allows everyone to customize it to their needs. If Steam Deck 2.0 were more portable (i.e. smaller and lighter) and that made it too small for you to hold comfortably, a cheap attachment could trivially fix that. Professional photographers have used extended grips for decades when they've wanted a larger grip than the manufacturer provided. This is not some novel solution. The Steam Deck is currently trying to be a single size that fits all, since it is already at the large end of what people will tolerate, and aftermarket customization cannot realistically make it smaller, only bigger.
> You are free to use a tiny Switch. [...] I'm perfectly happy with my choice.
You're setting up a weird comparison. When I owned the Steam Deck, I owned a Switch. Now that I own an AYANEO Air, I still own a Switch. Neither device is a replacement for the Switch. The Switch is not really the competition here. It is nice to imagine a world where the Steam Deck is somehow a full replacement for the Switch (or vice versa!), but such a world does not currently exist.
For now, I replaced my Steam Deck with an AYANEO Air for the reasons outlined in my first comment.
> that can not only play switch games
No, the Steam Deck cannot play Switch games effectively. Every time someone brings this up, they proudly throw out Breath of the Wild as an example... and it turns out to be the Wii U version, not the Switch version, because the Switch version runs like crap on the Steam Deck. Certain lightweight Switch games might work, but you're definitely not going to get the benefits of almost any Switch-exclusive game, especially once you factor in multiplayer issues.
I am interested in the Steam Deck, could you give a specific example or two? I've heard mostly positive things so I would be interested in some specific pain points.
Press a button, wait several seconds for something simple to happen on screen.
Felt like it was all held together with duct tape.
Many less demanding games can run with a ~7w TDP limit at 60fps without a hitch at full detail. This yields massive battery life improvements.
For modern AAA games you'll probably have to frame cap 30-40fps and lower detail settings in-game.
Setting the refresh rate to 40hz helps a lot too.
But they both have a place, side by side, below my TV.
That said, I don't get why Nintendo doesn't do a $500 Switch. I get that they’re about the gameplay and graphics come as an afterthought, but seriously their own launch title could not hit a consistent 30fps which is simply unacceptable. They cant keep using the gameplay excuse for being wildly out of touch with hardware reality.
Related, I invite you to review the comments and note how many are focused on the battery life of the Deck, and specifically on how short it is. Even if Nintendo could just upgrade to a faster CPU, that would bring increased power draw, which would lead to either shorter battery life or needing a bigger battery, at which point you are either at people complaining about your battery life or once again back to industrial design and retooling your assembly line.
Tldr: They can't just bump the price by $200, drop in a Threadripper, and call it a day.
They can and they will because it works.
They’ve been printing money since adopting this philosophy with the Wii because they are right.
But I don't agree that you can continue a trend of shipping hardware that fails to run even your experience centric resource limited titles and remain relevant. I’m saying there’s a middle ground between barely 720p @ 30fps and 4k @ 120fps with ray tracing and ultra settings. The Switch was marketed as a handheld console hybrid. Not a fancy gameboy. I’m not asking for Nintendo to ship a PS5. But I would like to be able to pay a little more (pass the cost entirely on to me and keep a lower tier for all I care) for a hardware device from Nintendo that can run on my 4k TV in docked mode without looking like pixel art. Nintendo needs to deliver a device that can run low to medium quality graphics at 1080-1440p @ 60fps. That’s a completely reasonable request and still confines Nintendo focused studios to the product centric resource constrained environment they want. It’s sad to see all the interest from devs in porting titles to the Switch but then actually trying them and encountering unplayable garbage. Like Skyrim, what a joke.
You say this like they didn't spend the last decade selling 75 million devices that barely pushed ~360p, and making a small fortune from it. I get wanting Nintendo to bump the hardware (I'd love a beefier Switch too), but they've proven over and over again that they don't need to do anything.
