The killer features of the Steam Deck | Hacker News Reader

The killer features of the Steam Deck

jonashietala.se

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I’ve been working from home for a long time now and, in addition to being over the hill and too exhausted from work and life in general, I’ve somewhat recently hit a wall with gaming where it feels too much like work (to game, I sit at the same desk, in the same office, just switch monitor and input to a different computer). It has really depressed the hell out of me.

I had the good fortune of a friend selling the top end Deck for very cheap and I gotta say it reinvigorated gaming for me. I can simply go somewhere else in the house, plop down, and get right to it. The usual anxiety or exhaustion that prevents me from firing up my gaming PC is gone. I’m finding myself more motivated to try the plethora of older or lower spec games that have been languishing in my library that are actually really fun and easy to drop into casually, unlike the chain of disappointment that AAA gaming has become. I can put in a headphone and play something casual next to my partner if they’re doing something else, and they have appreciated that rather than me locking myself way for an entire day.

I did try a Switch but the hardware and OS was too limited and closed off. The exclusives are largely uninteresting to me, and I don’t want to have to buy titles twice if I already have it and want to jump a title onto more powerful hardware (it’s nice that I can casually mess around with Baldur’s Gate 3 but if I’m really in the zone I can fire it up on PC to get buttery frame rates and full visual glory for deeper immersion).

That’s the killer feature for me: helping me enjoy gaming again. Unfortunately, the right shoulder button stopped working and I had to send it in to be fixed. It should be back tomorrow and I cannot fucking wait. When’s the last time I’ve been excited about anything gaming related?

As an aside: if you start working from home permanently or a long period of time, my unsolicited advice is to keep your workspace in a separate area from leisure if it’s possible, otherwise one will ruin the other. I was fine for _years_ in a combined office/den but around the time of the quarantine it flipped in my head and now it feels like I’m chained to my desk permanently.

> I’ve been working from home for a long time now and, in addition to being over the hill and too exhausted from work and life in general, I’ve somewhat recently hit a wall with gaming where it feels too much like work (to game, I sit at the same desk, in the same office, just switch monitor and input to a different computer). It has really depressed the hell out of me.

This is related to why a lot of people feel working from home is more stressful or distracting than not - there's no tangible "mode switch" from "being at home" to "working", and many people struggle with that. Advice I've often heard (and given) is to a) have a separate space for work vs play, and b) have a routine in the morning that switches you to "work mode" - i.e., don't just wake up in your PJs, make a coffee, and plop down at your work station.

Quick Edit: I should have finished reading your comment :)

I use a doorway as a mode switch.

I have a spare bedroom that is setup as my home office. While I do not work from home daily, I do often do work after-hours, and assist from home now and then.

When I walk into this room, I'm mentally at the office. When I exit it, I'm home again.

YMMV.

This is infinitely more difficult if you live in a small space. It's likely not practical to have a home office AND a gaming room for your sick flight simulator setup, so they end up co-located.

For me, I've largely switched to console gaming in the living room when I get the itch, but I'm a little sad I don't do it more.

I've personally switched back from console to PC gaming, even in the living room.

The Deck was awesome and reinvigorated PC gaming, but building an AMD ITX system for the TV and sticking HoloISO on it for the same experience as the Deck has been great for couch co-op which has mostly been abandoned by consoles. Online co-op can now be satisfied with the TV and the Deck so we can still play together. Can't really do that easily with many consoles.

I rent a small office (room, really) in a coworking site 5 mins away from home. It’s deductible for me, best decision in last year. That, and the Steam Deck for reasons listed above…

I don't disagree. I do have the option, so I took it and it's worked great.

> (to game, I sit at the same desk, in the same office, just switch monitor and input to a different computer). It has really depressed the hell out of me.

Something that broke this cycle for me was steam remote play to my Apple TV in my living room.

Neat, I haven't tried this.

I love my Steam Deck but about every other time I use it I’m reminded it’s Desktop Linux.

