I love the philosophy of steam deck: by default, it's an Switch-like device that hides all the non-fully compatible games in store, has good UI and makes sure everything "just works".
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.
100% agree, it's so refreshing to finally get a device that does it's best to be both a great out of the box experience but also respectful the user, reminds me of the olden days of computing, despite what gnome and apple proclaiming such a goal is impossible.
It's also kind of sad this only really exists because Valve are wholly independent and have "fuck you" levels of money.
Another view point: if you want to compete in the big leagues, you need to have "fuck you" levels of money. You can be happy building indie games for desktops as a career, but if you want to compete with Nintendo, Sony, and Meta then you need to take out your checkbook and write lots of zeros. So stop trying to compete with them if you don't have the capital! Build great games that aren't AAA-style FPS, BR, Minecraft/CoD/Halo clones.
Yup. I'm pretty sure the indie games we all know about made good money. Enough to have continued growing a business without copying any AAA games and avoiding getting bought out or aped.
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.
> Yup. I'm pretty sure the indie games we all know about made good money. Enough to have continued growing a business without copying any AAA games and avoiding getting bought out or aped.
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.
> despite what gnome and apple proclaiming such a goal is impossible.
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).
It's going back a few years now but the gnome 3 debacle is a reasonable example of not respecting users https://felipec.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/the-problem-with-gn... . I think in subsequent years the devs have been worn down and the community solved the missing features in other ways, but some people have long memories. gnome 3 is the primary reason Ubuntu got its own desktop system, it was that divisive.
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.
Apple is that stoic palace guard at Buckingham palace who says nothing and doesn't move or smile but won't let you leave the appointed tourist areas and bother the queen while GNOME is your obnoxious aunt who is always judging you.
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.
That is why there is the Gnome Tweak tool and Gnome extensions. You get a great out-of-the-box experience for regular users and good customizability for advanced users. If you want extreme customizability just don't use Gnome. IMO Gnome gets way too much unwarranted critique here.
The problem with fixing all its problems with extensions is that they aren't always updated in time for new releases.
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.
I don't use Gnome because I find its out-of-the-box experience to be pretty horrible. I couldn't figure out how to fix it, and didn't know about these tools. But it's fine, I'm really happy with the DE I use.
Not to mention it's one of the few modern platforms that allows modding up to code injection, memory manipulation, and mod managers that'll gleefully pull code from the four corners of the internet. You know, the things that every other platform heavily locks down over the fears hackers will steal grandma's cookie recipe and not because it allows the selling of 14 different microtransactions for something your average modder could put together in a day.
Despite the negative dismissal (which gets rightly downvoted), I think there’s a good point here - your phone probably needs to have stronger security requirement than your gaming device?
I agree with the sentiment here, but it's worth pointing out that most AAA games now come with an incredibly invasive anti-cheat suite that violates your computer's security and thoroughly violates your privacy. That's precisely because they're allowed to by the OS
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.
> 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.
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.
> it's worth pointing out that most AAA games now come with an incredibly invasive anti-cheat suite that violates your computer's security and thoroughly violates your privacy.
Which is why I stopped playing AAA games. I'm fine with avoiding them and having a machine I can actually control.
Anticheat-protected games just don’t work on Steam Deck (usually just refusing to connect).
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.
Many games with those invasive rootkit DRMs simply don't work.
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 :)
Phones are the only popular end user device that has any sort of protection worth its salt. Against who? Against easily downloadable malware that can trivially execute as the user, effectively doing anything beside installing a video card driver. Can trivially log key presses, read any screen, download/upload to the internet, read your .ssh folder, browser cache, or encrypt your family photos without a second thought.
Mac is a bit ahead of the other two, but gnu/linux (as opposed to “android linux”) is just insanely unsecure.
> 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).
Because when you sell to a billion people it turns out that some of them need to be secured against the people using them. It only matters that this fraction is non-negligible, not some significant level to be a problem. And, you can't bless the other set with special privileges because those very pathways will be used against the set that needs protection against themselves.
First of all, no, they're not adults. Kids can have phones, too.
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.)
It's good faith, thanks for responding. :)
I'm often challenged by these questions because the arguments often become questions of what's the best analog, which feels like it could be unreliable.
I get your point about keeping chemicals out of our stuff, but that doesn't feel analagous to control over my device.
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.
Hm, FWIW, I'm more on your side than not - I don't want to be locked out of customizing my devices. That's why I have GrapheneOS on my phone, and I think phone manufacturers may have gone too far in the overprotective side. I was only arguing that the correct path is somewhere in the middle, not a total abdication of responsibility by the manufacturer.