If anything, I kind of like that Nintendo has chosen to cede the market of "indie/port" titles, their decision to mostly ignore that market is a big part of what's allowing Steam Deck to flourish right now. And the Steam Deck might be the healthiest new development the industry has seen in 20 years.
Back to the Steam Deck, I guess that's silver lining. I'm lamenting that my Switch can't really do what the steam deck can do because it does get a lot of indie/ports "attempts" they just kinda suck and especially when there's a PS5 sitting next to the Switch why would I hamstring myself. I'm happy the Steam Deck has spurred a bunch of gaming compatibility layer love. The industry's needed that. I have a pc for pc games, and a switch for console games (and a ps5). As cool as it looks, I don't see myself dropping money on a steam deck at the moment because I got a switch pro last year. Maybe the steam deck will force Nintendo to get a little more serious about hardware? One can dream.
However, battery life for a mobile console cannot be ignored. The Steam Deck can last as little as under 2 hrs depending on workload. A switch to ARM64 (e.g. ARMv9.0) would likely over double the battery life at the bottom and top end.
As a side benefit, because high-end ARM64 SoCs are so common in phones, Chromebooks, tablets, steaming boxes, et al., they may be able to bring the prices down, further increasing their competitiveness.
PS - No doubt I'll get a bunch of replies with "But use this One Simple Trick™ to get longer battery life" which, while true, also applies to ARM64.
You're talking about Rosetta but Rosetta is a transition period. If the Steam Deck is the only device to run on ARM64, and game developers keep providing only x86 builds, the drawbacks of ARM will outweight the benefits.
If you want more battery life, Steam Deck has a bunch of controls to throttle CPU/GPU performance, including limiting the framerate.
Only if the games are compiled for ARM64, and even then the performance improvements over x86 are not guaranteed compared to just switching to a better process node. A big attraction of the Steam Deck is the massive back catalog of already existing games on Steam, all of which are compiled for x86. If your ARM CPU is spending its time emulating x86, you're not going to get much of an improvement in battery life.
A Steam Deck v2, still running on an AMD CPU, but on TSMC 5 or 3nm, is more likely than one with an ARM64 processor.
So the question is do you keep clinging to a slowly dying platform that is falling further and further behind, or do you go to the commodity platform that is going from strength to strength?
The Steam Deck will wind up on ARM64 eventually, it is a matter of "when?" not "if?"
And almost all games are x86 only so either you need to do that opcode level conversion too (on top of the Windows / DirectX APIs), or limit yourself to only ARM games (realistically mostly FOSS games). Apple has done it well for M1/2 to be fair, but it's far from easy.
So you could get much better battery life but it'd be very niche.
I might be in the minority here but I just stopped using my switch and my gaming PC entirely. I'm sure there will be a time when a certain triple A game comes out and I'll go back to using a dedicated gaming PC, but i just get so much utility out of the SteamDeck. I have VSCode running on it, Netflix, Steam, GoG, etc.
I'm ready for what ever Steam puts out next.
I won't streaming much tho as most 4K DRM is limited to Mac and Windows at the moment.
Perhaps general-purpose computing has been handed a lifeline because playfulness is its essence?
I recently got an Anbernic RG351V, which is nowhere near as capable as the Steam Deck but is a fantastic platform for playing emulated games. The AmberElec custom firmware I'm using just runs a RetroArch installation with some nice theming, and the experience of hacking on it reminds me a lot of the good ol' PSP homebrew days.
The RG351 is really just an ARM Linux box inside a Gameboy shaped case, so it can really do pretty much whatever within the limits of its hardware. It's a really neat little device, I've been having lots of fun with mine. I've played mostly SNES and Gameboy stuff on it (that's where my nostalgia lies), but I've run a few PSP games on it with decent to middling results.
[1] https://media.metalhead.club/media_attachments/files/106/589...
[0] https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2022/12/01/holoiso-steam-deck-exper...