For example my Bluetooth headphones will gradually lose connection over a play session and start cracking before finally going silent. Sometimes a game won’t start until I reboot the system. The on screen keyboard sometimes doesn’t show up when it’s needed, or shows up when it’s not needed. Games crash more frequently compared to other systems.

Even sleep - feature everyone is raving about - doesn’t work perfectly like it does on Nintendo Switch or PlayStation. Sometimes games come back from sleep without sound, or at 15 fps until I quit and relaunch.

It definitely feels more shaky and less polished than a Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, or iPhone. I still love it, but don’t expect that level of quality from it.

I don't think it's fair to expect that level of quality... yet. You've named 3 companies that have been making related devices for literally decades. Valve... hasn't :P

Certainly it's fair to mention it, though. As a person who has never used a Steam Deck, reading about these experiences alongside the positive ones helps paint a fuller picture for me.

GNOME and KDE have been doing Linux desktops since the 1990s, "literally decades". At Microsoft and Apple there are evidently product managers incentivized to ensure bluetooth earbuds "just work" and do not hang the bluetooth settings app. Apple has sold more than 150M AirPods, has over $12B revenue from them, and would lose a lot of profit if they don't "just work". Core desktop Linux devs on the other hand be like, "Whatev.. I don't use bluetooth on my 24-core BeastStation. Not my problem." They have the brains and talent to make it work, but not the motivation. Open source people work on what they find interesting.

> Core desktop Linux devs on the other hand be like, "Whatev.. I don't use bluetooth on my 24-core BeastStation. Not my problem."

This is absolutely not how Linux development works, but okay.

Very true. They use 10-15 year old ThinkPads.

Are you sure? Maybe it's not how kernel dev works but the issues aren't usually in the kernel, they're in daemons and GUIs sometimes made by small groups.

Sometimes Bluetooth hangs on Windows11 so it's on par

Some days my Mac decides it hates my Bluetooth mouse, so I have to use the Logitech dongle.

It seems about on par with MacOS.

no offense but to expect audio to work via bluetooth seems like a reasonable and prudent expectation. little portable bluetooth speakers for 10-20 bucks from aliexpress work seemlesly.

Ubuntu on a regular desktop, with the exception of sleep and resume, is a similar level of polish to a console. Good enough to change my mind about ditching Linux.

If they hadn't gone with Arch, I wonder where they would be? I could imagine some other company doing an Ubuntu console. Maybe they could even convince Canonical to open up the Snap backend a bit and let them do their own servers, of they could just implement their own from scratch.

It's much more reliable to use a usb bluetooth audio dongle instead of connecting your bluetooth headphones directly for gaming. During a gaming session, the bluetooth stack might be cpu-starved and starts to stutter or even lose connection. A usb bluetooth audio dongle is detected as an external audio device (mic and speaker) by linux which will bypass this issue entirely, and usually has lower latency codex support as well (I have a hard time getting aptx working on linux). You then connect your bluetooth headphones to the dongle (usually by putting your headphone in pairing mode, then pressing a button in the dongle, and it'll automatically connect to it) instead of your pc.

Good to know, but this is just an example of the issues OP described; needing yet another workaround instead.

"There are no LinuxPods, and if there were, I doubt they'd go in your ears."

It's a workaround that demonstrates how Bluetooth, and especially BT audio, are still "hard". So much so, that a company designed and built a proprietary product and tech stack whose entire acclaim is that its Bluetooth audio works reasonably well.

And even owning the entire stack, Apple can't make it perfect. In Mac Minis at least up to 2019, because of the BT radio's proximity to the USB traces, interference from communication rates when certain USB devices are attached causes the BT peripherals to fail. And I don't mean when the rare noisy 2.4GHz product is attached, I mean USB 2.0 mass storage devices, printers, and more that otherwise work perfectly well cause Magic Mice and Keyboards to completely not respond or else have mere inches of laggy range. You can forget BT audio in those cases.