It is the responsibility of you to find an alternative product if you don't like the limits put in place by the company doing this. It is a free market.
Because sometimes the people using them are thieves that have stolen the phone, or blackhats that are actively trying to gain access to your bank account.
Why? Most modern PC games come with insanely privileged DRM and anti-cheat measures that lock down and cross-examine everything else your PC is doing. If Denuvo can secure games from being pirated over months of concerted effort, why can't something similar be used to secure my online banking app while still letting me do whatever I want when I'm not using banking?
I see where you are coming from here; but aren't the stakes a bit different here?
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.
A smartphone does nothing what a desktop computer (with ubiquitous root access) doesn't and apocalypse still hasn't happened.
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.
There must be a way by now to stash this critical stuff away safely in one half of the phone, while the other half runs all the untrusted stuff. If there would be a will (by Apple) there would be a way.
Sure, you stick things into sandboxes and only allow specific permissions to access outside the sandbox. In which case, users habituate to allowing any permissions that anything they install requests (c.f. Android).
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.
Or, you take the more extreme step, and obfuscate from the application whether or not permissions have been granted. The reason why people default to granting excess permissions is that many applications simply will refuse to run without them. If instead of "overtly deny permission" there existed the option to "covertly deny permission (by opting to feed plausible random data instead)" and making that the easier to select "deny" then you have the best of both worlds: well-behaved applications start asking for fewer unnecessary permissions, because the data they're gathering is being poisoned, poorly-behaved applications have their harm reduced, and users who want to build programs that actually need high-level permissions can do so.
It's not much of a sandbox if permissions exist to escape the sandbox. All "secure" apps (mail, pay, banking, chat, ...) need to live in a special compartment which they cannot escape, and no installed apps are allowed in this compartment, only builtin apps.
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.
> 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.
I never knew I wanted a Valve phone and tablet, but now I do.
* deep, complex, and regulated market. by comparison, not a lot of FCC rules or local 911 rules related to a Steam Deck.
* 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
Except, iPhones were first to market with an app store. There's a stronghold that Valve would need to break. If Microsoft couldn't do it with the full weight of its developer division and Windows Phone, then it's not likely Valve can.
>I imagine the biggest obstacle is that it has nothing to do with their business.
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.
I can, because they really don't seem to. They aren't a publicly traded company beholden to corporate share holders who only value profit. They have a history of behavior which suggests they care about PC gaming and not a heck of a lot else. Arguably they don't even care about the money that much. Did you know you can sell Steam keys on other store fronts and Valve won't even take a cut?
Not to mention the fact that they might be able to tap into a market that practically doesn't exist anymore: paid mobile games. Like, actual, "I pay you $5-40, you give me a complete game". People are in the habit of buying games on Steam. Half of the top-20 most played games on Steam right now cost money. SteamDeckPhone's sales would probably be disproportionately people who already use Steam on the PC and/or the Steam Deck, so it would be a significantly different audience than the broader mobile gaming market.
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.
The same reason that stopped everyone else that tried, the mobile os market is mature and not enough people want or care about another mobile os to make it worth the effort.
>The same reason that stopped everyone else that tried, the mobile os market is mature and not enough people want or care about another mobile os to make it worth the effort.
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.
How many would buy a gaming-first phone (by Valve)? I don't quite know what such a product would mean in practice, or if there is a killer "app" (game) for phone. But it would have higher probabilities of success than "a real Linux phone".
Gaming oriented phones exist for sure. One by Valve with SteamOS, yeah maybe.
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.
Apple fans, if Im being honest, apple fans do know that Android exists.
No one who understands tech claims it's impossible.
Its just not what they want. They dont want to deal with the baggage it comes with.
Saying this as an Apple user in the past now switched to Android for more flexibility, but feeling not worth it and going back to Apple after USB-C integration.
Nah, Apple fans aren't explicitly against sideloading, by and large, they just accept its lack because they care more about the positive features Apple devices have.
> 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.
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.
> 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)
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.
The original iPhone did support native apps - they just had to be written by Apple. ;-)
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.
> it trusts you as a user - you can install games that aren't verified.
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!
> I love the philosophy of steam deck: by default, it's an Switch-like device that hides all the non-fully compatible games in store
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 was with you right up until the end... I have a Steam Deck and it's absolutely incredible. Support, though, even for the verified games and with nothing modified, is hardly at the level that it is for Apple products and actually using it is nothing like using an Apple product.
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.
The desktop/Steam OS split was particularly smart. You can have a wonderful, catered, safe experience and never leave Steam OS. Or you can go into the desktop and open up a world of emulators and more.
