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> An insanely helpful community. Tons of knowledge out there for getting it to do anything you can dream of.

This may actually be one of the biggest lasting impacts of the Steam Deck. It puts a lot of enthusiasts with a common interest on a highly reproducible and officially supported configuration. If a game doesn't work, you can file a bug with Valve on Github about it and most of the time it'll be fixed within a week. If the system itself is misbehaving, you can feel safe knowing that there are thousands of others on the exact same configuration.

Just two weeks ago, I had an issue with the system resuming into a blacked-out screen, so I vaguely Googled the symptoms and "Steam Deck", which led me to a Reddit thread with oodles of people experiencing the same issue[1]. Someone said it was a bug related to the new customizable boot animation feature -- I turned the feature off and I could go on with my day without even opening a single log file!

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/11ubgfl/latest_u...

I have the same issue with my Steam Deck but didn't have the time to Google it. Thank you for saving me these few minutes!

Welcome to the greatest benefit of the Mac community since 1984!

Don't see why you are being downvoted, missing one common supported hardware has always been a big problem in the linux community, always chasing crazy combinations of drivers.

Of course if you control the hardware and software stacks, it's leads to a better experience and community can build on it.

Microsoft Surface and Google Pixel are both similar examples, but they don't really feel substantially better than alternatives where the hardware and software stacks are less unified. The primary difference between Steam Deck and other Linux experiences isn't really that the hardware and software are unified, it's that you're actually running a supported configuration in the first place. Almost all Linux setups are ultimately ran on hardware that was built to run Windows in the first place. Even System76 laptops ultimately (today) come from hardware designed for Windows laptops. Steam Deck is flat out, start to finish, all the way down to the APU, designed to boot into Linux, and it shows. On the contrary, booting Windows on it gives you some of the hallmarks of a typical Linux experience on less supported hardware.

But I don't think that's really what the comment was about. I think what is really interesting here is the community.

I think the close collaboration between Valve and the Linux community is pretty unique. Mac has always had a very vocal fanbase, but Apple is a notoriously secretive and stubborn company. Valve is doing all of this work in the open including customer support, which is fostering quite a community. I think to compare it to Mac computers misses the point; Mac has an unusually large base of enthusiasts, much larger than the Steam Deck userbase, but it's not strength in numbers that is intriguing here.

That's not what OP was mentioning as the benefit. They were specifically mentioning the simplicity of a single common hardware base, not the openness of Valve. That this simplicity was making it super easy to pool resources with other users. The Mac always had that common pooling of resources amongst users, and it has been useful despite Apple's stringent secrecy.

This is the important bit.

> > An insanely helpful community. Tons of knowledge out there for getting it to do anything you can dream of.

> This may actually be one of the biggest lasting impacts of the Steam Deck. It puts a lot of enthusiasts with a common interest on a highly reproducible and officially supported configuration. If a game doesn't work, you can file a bug with Valve on Github about it and most of the time it'll be fixed within a week. If the system itself is misbehaving, you can feel safe knowing that there are thousands of others on the exact same configuration.

The community building that Valve does is important for this in my opinion.

The ease-of-use of software or hardware can unintentionally filter for a certain profile of user base.

If it’s hard-to-use, Kafkaesque, or unforgiving, users who are able to integrate the hardware/software into their daily lives are likely to see it as a trial-by-fire and be gatekeepers to others.

> really just a much more comfortable experience than sitting at a desk or playing on the TV

Can I ask what types of games do you play?

I feel like the ones I play wouldn't be as enjoyable on the Deck than on a big monitor with a keyboard and a mouse. Especially for very long sessions. Strategy, FPS, ARPG... I'm still thinking about getting one to occasionally play JRPGs (FFs, Yakuzas, Personas...) and other story driven games that were originally designed for consoles (God of War, Red Dead Redemption, The Last of Us...). I guess it works great for this type of games and it would be more comfortable than playing on a laptop in bed.

In the last 1 month, Games I have enjoyed on my steam deck:

* A Plague Tale: Innocence

* Shadow tactics: Blades of Shogun

* Metro 2033

* Mark of the Ninja

* A way out (co op only)..

My only recommendation for playing in bed is that get some kind of stand or something so you can rest the deck on your chest/stomach and comfortably play for 2-3 hours at a time.

What stand do you use?

I purchased this one: https://www.amazon.com/Accessories-Protective-Adjustable-Pro... it came with a stand. While the stand itself is comfy to use, i hate how i have to manually hold the stand while picking up my steam deck.