There's no beating radio physics, so our engineering solution was to add Bluetooth dongles on USB extenders to a few dozen Mac Mini installations.

BT sucks, but it's what we have.

had a lot of issues with magic keyboard & trackpad, plenty of times they just disconnected, not to mention apple still doesn't show the battery level for a lot of BT devices.

after switching to linux, BT has the same issues just multiplied because now there is N vendors with each having their own quirks.

I was just reading your comment when my BT headphones disconnected from the USB BT dongle and had to restart the BT service, what a timing haha

Much like the author, I'm also really loving the Steam Deck as someone who casually plays a game or two. It really is like a more powerful Switch with the option for much more, and cheaper, games.

What I'm missing in many reviews that is gladly mentioned here is the ability to use the right trackpad as a mouse. I've also played many older games in handheld, like Impossible Creatures, which are pretty much impossible if you aren't emulating a mouse. The Steam Deck delivers in this sense, which very few competing manufacturers seem to realise.

As happy as the author is with the sleep & wake functionality however, as someone who only wakes the Steam Deck once every three days or so, it is unfortunately pretty common to wake my Steam Deck to an almost empty battery.

I agree that 1 second sleep is an amazing feature of the Steam Deck.

It's also worth figuring out the ins and outs of Steam input: Sequences of keypresses with specific delays, gyro as mouse, repeating presses, use of back buttons, etc.

Sleep is instantaneous but resume is more like 4-5 seconds (sometimes a bit more) than 1 second. Which is not a complaint, it's still incredible to stop and restart gaming like that but it's worth pointing out.

I love this thing and I haven't even bothered with emulation yet. The library is obviously great because it's steams library but I don't love how they push you to the (slightly limited) great on steam titles because if they included compatible ones there would appear to be much more.

A lot of the games that are not listed as great on steam are in fact great on steam but you need an onscreen keyboard at some point for five seconds and it gets dinged. I think they need a "almost great on steam" designator to let people know this.

> I think they need a "almost great on steam" designator to let people know this.

There is an equivalent called ProtonDB Badges which is a plugin for Decky:

https://github.com/OMGDuke/protondb-decky

It contains crowd sourced badges from ProtonDB from what are typically "advanced users"

> But if you want to play through the Zelda series you’d have to collect almost every Nintendo console.

Minor nit-pick, but IIRC the Wii-U can play every Nintendo made Zelda game except for Tears of the Kingdom.

Does this include gameboy games like Link's Awakening? I don't remember if it was developed by Nintendo but Oracle of seasons & ages too.

Yeah, that’s including the game boy games as they are (were?) available on Virtual Console. I put the “Nintendo made” qualifier to exclude the CD-i games

WII U can't play 3ds games, so no that's not correct. It also can't play gamecube games unless you hack it, if I recall correctly, so that excludes the obsure 4 Swords gamecube came which was never ported.

Incidently Steam Deck can't do 3ds games well either, apparently AMD support for the 3ds emulators are very bad.

The fact that they opened up the OS completely is such a shock in the corporate landscape we live in. I should buy one just for that, it's such a great move for the consumer and it's sad that we've come to expect the opposite.

Yes, turns out that you can have a successful console without locking it down.

It's not really a console though.

Why isn't it?

My gut reaction is that I don't agree with you, but I can't immediately put into words why. I think it's possibly that I view a "console" for gaming as a combination of a form factor and development environment and this seems to fit that bill.

I'm interested to hear the other side though.

To me a console comes with a lot of restrictions. Good luck loading entirely arbitrary code on your PS5. This doesn't hold as true for older consoles, but they still hardly try to help you. Getting a normal desktop session on the Deck is trivial. At that point, what's the difference between me opening Big Picture Mode on my desktop PC and calling it a console? The fact it's not a static hardware stack, I guess? I think we'll struggle to nail down what a "console" is, cause the steam deck has a lot more in common with my desktop PC, primarily used for gaming, than it does with a NES.