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.
>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.
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.
Through Steam, tested on three different verified for steamdeck games.
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.
It looks like a good device, but I wonder about how much data collection is going on.
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.
A privacy policy does not mean anything. It is not a contract between you and the company, it is not a service level agreement, there is no penalty if it is violated. At worst you may have a violation of some sort of truth in advertising law if the company does not follow it's privacy policy.
At the end of the day it comes down to what the company actually does vs what they say they do.
That's the truth. It's good to keep an eye on what they'll admit to if nothing else. It'll likely take a whistleblower for people to know what a company actually does with their data, although if we're lucky we might learn something by chance from evidence presented in an unrelated lawsuit. What we really need are meaningful regulations.
This. Also, almost every privacy policy I've ever read has enough holes to drive a convoy of trucks through anyway. I believe privacy policies are worthless, and ignore them.
The main concern raised by that review seems not to be from data collection by them:
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Given that there's effectively no such thing as anonymous data, I'm really surprised they said this.
Honestly I hate to say it but I think the Switch was actually the big advance. It does not run PC games but it does run a fairly standard OS ( I believe a flavor of android ) and the old Nvidia processor from the Shield.
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.
Got it. But the hardware is still tablet hardware so its perfectly hackable into Android mode. Not the same as the Steam Deck at all but I think my point still sort of works
Yes. Nintendo intended it to be 100% fully locked down. They made a trivial mistake in the early versions, since corrected. But they absolutely do not intend for you to run anything other than their exact stuff on it. It could not hardly be more closed down and proprietary.
"If you allow 3rd party app stores and other browsers it will ruin my walled garden device and the official app store and threaten the entire ecosystem Apple meticulously curates!!!"
Why force apple to do that. That business model has android and that is fine. You need a choice. You want a choice. Apple model is a choice. Forced side load allowed close apple. It may not be good. At least some of us has a choice.
That's for newer AAA games. Games with simpler or more optimized graphics, especially those running in emulators, tend to do really really well.
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.
Just attaching any off-the-shelf USB-C powerbank is perfectly viable right now.
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 don't even own a Steam Deck and I've been seeing the benefits just from its existence. Now, almost every game on Steam has a quick accessible rating that lets me know if it works fine on Linux. This has led to me being able to buy games confidently that I never would have otherwise. In addition, the effectiveness of Proton for running Windows games is baffling, and something I never could have expected when I first switched to Linux back in 2015.
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.
> almost every game on Steam has a quick accessible rating that lets me know if it works fine on Linux
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.
> let's give WineHQ a bit of credit here [..] But the Wine team deserves a boatload of praise too.
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!).
Huge pet peeve of mine on WineHQ + ProtonDB - number of people who say, "Works for me, I just had to use the BingoBangoPatch_v3". No indication at all of what BingoBangoPatch is, where I could get it, how to set it, etc. Too much shorthand allowed without providing real configuration guidance.
That's the value of Valve's official SD rating I assume. Basically a reliable but conservative Valve official rating plus an adventurous ProtonDB rating, you as a user have the freedom to choose your own risk level and time investing to tinker. To me this is best compromise one can hope for.
Yes, CodeWeavers are an independent company that has been developing Wine longer than Valve had any interest in Linux games. However AFAIU Valve does contract them to work on Wine/Proton now so a decent amount of their work is probably funded by Valve.
> 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.
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.
But WineHQ also shows which Wine version it worked at so if you wanted to you could get that Wine version. And the same also applies to Proton, it's just hidden from you when you use Steam.
If you look at the list of top sellers, new arrivals, upcoming games, and games on sale, most if not all of them have native Linux support, which is something you absolutely could not have said just a few years ago. In my experience, at this point bad Linux ports are more of an issue than a lack of them.
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.
I think this is the more likely end state. Instead of builds targeting certain platforms, some amalgamation of windows APIs and perhaps vulcan or other special things sprinkled in will become a sort of standard. From there, Linux compatibility will be brought up to the same level as Windows and perhaps other platforms will follow suit. We've seen this pattern time and time again in software.
That's missing what ABI is and what features can/can't be accessed by the app. Otherwise we'd call nes ROMs an even more stable ABI accessible across all modern systems.
Windows 10 hits EOL in 2025. I'm really hoping I can just completely convert my gaming PC to a Linux machine by that time, because Windows 11 started out rough and has become less appealing over time.
The Steam Deck is absolutely building that future, and I, too, am excited.