Maybe one of the fancy cases with detachable stands is better?

Shadow tactics is one my favorite games, how did you play it without a mouse?

the steam deck has haptic trackpads

Ohh it supports controllers decently too. Almost as comfortable as keyboard and mouse. Once you've used keyboard and mouse, you'll find it a little slow to toggle through characters and their abilities using right and left buttons ... But you'll quickly get the muscle memory and start worrying more about the strategy than the controls. The trackpad can be used to move the camera around.

There maybe some community provided controller layouts to improve shortcuts.. but i haven't explored them yet.

Plus i really like the game so if there were any little annoyances i probably didn't notice them ..

You're right in your thoughts. It's the perfect form factor for those single player narrative games, especially if you don't own a tv w/ a steamlink or the like. I usually have trouble finishing games, because i'm often distracted. I found when I can't alt tab to the internet, i focus a lot longer on narrative games. The steam deck has been wonderful for me.

Yes, I’ve mostly played games that had a console release and came out of the box with reasonable console controls. That said, the steam deck is really at the next level when it comes to being able to control PC-centric games. The combo of mouse control through the touch pads, touchscreen, and key combo mapping to buttons means that you can have a decent quality of life on a lot of titles meant for PC. And someone has probably already done that hard work for you and just uploaded a community controller profile to steam. It’s really a lot better than trying to play a lot of games with a laptop keyboard and trackpad. Certainly you sacrifice something to portability for a game designed only to be played with a full keyboard and mouse.

JRPGs and PS3/4-era story driven controller games have been my goto on the Deck, and I'm not traditionally a big JRPG guy outside of the really well known ones.

There is a huge range of them out there I haven't played, and the Deck's hardware is extremely well suited to running most of them. I've found I've played stuff that completely passed me by on the desktop - Ni No Kuni, Valkyria Chronicles etc.

The less intense gameplay of these just fits drop in/drop out gameplay on a mobile device surprisingly well too, especially as the Deck can sleep the game at any point, regardless of whether you've been able to save in-game or not.

The PS4 era action games you list also work pretty well - thinking of the Deck as a portable 720p PS4 I think actually describes its abilities pretty nicely. Yakuza 0 clips along at a great 60fps with reasonable battery life on medium settings.

The only genres I avoid are the really mouse heavy ones - strategy games and anything first person. Outside of these two genres, most things do work well with a controller or the Deck.

yeah, I've been very tempted to get one, but what's holding me back is that I don't play games all that much, and when I do it's usually 4x games. I tried playing civ6 on a borrowed steam deck and it technically ran fine but the screen felt a bit too small for it.

I play a lot of solo adventure games from yesteryear that I just didn't have time nor the opportunities before acquiring the Deck. With kids in the house, this little device is great!

Adventure/RPG/Story Games: Tomb Rader 2013 Trilogy (TR, Rise, Shadow), Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order; SOMA, RiME (both haunt me to this day, highly recommended), Skyrim/Oblivion, Assassins Creed 1-3, Black Flag

Racing: Grip Combat Racing, Redout

Shooters: Halo MCC, Bioshock 1-Infinity

Other: Rocket League, Minecraft - Java with shaders! With a LOT of tweaking, it's possible to add Minecraft Java as a shortcut and pre-load it with shaders and mods. It looks incredible and can easily handle 7-12 chunks at 60 fps with shaders depending the settings.

I wonder how the power draw compares to say an Xbox or PlayStation. Could the steam deck replace power-hungry consoles using a thunderbolt cable and dock?

This could be a big win for Europe as electricity prices are going up considerably.

The Steam Deck itself is like <20W. A Playstation 5 uses ~200W when playing games.

That's before thinking about what your TV power usage is. A Steam Deck could use its own screen within that <20W power envelope, while a Playstation or a docked Deck is going to probably use an extra 100-200W on a TV.

If you’re happy with 1080p PS4-ish level performance on the Deck’s 720p screen, sure.

It’s probably not going to keep up with a PS4 on a 1080p TV, but Valve has done a lot of optimisation work & the output might be surprisingly “good enough”.

The steam deck on paper has higher specs than a PS4. PS4 can push 1.8 tflops on an older architecture and steam deck can do 3.3 on a more modern architecture. People’s real world experience on several games seems to put the Steam deck consistently ahead by a comfortable margin.

Original or Ps4 Pro?

> Bought one of these during the recent sale

Was the Steam Deck itself on sale? Or you bought a Steam Deck during Steam game sales?