You could install Linux on a PS3 - it is still a game console, because that's its primary purpose.

You could, before they removed that feature. They want it to be very locked down, Valve obviously does not. Valve has made a very gaming-tailored machine, yeah. But due to still being very easy to do general computer things on I wouldn't classify it as a console.

Otherwise, are stationary PCs custom built for only gaming, such as those used at e-sports tournaments, consoles? They don't have the same customized software stack, but neither does the Deck in comparison to a PS5, imo.

so it's not a "console" in the pejorative sense of "locked down gaming device some company is trying to extract rents from", but it definitely is in the operational sense of "small device dedicated to gaming". the deck goes a bit beyond a general purpose pc because it does have a vertically integrated hardware and software stack that is optimised for playing games, even if they haven't restricted other uses.

Aye, there is something to be said for integrated and purpose made software+hardware making a console, but you can barely compare the software of a Steam Deck to that of something like a NES. As far as I'm aware, a NES doesn't even really have any software, all the software is on the cartridge. A custom PC running Steam in Big Picture Mode will be far more similar to a Steam Deck than a NES is to a Steam Deck.

Is the ROG Ally a console? What if I load SteamOS 3.0 on it? Is the PS3 with Linux on it still a console? Are gaming-focused phones consoles? They have vertically integrated hardware and software, and are made with gaming as a focus yet can be used as somewhat general purpose devices, just like the Steam Deck.

ah, i see your point, the steam deck tech stack is not designed from end to end as a gaming system; rather it specialises a broader linux stack. i wonder how much difference that will make a couple of generations down the line, but for now i agree the NES probably does do a much better job of gaming performance for given hardware specs.

I'd recommend it. I'm a Linux native, deal with a lot of embedded, and my mind was still thrown for a loop when I got it because it wasn't anything like what I imagined.

It ships as a dual booting computer with a dedicated gaming mode - it doesn't corral your behavior into a "correct mode of usage". You can freely program and modify it. The haptics are great, it's not as big or unwieldy as people made it out to be, and it's full of "nice touches", if you dig into it.

I laughed when I realized I'd been toting it around with me like I did with my GameBoy as a kid, because I haven't even "gamed" since Dark Sous was big, yet I've been finding myself constantly thinking about things to do with it. And if you love it, you can always upgrade the storage.

One of the first sentences in the article stuck out to me:

>I wanted my kids to play games instead of passively consuming endless amounts of YouTube.

I'm kinda surprised that modern parents consider watching youtube a worse activity than gaming.

In an old Wodehouse school story the kids are being chastised for reading Great Expectations by Dickens instead of their schoolwork.

I'd still rather have them play in the real world over either, but at least its a semi-active activity (problem solving, hand eye coordination?) vs a purely consumptive one.

Barring bad time-management habits, gaming stimulates and develops both motor and intellectual skills, and offers a safe and sandboxed environment to experiment and get exposed with various topics. (YMMV with multiplayer games, but that's also an experience in and of itself)

Watching content is a passive activity. At best you're accumulating information.

It's also a great medium for learning English, if you are not a native speaker.

Gaming or youtube?

It's a trick question, both are great.

Yup. And gaming as in board/roleplaying-games too.

Not as good as chatting, which requires one to formulate ideas in target language.

That's actually how I first learned English!

Having seen the auto-played stream of Youtube videos on family gathering I would consider reasonably well selected game catalogue to be vastly superior to content that lot of Youtube is... It was either seemingly auto-played mario party or entirely bizarre and weird stuff...

Am parent.

After 30 minutes of YT entertainment, kids are clearly disengaging their brains. After 30 minutes of video games, kids are talking to each other and actively commenting, hypothesizing, or empathizing.

Would I prefer that they be reading a book? Yes. Is playing a video game better than watching YT? Also yes.

I never got the books argument. Is reading YA novels like the Hunger Games a more highbrow activity than watching movies or playing games like Civilization?

It's not immediately obvious to me.