And OLED display might be a decent upgrade, but I'm not holding my breath for a Steam Deck 2. Plus I'm like 95% sure if an upgrade comes, you can just swap the new display yourself, like you can do with every single part in the Deck right now.
Heat and noise reduction is mainly what I'm after though. I really, really don't like it when portable devices get hot or make significant amounts of fan noise.
Longevity is really not a concern with the types of OLED panels we're talking about. (It's more of a concern for the technology LG puts into their TV W-OLED panels, but those do not exist in handheld sizes.)
I have not seen a single report of anyone experiencing burn-in on the Switch OLED outside of this extreme, unrealistic test. I also haven't seen anyone who owns a smartphone report that their smartphone had burn-in since many, many years ago, even though there are plenty of static elements on a smartphone screen, including the wireless signal indicators. QD-OLED would be nice, but it is absolutely unnecessary for longevity based on the available data.
Switch OLED is also incredibly nicer to look at than even decent IPS panels, let alone the Steam Deck's current awful screen.
Software. Buggier than desktop Steam in many ways, frustrating touch/scrolling experience. I expected it to match the feel of perhaps an iPad 2nd generation but it's just janky. I don't have a lot of faith that they'll polish this that much but hopefully they do.
Portability. I just wasn't taking it with me when travelling as it's extremely chunky when packed with cables etc. I'm very much looking forward to a V2/3 that's more slimmed down.
Put differently: unless the game is purpose built from the start as something that works on a 7 inch screen, I am not sure it would be a good idea to play it on a Steam Deck?
300 hours of gameplay with the only frustration being I have to hit "Steam + X" to manually pop open the text editor from time to time says its possible to even play some decade old games.
2. While not every game is suitable for the Steam Deck, almost every game that was designed to run well on a gaming console will control well on the steam deck, if it's compatible on a software level.
Also, the input mapping is fantastic. It's a little cumbersome but the touchpads work for mouse input and the additional L/R 4 and 5 buttons on the back help.
Timberborn is a favorite of mine and even with tons going on it's a good experience at 800p. I think the Steamdeck is right around 1050/1050ti performance too and that's better than you'd think at 800p. I'm currently playing Doom 2016 at Ultra and the card can pump 110FPS+ (though I'm limited to 60 on the laptop).
Honestly, every game that's not certified that I've tried to play, I have been able to craft a control system that feels very nice. The sheer number of buttons helps.
The games that don't, will show yellow "Playable" rating with a notice that fonts might be small and will need magnification. [2]
99% of the time it's not a problem. When it is a problem you can bind a screen magnifier to a key. I still wouldn't want to play some games on it, games that require extensive typing (duskers is a game about piloting drones through a command line, wouldn't want to play that without a bluetooth keyboard), but for the most part it's fine. Most games, even text heavy ones, have big old fonts and large UI elements.
Of course I had to run the game at "potato" settings to get a good frame rate, but I was able to hold my own with my nephews for a week.
PSP / PS Vita apparently didn't even influence the design of the Switch itself. The Switch was more likely Nintendo's internal answer to the questions "What if we move the console into the Wii U tablet controller?" and "What if we consolidate our handheld and console divisions and make a hybrid console?"
The piece is also missing a key aspect of the Steam Deck success: Its price. While the cheapest Steam Deck is not too far away from the Switch OLED price, all the other Switch-like gaming PCs cost so much that it makes them irrelevant for the mass market. Even the Steam Deck, despite the initial hype, apparently didn't manage to come anywhere near the early Switch sales, and Valve seems not interested to bring it into stores and to market it more broadly.
3840x2160 = About eight million pixels
People underestimate the performance cost of 4K. The step from 720p to 1080p was a mere doubling of pixel count, but going to 4K was another 4x increase.
The choice of a relatively low screen resolution is one of the main reasons that the deck can run modern games so well.
It turns out that a big chunk of my steam library is ideal to play entirely handheld on the couch.