How much did you pay for your Steam Deck, and what model/features did you buy?

There was a Steam Deck sale. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/03/valves-year-old-steam...

Steam Deck was on sale 10% off mid-march

The Steam Deck was 10% off just two weeks ago to celebrate its first year of being out, at every performance tier I believe. I also think they discounted the Deck Dock.

Crazy how it's only been a year since the Deck came out, given the impact it's had on the gaming market.

I have a steam deck. I can't say I understand it's impact on the gaming market though.

From what I understand, it gives games a good lower end hardware target to hit with optimal visuals. It also pushes games to add solid controller support on PC and be Linux/proton friendly. Some anti-cheat supports Linux now as a result of steam deck.

do you not like it?

I do like it, but I like a lot of things I would consider niche and that dont have impacts on large markets. I was wondering what they meant about impact on the gaming market. It's not clear to me how many steam decks have been sold in comparison to say, the nintendo switch. Which is why when they talk about impact I'm just not sure what the impact is.

The title of the thread is the impact. If 75% of the most played Steam games are playable on the Steam Deck, that means they are also playable on Linux. The Steam Deck is the Trojan Horse that decouples PC Gaming from Windows. It doesn't mean that everyone is going to start installing Ubuntu or that this is the Year Of The Linux Desktop, but it does mean that Valve as a business, and thus a huge segment of the gaming population, is no longer beholden to Microsoft.

That is fair I just think the actual impact on the industry is fairly small - the steam decks themselves are likely the largest collection of linux gaming computers to have ever existed.

I think the biggest obstacles are going to be getting companies to implement anti cheats that run on linux and not in kernel mode. Apparently Apex does this, but also apparently lots of cheats now target the linux implementation. Maybe valve can figure out an effective anti cheat system for linux and license/sell its use.

The real trojan horse will be bringing gaming to Mac, since Asahi linux now targets M1 Macs, and Proton open gaming on Linux.

If Mac and Apple TVs become on par with Windows gaming, Mac and Apple TV will be the default choice for gaming.

mac cant run many games with proton because its arm cpu is 64 bits only and steam needs 32 bits support

I highly doubt that. Macs come with high resolution screens and relatively underpowered GPUs. They also come with their own graphics API (Metal) to deal with, as well as Rosetta2.

There are already forks out there that make playing games on macOS possible by porting the many Linux wrappers. I haven't seen any of them take off, really.

I expect that most people who own a Mac simply buy a console for gaming.

I bought the 64 GB model and then picked up a 1 TB Sabrent Gen 4 SSD to install into it.

Pretty straight forward! The Steam Deck is repairable and there are a ton of iFixit guides.

The only things I didn't really like were:

- Unhooking plastic clips on the case - I dislike this generally since I'm always afraid of breaking a clip

- Disconnecting the battery was a PAIN. Everything is pretty compact - it took a long time to get it out.

- Flashing the OS requires you to have a good internet connection - it won't tell you if it can't connect, it'll just say it's trying to connect. Just press B, re-select a network, and move into a better spot.

- During the flashing OS process the buttons won't work. They work after everything is done installing.

I agree. Last gaming PC I built was 2002. Decided to give the deck a whirl and I’m amazed by it. Playing octopath traveler 2 right now. Even though it has Denuvo antitamper I’ve had 0 issue. Put steam in offline mode and went on a plane and it worked great. Emu deck is also very good. My kids like to play super Mario allstars and they just fire it up like any other game.

I almost bought one but then got curious about its fan noise level, read a bit on the internet and decided I wouldn't risk it. I still remember a laptop computer I barely used because of a whining coil. Fan noise that sounds like leaf blowers are a turn-off for me and I can't use headphones because of tinnitus :/.

Honestly the fan noise is pretty overblown. It's barely noticeable on less intensive games (which naturally stress the CPU less), but I did a ~100 hour playthrough of Elden Ring (a recent and graphically intensive game) solely on my Steam Deck, and only ever noticed the fan noise in the lull of silence in the moments as my heartrate came back down after losing to bosses.

I am sensitive to those kind of noises, so I tend to give more weight on the feedback of people like me. Took me some time also to understand that most people don't always realize noise sensitivity can vary much between people and their own experience and that their baseline is way off other's baseline.

I wonder how comfortable it is to write code on the deck. I'm already addicted to programming on my phone with Termux, this could be an upgrade for me.