It's more about the mode of consumption than the content itself. The same way one might argue reading a book is better than listening to the audio book because it requires marginally more focus since it's an active vs passive activity. Now add screen time into the mix.

Highbrow isn't the way to look at it. I think what books do, primarily, is make the brain work in a different way, because you're constructing a visual and perhaps audio interpretation of text. Which causes you to do a lot of world building yourself, whereas in Civilization it's the opposite.

Neither is better or worse but they're different forms of mental exercise.

At least for me, reading requires significantly more concentration, comprehension and imagination than watching a movie, which is completely passive. Especially when reading/watching in English which is my second language.

Games are harder to compare as they're pretty active, it probably depends on the game.

It's a hard question when you mix the content as well, but yeah, reading a YAF-y book is way more actively engaging than watching the TV version of it. There's also an extra effect of the effort needed to get to the end, possibly over a number of days that will make you think of that content again. The movie will end in a couple of hours whether you care about it or not. The details of the world building are also going to be much better in the book version where the author has more space for it.

Am a biased person who also feels like the "common-sense" knee-jerk thinking books > games may not make much sense. But reading demands more imagination and patience. And literal reading skills. And it expects the reader to engage at its own pace in his/her own way instead of the more guided experience of most games. And I feel more books, even the average YA novel is going to engage in deeper and more relevant themes than the average game. Sure Civilization may teach a bit of history and lead to an interest in the topic, or an RPG may let you put yourself in another's shoes like a novel, but what does say, Fortnite teach?

And sure you could pick the most lowbrow possible book and compare it to an educational game, but you can also pick a highbrow book and compare it to the worst "designed to addict you" pay-to-win overwhelmed with random buttons and popups braindead mobile game.

It practices your reading skill which is applicable in many other domains.

Rapid reading and comprehension¹ and exposure to a breadth of vocabulary and ideas is the professional equivalent of having superpowers. So many developers have crappy writing skills and weak reading comprehension and have to struggle harder to develop their careers because of it.

¹ The barren wasteland that is online discourse doesn't count for obvious reasons.

I'm not so negative about online discourse. Participating in online arguments, and writing tons of comments has immensely improved my writing skills and my ability to translate my ideas into text in a clear and concise manner.

Sure, it's not the peak of literary achievement, but hey, you gotta walk before you can run.

I also like to say that years of rules lawyering in D&D and MTG have given me a leg up in contractual language debates. Its kind of fun, even.

Its a bit of a fence sitter response, yet the activities support each other, and are not necessarily 1/0 better/worse.

If I read historical novels (or nearly similar like medieval fantasy) then my experience of playing Civilization is enhanced, because I can consider all the little stories that might be going on in Civ. Founding a city by the sea vs founding a city by a great chain of mountains is a very different consideration (beyond just "numbers").

If I play Civ, then my novel reading experience is enhanced. I might read something like a Bourne novel, yet never ask questions like "what is the world beyond the immediate story locality?" "What are the politics, or continents, or logistics, or military situation like?" Its just popcorn action plus names.

If I read something like the Hunger Games, I might ask "what Civ result would have caused such destitution that everyone is playing PUBG for food?"

Doing several orthogonal things is typically better than doing just a single thing.

Because reading is boring-- or at least boring relative to playing StarCraft while watching TV and chatting on Ventrilo (or whatever it is the youths do these days, WhatsApp and TikTok videos of Family Guy + marble game or somesuch.). Reading is a less dopamine-rich activity, and is therefore adjacent to work, and well-aligned with Protestant ideals of seriousness, diligence, temperance, and discipline. Because it's boring, it may also help train the mind to persist in other difficult, dopamine-scant activities, thereby allowing those sufferers to accomplish things that they might otherwise have given up on while jonesing for the next stab of reward chemicals.

Adult youtube is a lot of educational content and it's definitely better than gaming on that front but kids' youtube is something else entirely

> I'm kinda surprised that modern parents consider watching youtube a worse activity than gaming.