I just decommissioned my 2011 Windows 7 machine where I did most of my dev work and all of my casual computing such as web stuff and gaming. It ran all of the software I needed plus the Steam games I enjoyed. I had no technical reason to "upgrade" in all that time. In its place now is a kooky Linux machine.
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 ;-)
Yup -- assuming you don't need malware like EAC installed to run online games you can have a surprisingly good game experience on desktop Linux nowadays.
Even weird distributions which I expected to be a miserable fight but nope. Just Flatpak it and all the dependency is inside and it just works. Couple that with out of the box AMD GPU support and it's painless. I expect that I could even run Steam on Alpine Linux. My only gripe is Flatpak'd programs like Steam need to be updated separately through Flatpak.
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).
Skipping v9 broke the old "Even number releases bad, odd number releases good" rule of thumb, but the tick-tock (tick-clunk?) rhythm still seems to apply.
While this sentiment is common, I've honestly never had this experience. Every Windows experience I've had post-Me has been a slow but steady improvement in stability.
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.
Agreed. I actually found Vista to be a massive improvement in stability. It changed how drivers were run in the kernel, so that a driver crashing often wouldn't result in a bluescreen. I had a ton of graphics card bluescreens on XP, and then virtually none with the same hardware after upgrading to Vista.
Windows 11 really isn't that bad, mostly because it's not really a significant change from Windows 10. The default menu layouts changed a little bit, but not in any way you couldn't recreate in Windows 10, nor did they really remove anything such that you can't make Windows 11 feel like Windows 10.
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.
> 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.
Even better, you can get the decky-loader and proton-badges plugin. It can show the protondb rating directly on the game mode ui. Allows you to know will a game(or a program) even run even it is not rated as steamdeck compatible yet.
> I don't even own a Steam Deck and I've been seeing the benefits just from its existence. Now, almost every game on Steam has a quick accessible rating that lets me know if it works fine on Linux.
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.
>In addition, the effectiveness of Proton for running Windows games is baffling, and something I never could have expected when I first switched to Linux back in 2015.
Is it true that Windows games run better on Proton than on Windows?
Wine was also quite capable before proton came about. Valve obviously did a lot for the linux gamers, that much is clear, but we must not forget the volunteers (and codeweavers) that worked tirelessly for years to get wine to that point. Wine is a tremendous achievement.
I've been blown away by my Steam Deck. It arrived about 5 days before my long sought after PS5 and basically the PS5 has sat collecting dust. I pre-ordered the Deck thinking I'd sell or trade it for the PS5, that was basically my interest in the device.
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.
> 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).
And you're right because the 31st Jan Proton update fixed Dead Space and now it runs on Deck as Verified :)
My opinion is the same as yours, plus recently I've installed some Flash games becasue I'm nostalgic, one way to do it and play games in deck mode is this link [1], but you can also just run "flashplayer.exe --some-options game.swf" with Proton and it'll work too. I love good flash games like Sonny 2 and I know Flash has security issues and had to be killed, but I'll never let it go, I'll always have to run it somewhere for retrogaming.
Just so you know, there's a Linux-native Flash emulator named Ruffle you might want to try. It's worked pretty well with the things I've tried so far, and it's one less layer of emulation.
Ruffle is legit, but there are some later era flash games that don't play because they claim to / actually use later versions of the Adobe 'action script'; I'm hopeful that they'll eventually be supported and the archived versions of flashplayer (standalone) will not be necessary for anyone.
Note, in AUR there's a Flash Player standalone package - flashplayer-standalone I believe. You can use it very similarly, just without a need for proton.
I'm the exact opposite. I got the deck, had a honeymoon period of maybe five days, then I went back to the PS5.
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.
> and has the buttons in such an awkward position that I get cramps in my hand after half an hour of playing.
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.
I wonder if that's just personal hand shape / size? I have horrible hand cramps playing the switch portable (always have to remove the joycons) but not so much with the deck
> buttons in such an awkward position that I get cramps in my hand after half an hour of playing
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.
This is exactly it. As someone who also has a PS5, I've just stopped playing it. Now that Sony is doing their games on PC too, I'm totally fine waiting for their release so I can play on the Deck and on my PC too. I also get to catch up on all the old Steam games that I bought and could never properly get into because of the logistics of being at a PC. On top of that, when the new PS6 comes out eventually, I won't have to be pissed off, yet again, that my old games don't work on it and I have to re-buy them.
Same here. My gaming PC has not seen any use whatsoever (for gaming) since I got the Deck.
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).
I don't own a Steam Deck. I sold my PS4 and I own a Switch.
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
My friend has been playing Dead Space on it for the last few days and has been quite happy. I think they released a patch recently. Give it another go if you’re interested!