Pros: great hardware, games run seamlessly, allows me to play in places I couldn't play before, Desktop Mode gives you effectively a beefy Linux desktop computer. Cons: I wish SteamOS hadn't been modified in such a way that I can't create multiple desktop users out of the box, which limits my use cases. I would love to do some personal projects on it when in Desktop Mode, but I want to have a user that I can trust to be private (and preferably encrypted).
If not, then the Steam deck is a historic achievement.
It's not a perfect experience. Some of the Windows drivers could use some work. I would rather be running Visual Studio on my desktop at home. Performance in games like Valheim is maybe around 40FPS average... but I would seriously ask the question what other $400 device with a $150 SSD upgrade could product the same results.
That sucks, we hosted it on AWS and it was fine but it was just Windows and Linux clients.
Its been great.
I'm really happy with the antiglare screen. I can't always play in the dark.
It is possible to replace the SSD although i am pretty sure it voids the warranty. Valve's recommendation is that you add an SD card, which is a lot more reasonable these days.
Sorry my answer has been kinda rambling yet non descript. tl;dr i don't think storage is the biggest concern, but the anti-glare glass is great.
It cost me $30 to add 256gb of storage in the form of a microSD card.
I’m very happy with it and I think I got 95% of the satisfaction with minimal cost. There are some moments when I wish I had the better screen or the dock, but not really.
The Deck SD slot has UHS-I support so maximum read speed is 104 MB/s even if your card is faster. So no need to get any top-class extreme card, as long as it's UHS-I it should be good to go.
For people with big steam libraries it's a no brainer, lately most games come with controller support out of the box, and for everything else the community patches it in.
This opens up "Ok, I can play Steam deck games" on the Mac and the forgotten games that haven't followed with the updates needed for Catalina.
It's a great piece of hardware that still needs a lot of work in the software department. It's not ready. Not even the on-screen keyboard works properly; the final straw for me was when I was locked into the fullscreen main menus of several games with no way out (no mouse, no keyboard, no game controller, nothing), other than holding down the power button.
Look around the internet, you'll find many reviews that say the same things about the device. Don't buy this thing yet if you have a low frustration threshold. Don't listen to the fanbois.
I also had no issues with stability and the Steam Button was a reliable way to get me out of the game whenever I misconfigured something or started a game with "unknown" ranking, which actually didn't work.
In fact, Valve did an awesome job making it extremely usable and pushing so much performance out of such a platform.
When you get stuck in a crashed game, you can use shortcuts to quit it (hold Steam + B). This likely won't work in desktop mode, but you can configure KDE to do whatever you want if you run into trouble.
There are definitely UI issues to be fixed but if you stick to the normal, supported games and menus, the Deck itself is entirely on par with other consoles in my opinion.
The miserable state in which game publishers release their games on PC is a whole different can of worms that proves that companies expect quite a bit of tolerance of PC gamers.
I am sure it could have worked with more tinkering, but I wanted to play games, not tinker. Truth is, the fanboys like to tinker, they like to balance trade offs and do performance tweaks. I wasn't looking for that at all.
Every time I've mentioned this I hear from fanboys how theirs just works, but the steam forums filled with people dropping into the terminal and editing files leaves me skeptical.
Ended up getting a return and buying a Logitech G Cloud that I love dearly and play every day.
Most of the time I was staring at some game menu, trying to figure out how to get out of there because none of the buttons/combos did anything. Skyrim wouldn't let me create a character - Steam+X(?) for the onscreen keyboard did not work. It also wouldn't let me quit while it waited for me to type a character name and required a power cycle.
My first steamdeck had a bad battery (it wouldn't last more than like 15 minutes, really flaky).
I spent some time troubleshooting (as per valve supports direction) and everything kind of always worked (when plugged in anyway). The buttons, going to "desktop mode", going back to the steam app. They had me install steamos again from a usb stick oddly. It didn't help.
After trying a few things they sent me a new one, and its been great. There was some wierdness in selecting the controller, but that seems to have been resolved.