Kids have a different relationship with algorithms wherein they don't recognize they're being targeted with low quality stuff, watch a bit of it, and start a feedback loop.

I can "fix" my YT recommendations within a day if I went exploring and started getting fed stuff I don't want, but I find younger kids are happy to just fire through it as though it's TikTok.

Generally they end up with very low quality click bait very quickly. I'd rather my son have at least a tinge of mental engagement if he's going to have a screen.

And worse, they can get sucked into some very dark places and not realize they’re being sold some garbage ideology. I once clicked on some lecture that I thought sounded interesting. Next thing I know my feed is full of red pill/blue pill nonsense. I know enough to fight this kind of ideological onslaught. Someone younger and less experienced could easily get swept in.

> I'm kinda surprised that modern parents consider watching youtube a worse activity than gaming.

I read an article about a study a while back that showed that people who less brain activity when watching TV than when staring at a blank wall*

Another study I read studied children (up to 3 years old) that watched educational DVDs supposed to teach them new words. Turns out that the children who watched those DVDs scored lower on vocabulary tests than those that didn't watch them*

*: I'm too lazy to look up the references, so you'd have to Bing them yourself.

The way you write it makes it sound almost unsurprising: of course staring at YouTube is worse than almost anything. But I had the exact same surprise: do parents now consider playing video games as something to strive for? Not as bad as YouTube, I get it, but it does have a certain "the cocaine helps me staying away from crack" vibe...

It used to be that TV was bad for you. Now that's just accepted.

This is the way it goes, I think.

> do parents now consider playing video games as something to strive for

Which games? Candy crush - no. Nandgame - yes. (https://www.nandgame.com/)

And there's a whole spectrum in between. Games are not equal. "Screen time" is a terrible generalisation most of the time.

Gaming is a much healthier ecosystem than Youtube.

Youtubers are mostly thirsty, talentless repeaters of mis/information. Many of these Youtubers get coaxed into stupid belief systems, and they start to spread it to their viewers.

Gaming doesn’t have a political / message objective. The youtube algorithm previously (and maybe now) has been trained by superPACs to recommend alt-right and conspiracy videos.

I'm surprised this is controversial.

It seems obvious to me that being actively engaged in (curated) gaming is better than passively consuming videos that YouTube recommends.

With gaming kids can develop:

- Motor skills and hand-eye coordination

- Communication and collaborative skills

- Problem solving skills

- Learning to cope with losses and setbacks

- Social interactions

Of course, I'd rather them play with Legos, run around and play or even play boardgames with me or each other. But if it's a choice between playing games or watching YouTube, I absolutely prefer them to play games.

At least offline gaming is way better for several reasons. One, games lack the algorithm directing them towards arbitrary directions, possibly exact opposite of what you would like. Two, the child chooses what they play, and focus on the one thing they're doing. Three, playing typically is a much more active activity instead of passive consuming.

But it's still not something you should allow/encourage kids to do for several consecutive hours or instead of sleeping.

I know it's not as popular, but when evaluating handhelds I decided to go with a Logitech G Cloud instead. I don't see it come up as often, so I thought I'd introduce folks to it. Here was my reasoning.

Ergonomics. It's a handheld. If it's not comfortable for long-term play then it really doesn't matter what capabilities it has. The core ergonomics and weight of the G cloud is the best of any handheld.

Battery life: Similar to the above. It's a handheld. Steam decks just don't have the capacity to last very long on the move. The G cloud, which is either doing light emulation or streaming games from someplace else doesn't need to do much. It's essentially a phone with a nice screen.

When I saw the battery life of the Steam Deck it didn't matter that I had two decades of games with Steam. I'm not carrying around something that bulky with a fan on a trip to Europe.The few times I need to go on the move without a good connection I'm happy enough to emulate something or play an Android game on it. I just don't see how people play SDs without having a power cord nearby, resting them on your knees. As an alternate to a gaming computer the Steam Deck is great, as a support device that targets being a handheld I think things like G Cloud and the Odin are a better target.