Oh nice! And thank you, I actually meant to take a look every week at the Steam page, and you're right, they have added the Steam Deck compatible box, and it's been tested / verified now. Amazing.
Agree with your comment, but this is not accurate:
> 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 key to its success I think is controls. I could never feel comfortable with portable gaming because controls always felt clunky for games I like. This thing treats controls as the centerpiece, allowing seamless sharing of layouts between players: just pick the most popular layout for any game. You can play freaking real time strategies on this thing fairly comfortably.
I want a standalone controller with the full Steam Deck layout so bad. I'm amazed nobody has put out anything like it yet besides maybe the old discontinued Steam controller.
The Steam Deck is an upgrade to the Steam Controller in my eyes; I own both but just never really liked using the Steam Controller the same way I do the Steam Deck for some reason. I guess the Steam Deck just feels more comfortable?
The steam controller suffers immensely because valve was trying to push the dumb touchpads replacing sticks mentality at the time. The touch pads are a horrible replacement for sticks because they lack the physicality and feedback. The original vive was similarly hampered by controllers that had no sticks because valve got weird for a bit.
To be fair, I think the touchpads are pretty crucial on the deck.
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.
The deck has a sort of "second gen" implementation where they realized sticks are important but trackpads can be great secondary or alternative controls. They figured the same thing out for VR controllers, with the index having a thumbstick for most interactions but some weird little touchpad thing for whoever wants it.
I mean - I think it just depends heavily on what game you're playing.
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.
But you lost all the sensation of sticks for non-mouse based games. The trackpads are awesome for things that weren't meant to be played on a gamepad, but for say a platformer or racer, they are really mediocre.
The mouse and trackpad emulation of the steam controller makes it one of the best ways to control a media PC though.
When I sold my steam deck controller recently it was for I believe at or slightly higher then retail price. For a used one with no box on a local resale market. I asked the guy why he was picking it up, and he said something a long the lines of "It's the best and they're getting rarer" The steam controller still has fans.
I did an entire Civ 6 game on Epic speed on my SD. I did find the touchpad uncomfortable to use with my large hands, so I 3D printed one of these[0] in PLA and it lets me more comfortably rest my thumb on the pad.
Of course KBM is better, and the touchpads involve a lot of pausing to make up for the less immediate reaction, but the fact that the experience is enjoyable at all is surprising. The form factor and the ability to be able to instantly pick up were you left off for a 10-20 mins session more than makes it up for the awkwardness.
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 bought one with low expectations, but it has surpassed them tremendously. Proton is most of the way there. In fact, most of the issues I find with some games are the third-party launchers, not the games themselves.
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.
> The docking to a TV / monitor is a joke with the standard UI
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.
>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.
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.
I use my Steam Deck almost exclusively docked in to the Steam Dock, connected to my projector and beamed to a whole-wall 190" image. It works great so I'd be curious to hear about your obstacles.
I don't know if there was an update, but one of the main issues I had was that my TV supports 4K, and the steam deck would natively try to select 4K in big picture mode, except that it would default to 30hz because that's what my dock supported. There wasn't any way at the time to set the TV resolution lower so I could get it to 60hz, but I'm not sure if that has changed.
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.
My greatest wish is that Apple would put a fraction of their billions into porting Proton to Metal and by extension the M-series CPUs.
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.
> That would instantly make the M1-series machines the greatest gaming machines in the world.
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.
Proton (WINE) Is Not an Emulator. And Rosetta is a semi-dynamic translation layer. Both have pretty impressive performance on their own, with many Rosetta-translated programs running faster than a high-spec Intel machine. So there's no reason this combination couldn't exist or provide a good experience.
Rosetta is built into the hardware of the M-series chips somehow, they're specifically made to be really good at emulating Intel commands, which makes them crazy fast.
Only cpu instructions have to be translated, graphics are "native" in the sense both the previous AMD and Intel GPU's used metal and openGL, just as the new integrated gpu's do.
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.
And I just bought the cheapest model and a 512G SD card just like GP recommended, as all testimonials said it's basically equally fast in games as an SSD is.
It literally is a gaming computer. Its design prioritizes gaming applications at every turn, from the form factor to the unusually low-resolution display to the gaming-oriented features of the (default) operating system. It's optimized to provide the best portable PC gaming experience at its price point, and due to the fundamental power/heat constraints of the "deck" form factor it's pretty close to the point of diminishing returns regardless of how much you want to spend.
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.
The implication was that laptop-class hardware and "gaming computer" are at odds with each other. Sure ultrabooks can play games, but they are not referred to as "gaming computers".