For what it's worth, the on-screen keyboard is kind of awful. You can also type using the two thumb touchpads, so I guess you could do it with that, but it sounds like an exercise in frustration unless you're using an external keyboard of some sort.

I suppose if you are already coding on your phone it could be an upgrade. I find the touch keyboard to be pretty basic, but it does have all the symbols and special characters visible like on a physical keyboard. Once you get used to the double trackpad and hot keys, I think the coding experience could be maybe even better than a phone.

For real coding plugging in a dock and going real keyboard, mouse and monitor would be a must for most.

> Once you get used to the double trackpad and hot keys, I think the coding experience could be maybe even better than a phone.

That's what I'm wondering about. Do those trackpads let you type without a virtual keyboard covering half the screen? That would be a killer feature for me.

It's terrible; the device is quite bulky and bigger than people seem to expect. I like the on screen keyboard, but it's not exactly fast or fully featured and the touch screen is too far away from your fingers in any comfortable holding position to type more than a name or a message here and there. It's also quite heavy if you hold it horizontal with only one hand.

With a docking station or a small Bluetooth keyboard you could probably turn the Deck into a portable dev platform, but it's simply not designed for text entry.

You basically need an external keyboard because the built in onscreen keyboard takes up about half the screen and the resolution doesn't get scaled down. And there's only one USB-C port so you need to buy a hub to extend it to multiple ports (and the charger is USB-C so a C to A hub means you can't charge while using your keyboard) or a Bluetooth keyboard.

Note that if you already have a laptop dock, you may not need to buy a separate one for the Deck.

When researching before ordering my Steam Deck last week, I looked into it and found that the Lenovo Thinkpad dock that work sent me with my work laptop is said to work great with Deck. (I just received my Deck and haven't yet tried this, though.)

One of the docks I had lying around worked perfectly, including the power passthrough. Very cool to plug in one USB and have an instant desktop.

> the built in onscreen keyboard takes up about half the screen

Well I've written thousands of lines of code in an 8x154 Termux terminal with Unexpected Keyboard. I got used to it.

As others were mentioned, it sucks with the onboard keyboard, but I used it for a bit to type out my dissertation with a portable type-c keyboard and a 3rd party stand and it was great.

I have a Deck and a first gen M1 Air, and I still pull out the Air to code. The Air is lighter, packs easier, lasts longer without charging, and has a real keyboard and a bigger screen.

With an external mouse, keyboard and monitor it’s great. I use vscode to write javascript and Python. You can do it with the built-in screen with external keyboard and mouse too, it just isn’t as comfortable due to the small screen. Trying to code using the touch screen keyboard will drive you insane.

> Trying to code using the touch screen keyboard will drive you insane.

I dunno about that. That's exactly how I've been programming for months now: an 8x154 Termux terminal with Unexpected Keyboard. I'm kind of hoping those touch sensitive pads will let me type without placing my thumbs over the screen.

Likewise. Bought the cheapest Deck & put a 512Gb SSD in it.

It’s going to be a lifesaver on the next long holiday drive with the kids.

It's great that you've trained them to be able to drive for so long so you can relax and get some sweet frags

I never understood the steam deck.

Most smartphones are much more powerful in terms are hardware, better screen technology (OLED and high refresh rates)

More importantly, you can easily stream games on to them.

So why on god earth is everyone so excited about a crumby screen that can play a few games on medium settings?

For one, game streaming is not portable past the range of a strong Wi-Fi signal. I have done game streaming on a phone with a Bluetooth controller and I found the ergonomics and screen size to be pretty uncomfortable. It can be done though and I played all the way through subnautica like that. And the swore to never do it again!

You are right, you simply lack any understanding what-so-ever if you think the only thing people care for are hardware specifications or having the latest and greatest tech.

Most smartphones have more powerful hardware than a steam deck? I doubt that.

No way are smartphones more powerful in hardware, and streaming adds latency to controls, regardless of the quality of the network connection.

Let me know when you get mainline AAA windows games running on your smartphone. Steamdeck does this through a software layer called proton. I guess you could try to port this to android or ios ... https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

The hardware may be more powerful on your phone (but it probably isn't). The screen is probably better but the steamdeck's screen is pretty great to my eyes.

I can also easily stream games to my steamdeck just like my phone, and sometimes do.. however that really only works if I am on the same local network unless I want to take a huge video compression quality hit.

I can take my steamdeck on an airplane and play any game that doesn't require a really reliable internet connection (or games without that requirement of course). But if you are trying to stream games, have fun with that I guess.