The downsides are that it's Android based and altogether a different category. For handheld gaming I wanted something portable that I could play casually. The minor, occasional input or stream lag isn't as big a deal in these scenarios. I'm not playing competitive Counter-Strike on this thing.

I also acknowledge that the G Cloud might not last long in production! The Steam Deck is popular, and the G Cloud might not get support 10 years down the road from Logitech. These portable devices all will need upgrades / updates and I figured I could wait till the next cycle regardless.

> Steam decks just don't have the capacity to last very long on the move.

This really depends on the game. A long game of one of the new dooms? Unlikely. Disco Elysium, or something largely 2D? No problem.

> I just don't see how people play SDs without having a power cord nearby, resting them on your knees.

I've done a 3h SD session on a train ride (trains and planes is also where you can't stream games) and... it's ok. Could be more comfortable, but also it's good enough.

Yep. The Steam Deck is great and it's all about usecase. Like I said it's a different category of device. Myself, I was unaware there were other options out there and figured folks might be interested in things like the G Cloud and the Odin. Cloud-based gaming has gotten pretty nice.

> This really depends on the game.

Absolutely, I get stellar battery life when playing Stardew Valley, for instance.

> Steam decks just don't have the capacity to last very long on the move. The G cloud, which is either doing light emulation or streaming games from someplace else doesn't need to do much.

I mean, you can do light emulation or indie games with low demands and the battery will last a long time. I don't have the power cord nearby when I'm playing with it.

First time seeing this. Is someone making it for Steam/Valve or did they build it themselves? I didn't realize they have a hardware group (admittedly last time I played a video game was around the time Unreal Tournament was released). Looks really impressive either way.

It’s developed by Valve.

Valve has released a handful of hardware pieces, though most were failures. There was the steam machine(s), which were just Linux pcs that valve put together as a response to windows thinking about going to an exclusive app store, the steam deck is really a continuation of that effort. Steam also had the link, which is actually a pretty good casting device to link a pc to a tv over wifi/ethernet, but the lag was a bit too much for gaming, especially without a wired connection. The steam controller was marketed alongside the link as a way to make a pc more like a console, it had some positive buzz, but never got super popular. Valve also released a vr headset called the Index back in the vr craze, but that whole market is pretty niche.

TLDR. Valve has been making hardware for a while now, but it's mostly about proving there is a viable non-Microsoft market if they are forced out of Windows.

Totally agree the sleep is the killer feature. I will have to quibble with Overcooked resulting in "collaborate with each other in a very nice way" ... when more often than not you end up screaming at your loved ones "I TOLD YOU TO GRAB THE F*CKING ONIONS!!!"

No game can lead the family into anger and resentment faster then overcooked.

My wife and I used to play overcooked… Now we call it the "divorce game". We don't play it anymore.

A true modern successor to Monopoly:)

Settlers of Catan would like to have a word with you.

Another killer feature: cloud sync. I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 recently, and it's an amazing experience to seamlessly switch between playing on my PC, and on the couch with my steam deck

Stupid question, but is sleep just normal PC suspend-to-RAM? Doesn't that work on normal PCs? I think I've had some games have trouble with it and graphics cards, did Valve fix that?

> is sleep just normal PC suspend-to-RAM? Doesn't that work on normal PCs?

Yes, but it's very well implemented. In fact, it's so quick and dependable that if I'm playing a game and someone comes up to talk to me, I'll put the device to sleep rather than pausing. (Not for any particular reason, it's just muscle memory now.) I've played a dozen or so games of all types so far and have never had a problem with suspend yet, so it seems that Valve did put a lot of effort into it.

Interesting. I would get nervous doing that because I've had quite a few instances of failure to wake from RAM successfully, and I think it has something to do with graphics drivers and having games running. Nice that Valve figured it out.