Am I a bad dad if my son doesn't know the difference? Because he's not chained to a desk he uses it for the same purpose as his high end custom built PC.
I meant it in the sense of, "it takes the place of and serves almost all the same purposes in usages as..."
You aren't a bad dad, but if you're going around the internet telling everyone the Steam Deck is "a gaming computer" you're going to mislead less technical people into thinking it's on par with a huge RTX 3070 laptop for performance, since that's what "gaming computer" usually means
It doesn't take a ton of compute or GPU power to play games from 5+ years ago, especially if they offered a good variety of settings. And when you include emulated games, that makes for a huge catalog.
What do you mean? For gaming it won't perform well at high resolutions in recent games. For just using as a desktop it's better than most laptops with Intel integrated graphics and can do multiple displays with MST.
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.
I only use it docked when I want to do some work in the desktop mode with a keyboard and mouse. I think of the dock more for using it in Desktop mode than something comparable to the Switch running connected to a TV. The one exception is Steam's game streaming functions - a docked Deck connected to a TV works great with controllers or keyboard/mouse connected streaming gameplay from your desktop in many games. Its a perfectly adequate little desktop PC in this configuration for a lot of tasks. The official dock even supports a dual monitor desktop config which is nice.
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.
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.
Not bad at all even when on full - if you have sound up or headphones on you won't even notice. The one thing that does bother me though about the fans is that sometimes they repeatedly go on/off in rapid succession over and over and over. I think whatever game is running must just be RIGHT at the thermal threshold so it keeps going under/over and triggering the fan to turn on and then shut off. I wish in these cases it would just switch on for good and stay on low rpms instead of all the on/off.
Try using the thermal limiting feature in the right-hand battery menu. Any game I’m playing, I bring it down as far as I can without unacceptable impact to performance. Often I find that I can set it to 7-9 and the fan goes nearly silent without any major performance impact.
Early models were loud, but they've released software updates to make it quieter and started switching out fans in later models I believe. I've had mine since July 2022 and don't notice the fans at all for mid to low power games. It kicks on for more processor intensive games but I personally don't find it distracting.
The only major difference is that the very first ones had a Delta fan that had some issues with noise and with magnets (the dbrand case's magnetic stand made the fan rev out of control).
There’s still basically one with a couple storage options - they have shipped with different fans though. My (fairly recent) unit has very reasonable fan noise.
I picked up one in mid January. By default the fans don't come on at all, you will smell plastic burning before you hear a fan. You can turn on the old fan profile which is much more aggressive about turning the fans on. The fans are quieter than my laptop, but noticeable.
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.
I got one Steam Deck and it really has brought back motivation to learn GUI programming (SDL2). It is already a very nice, portable(-ish), easily hackable device (normal linux programs!), with nice physical controls and a screen[1].
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.
I'm a happy Steam Deck owner strongly wishing for a Steam Deck 2 / Steam Deck Pro. I'm playing way more games than I used to; it just eliminates friction from sitting down and playing anywhere.
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.)
I liked the Steam Deck well enough; I bought one and tinkered for several weeks before returning it. The potential is clear, even if the current iteration is pretty rough in terms of software usability and performance.
What seems less clear to me is if they will ever address the abysmal battery repairability[1], until which I will not be purchasing.
> current iteration is pretty rough in terms of software usability and performance
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.
Sure, I was referring to the UI of the OS itself. I had the device about 3-4 months ago so perhaps it has been improved, but it was pretty janky in my experience at the time. It would often outright freeze on me for 10-20 seconds at a time.
Press a button, wait several seconds for something simple to happen on screen.
Felt like it was all held together with duct tape.
For me, the Steam Deck was just too large, and the screen was truly terrible. It made games that I'm familiar with look visibly wrong with how poor the color gamut coverage was. I ended up selling it. The Steam Deck was also a bad experience for launchers outside of Steam, and I didn't want to get banned from Overwatch or Fortnite for trying to play them on an unsupported operating system, if they were even compatible.
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.
I appreciate the size. I've got bigger hands and they tend to cramp after a short while holding small devices. Even the PlayStation controller feels tiny, but Xbox was manageable.
It's always possible to make a device physically larger after you get it, but it is obviously much harder to make it smaller.
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
There isn't a one size fits all approach. You are free to use a tiny Switch. I am free to use the normal size (for me) handheld console that can not only play switch games, but also has every single major game released for every console before the PS2. Oh, it also plays PC games pretty well. I'm perfectly happy with my choice.
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.
It's just a standard Windows 11 computer, so it is entirely trivial.