It should have an hdmi port and a usbA port... instead of the solitary usb. This would have made the os reinstall so much easier.
I'm sorry to hear your first experience with the steamdeck was so poor (I don't work for valve, I'm just Canadian)
While I believe you, I'm confused how you ended up in that state - valve has a list of games that work perfectly (according to them, I obviously haven't verified them) and then games that may work with some tinkering.
I can only imagine you tried games that were marked as not working (requiring tinkering) and if you have a low frustration tolerance (totally fair) it doesn't make sense why you'd try those games then conclude the device isn't ready?
I have a steamdeck, not a fanboy (in fact I want to sell it because I don't like how big it is) I also have a low frustration tolerance for gaming (I just want to play for a few minutes after work) and yet, I haven't managed to become frustrated with it yet. Where does our experiences differ?
Then I found out I could just click next on the touch screen :')
I haven't had any issues with games since. Lost of games, even some marked as not playable, ended up working fine.
It's much more of a mobile gaming device with it's own special input different from mouse+keyboard. Sure, having a relatively open mobile device is significant, but it's significant for mobile gaming, not for PC gaming which remains pretty much unaffected by the existence of the steam deck.
That's an inexcusable problem for a device supposedly designed to be used on the go. I can live with (and grumble at) not being able to get into hotel WiFi without switching to desktop mode (which in itself is an amazing feature on a console-like) but there are still bad problems that need fixing.
Luckily, the Deck team is still pushing out patches, fixes, and features quite quickly so I have faith these problems will be resolved in the future. Competing manufacturers seem to slow down their update cycle significantly once a device has hit the market but Valve is doing well.
It just popped up a web ui window where I could click the silly accept button and everything started working.
Then again I totally get that AMD may have not gone with that setup (since they want to sell their GPU's) but I feel like we would have a much more power efficient Steam Deck with that setup.
Endgame with all of this I think is a device with ARM that can (hopefully eventually) run full ARM on Linux and Windows on ARM and whatnot and uses an Nvidia GPU
Certainly I have to thank Steam for making all this work so well. Just a year ago things were in a much worse shape. If I was in this situation again, I would certainly save a thousand+ euros and get a Steam Deck instead.
I was thinking of buying a Steam Deck, but my investigations, Steam reviews have shown it is not really that good.
But going through the comments here, it feels like I am walking through a ChatGPT-botnet army.
I believe it has to do with the headline attracting type of person who is happy with Steam Deck and pushes away any other type.
I don't have a Steam Deck yet, but I've probably done more gaming on my various GPD devices than on my beefy desktop computer or any other device, with the possible exception of the Gameboys I had when I was a kid.
The Steam Deck is great because you can play anywhere. On the couch, a net, in bed.
And the Switch is only comparable to the Deck in form factors. The Deck has way more gaming options and freedom. I bough one in place of the Switch, but I can imagine that if like just the Switch games, it doesn't really make sense to have both.
I wasn't playing any AAA...A anyway so the deck is just what I needed.
besides all the tech it has promoted, i really hope it also encourages devs to build "low-spec" installs of their games, with reduced disk space by only bundling hd textures.
anti-cheat still remains a big hurdle for some games (looking at you, fifa), but i hope it eventually gets ironed out.
Like, I'm rooting for Linux gaming and have put my money where my mouth is before -- but this thread feels non-credible.
The Internet is full of disgruntled users.
I have been in tech long enough to know, this will be another device forgotten in 2 years and make it to landfill in less than 5.
That is the reason why people here like it very much, because they are able to work out the kinks. So screaming "marketing bots" is not fair, is it?
I am not sure about the future of Steamdeck on the broad market, but i believe it's strong step in a good direction.
I think it is headline-bias. I don't know if it is the right word for it. The positive headline attracts the people who think positively about it.
But then again, I would like to say, it is most likely headline-bias. It is attracting people who like the thing, and pushing away those who hate it.