Its a lot easier to do when you own the hardware design and drivers

I'm not so sure the person should be advertising that they play Nintendo Switch games on the Steam Deck. Clearly, we're not at the point where dumping Switch games are exactly legal- and it's not likely the person dumped their own legally-purchased Switch games. I mean, it seems like something that would ruffle Nintendo's feathers and get them in a heckle.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Aside from that, I'm on board with all of the other bullet points raised. Especially #1.

Oh wow the sleep feature sounds magical. Kudos for actually managing to implement it, shame it's not more ubiquitous. OTOH, does the Deck still ship without Hall-effect sticks?

Yes but you can retrofit them (either immediately or if/when they start to drift) which I get is not as good as having them OOTB but on the other hand, I don't have nearly enough time to play games to have to worry about stick drift for probably a good few years.

Call me old fashioned I just read the Holy Bible before opening intellij at morning for 2-5 minutes. And at the end of the day close intellij the 15min of Talmud.

The only showstoppers are the screen is too small to code on and battery life is too short.

Yeah, dock solves both. But I expect you're wanting a mobile device.

> screen is too small to code on

That's like saying VS Code not running on the Nintendo Switch is a showstopper. Technically true for a usecase no one agrees is appropriate for it.

Get the dock for the Steam Deck and you can plug a real keyboard, mouse, and monitor into it :)

buy a laptop?

For somebody who is used to old IBM ThinkPads (600X and X61s, I stopped moving around after that) this is not an option.

The only possible device I would consider using is a JH7110 tablet with bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

But it has to be low res screen and the GPU driver has to be perfect.

Do you think a tablet and bt kb/mouse is more similar to a thinkpad than a modern day thinkpad? I don't understand what point you seem to be making here. You can absolutely get another laptop. There's nothing keeping you stuck except you.

Modern laptops are complete garbage. I had a 200X at my last job it was slow (DDR4 is so much slower than DDR3 when in a low power laptop) and the screens are to high res, can't read anything without zooming and then it looks bad.

That combined with weight and bulk. The drivers being crap too. And a bunch of things I forgot... like price etc. makes it unviable.

We need cheap, open hardware and software. No big companies involved.

Get a 14inch lapdock and connect it to the Steam Deck via USB-C. That's your monitor and peripherals issues sorted. Lapdocks have built in batteries so they don't drain the device.

Are these features also available for Nintendo switch ?

Access to your existing steam library? No.

Did you even open the article?

I wasn’t sure if I’d end up using it, but I got one after realizing how many 4-key shortcuts I need in my IDE. I created some nice colored keys for my IDE and especially the step debugger and haven’t looked back.

"Steam Deck" vs. "Stream Deck"

Are you talking about a stream deck?

Did you make a confusion that TFA is about the "Stream Deck"? The Steam Deck is a game console. :P

lol I’m so dumb.

Confusingly, the Steam Deck and Stream Deck 2 were announced just days apart.

I see he's emulating Nintendo Switch games, which is a game console actually being sold, same as the games. I see no mention of him actually buying the games he's emulating, so this effectively is piracy.

Why wouldn't you assume he owns them?

> I see no mention of him actually buying the games he's emulating, so this effectively is piracy.

No, we don't know if the author bought the games or not and there's no reason to expect him to say it. Just as you didn't say you bought the computer you wrote that message on rather than steal it.

Oh no. Somebody call the police

I emulate the switch games I own as well because the emulator can play the games in 4k with less frame drops on my gaming PC. I still play my switch on the go tho.

I buy Switch games and play them on my Switch (bought and playing Super Mario Wonder on it right now), but I also would like to play them on my Steam Deck as well (haven't gone through that process to get Switch games working yet, only older systems, but I will eventually).

For some games, it would be nice to only have to bring one portable system with me (like I own Advance Wars Reboot, but I think I'd prefer playing it on Steam Deck and being able to bring it with me along with the rest of my Steam library).

Same with older systems. I own tons of retro games, but I'd rather play them on Steam Deck (especially since it has integration with Retro Achievements) than dig out my old consoles.

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