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.
Steam Deck is pretty nice, so much better than my Nintendo Switch. It's pretty great to see the iGPU getting love these days, more compact consoles would be great. The AMD 780M hopefully gets a chance at this as well.
My one big complaint is battery life. 2hrs for most games. Its a great at home device... but on the go and car trips are a hassle. There are battery extenders but they make an already chonky handheld into a 15lb brick.
It is honestly the only thing that is missing for me as a daily Deck user with dozens of games from the backlog finally getting installed and receiving attention.
The software is better than the Switch, and the CPU/GPU is more capable. I'd say the design of the Switch is much better, though. My biggest frustration with the Deck is how huge it is, and second place goes to how poor the screen is vs OLED. Third goes to battery life :/
It’s more powerful than a Switch for sure, but they’re different hardware classes. For a handheld, the Switch is far more portable and has a much better screen and battery life.
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.
It’s been longer than the Wii. I agree with the philosophy and that it works at a product level. That’s not what I’m criticizing. I am a fan of Nintendo’s exclusive titles.
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.
> Nintendo needs to deliver a device that can run low to medium quality graphics at 1080-1440p @ 60fps.
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.
I actually think they've walked the line historically very well. I agree with you. I'm not criticizing their past decisions. They're wildly successful. I've purchased 4 Switches (between two people). The part I'm criticizing is that in hindsight I don't think the current gen Switch hardware specifically aged well. I want everything Nintendo has to offer in terms of product, I just don't want it to struggle to drive my modern 77" 4k OLED. Yeah I'm an edge case. I'm just saying it kinda sucks. Tiny violin I get it. If the Switch was marketed only as a handheld I wouldn't be saying anything. But it was marketed as a console hybrid that you plug into your tv. It's like the only TVs they accounted for were 42". I am pretty confident the next Switch or whatever it's going to be will fill the gap. I just wish they'd give me the option so that I could match one of their products to my display hardware a little better. Literally like "to the dev it's indistinguishable hardware the graphics look exactly the same but it can output 1440p@60fps" and to the consumer "it cost you $200 more sucker have fun". I'm just rambling now.
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.
Why spend the money on R&D and retooling the production line when people will buy your Mario, Zelda, and Metroid games that aren't on any other platform? Most people aren't looking for occasional framedrops - they're there to play a game and have fun.
I'm pretty sure parent wasn't talking about Nintendo's software tooling, they were talking about the machinery to assemble the hardware. From that angle, I suspect that Nintendo would not be able to simply order something off the shelf that would work with their existing assembly lines. There is no "just" when it comes to changing hardware in a system like the Switch--which is part of why you don't see a bunch of aftermarket upgrade kits.
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.
I don't want a Threadripper. I already have one and an Epyc. From what I've heard Nintendo went with essentially the lowest tier (like 4 gens old at this point) nvidia SoC available (in class). They could have had better hardware in the same form factor on a smaller node with similar power draw. But it would have been more expensive and Nintendo doesn't use hardware as a loss leader.
I feel like Steam Deck is very successful; the next big milestone, which may be a doozy, is migrating off of x86-64 to ARM64. I understand why Steam Deck 1.0 is x86-64 since something akin to Rosetta or WOW64 is likely as much work again as it was to get the initial Steam Deck off the ground.
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.
Why do you think ARM64 would improve battery life so much? The Steam Deck can draw up to 20W, most of that due to the GPU. Apple's M1 laptops have a higher TDP, larger battery, and a similar 2-4 hour battery life on the most intense games.
If you want more battery life, Steam Deck has a bunch of controls to throttle CPU/GPU performance, including limiting the framerate.
This will only happen if Microsoft also pushes game developers towards 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.
The issue is the trade-off with performance though, that'd make it even more of a niche device.
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.
> A switch to ARM64 (e.g. ARMv9.0) would likely over double the battery life at the bottom and top end.
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.
We've seen with the M range of SoCs that even with the emulation overhead, you can gain battery life even accounting for that. Plus the OS itself would be natively compiled, so that's always an efficiency gain.
Because ARM64 is significantly more R&D dollars spent on it than x86-64. That's a trend that is going to continue.
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?"
I've paired my Steam Deck with nreal light AR glasses and its been an absolute joy to play games on.
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.
Ah, the PSP was so much fun back in its day. I only had a few actual PSP games, I was much more interested in that thing for all the homebrew and emulation stuff I could do on it.
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.
Great question, I'd guess emulating it is within the capabilities of the device. (I don't know much about the Spectrum but just a guess based on age). Would those games work well on a controller?
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.
The steam deck has allowed me to play so much more of my steam library. The sleep feature and portability opens up so many more games. I can now play big, open world games 15-30 min at a time instead of watching a random youtube video or show.
Has anyone messed around with building their own Steam Machine with the OS yet? It's easy to build a SFF PC with state of the art graphics card and still be smaller than a PS5. (But not cheaper.) I've been thinking of building another one to run the Steam OS and leave it hooked up to the TV. Then I'll never need to own a video game console again.
I gave it a go [0], but there are also other people out there who have installed HoloISO (Steam OS 3 but not official) on various hardware, like ETA PRIME on YouTube [1].
I have[1], but this was during the time of the official Steam machines (ie, 4-5 years ago). I never had the heart to leave just Steam OS on it, most of the time it functioned as a dev machine as it was quite a bit beefier than my laptop.
The Deck seems pretty great, but I’m probably going to wait until rev 2 or 3 which will likely use newer hardware to achieve the same performance as the original, which should make it cooler, quieter, and potentially less chunky. Valve has also expressed that they intend to swap out it screen panel to something nicer which to me is also worth waiting for.
It's not that chunky when you actually hold it. After using the Deck for a few hours the Nintendo Switch feels like a flimsy child's toy.
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.
I'd prefer a high-grade IPS panel over an OLED panel unless Samsung starts manufacturing QD-OLED panels this small, mainly for longevity reasons with how static UI is on-screen for long periods of time with most games.
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.
In case you haven't seen, the Switch OLED screen took about six months[0] of showing a static screenshot (zero motion!) at full brightness for any burn in to occur whatsoever, and it was barely there. If you're doing literally anything else, the OLED pixels will get exercise and this burn in would not have even happened.
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.
for the price of the base model ($400), I can't imagine you'll lose too much selling it when v2 comes out (and likely fully sells out). If you have a decent stream library, it is really pretty wild how awesome it is.
I had the Steam Deck for a few months and then sold it. The hardware is great and what it's capable of is very impressive. What really let it down was for me personally was:
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.
I'm waiting patiently for them to officially release SteamOS 3 for general consumption so I can try it out as an alternative to Fedora Kinoite. I have a feeling that if the Steam Deck and its clones become really popular then it is entirely possible SteamOS 3 will finally replace the rapidly declining Ubuntu as the default Desktop Linux Distro recommendation. Having that experience be immutable base OS + FlatPak + KDE would be huge improvement in my opinion.
The immutable nature of it might hinder adoption. I'm sure after enough time and resources are invested into immutable desktop bases it'll be fine, I'm just skeptical that it's ready at the moment.
A lot of games I would want to play have UIs that I think would be extremely tiny on a 7 inch screen. Which makes me think: if they are "available on Steam Deck", they would be a pain to play?
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?
I would disagree here. Elite Dangerous is a very UI and text menu heavy game. I fully expected to pop it open and nope out with it being unusable and not optimized for the steam deck experience.
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.
TV scale large UI elements and tiny screen large UI elements are actually pretty similar. If your game supports being played on a tv at couch difference it probably will work on a small screen as well. Most games support TV scale UIs so it's not a problem.
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.
I guess you could try running your games at 800p on your current system and see what it's like. I actually do a lot of gaming at 1280x800 on an old Macbook. I'm using Parsec to connect to an Optiplex with a 1050ti in the basement.
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).
The closeness of a handheld device makes up for screen size. Try holding up your phone and comparing it with your main Television. It's a lot closer than the raw dimensions would suggest.
1. It's possible to dock the Steam Deck and use a mouse and keyboard. The specs make a strong case for itself as a gaming PC at it's price point.
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.
Some games are difficult. Depending on the ui elements though, you could work around them.
If the problem is small text, there is little you can do, but with steam controls you can create custom uis for input, which makes some unplayable games very playable.
It's possible for this to be an issue. I've been lucky that so far everything I've wanted has been legible, or even better configurable for different resolutions or scaling factors. In some cases I have found the touch screen to be useful over trying to hit tiny UI widgets.
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.
A lot (most?) games work but will have Deck caveats labeled (on the Steam store product page in the right column there is a "Steam Deck Compatibility" area with details.
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.
Personally, I've loved the SteamDeck since I got it. Over this past Christmas holiday, I took my SD to my parents place and tried to run Windows 11 on it to play the latest "Call of Duty" with my eager nephews. I was blown away at how I could buy an external SSD (USB3.2 2x2), install windows on it, and install and run a Triple A title with relatively little fuss.
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.
This article is nice overall, but it arguably misrepresents the influence of the PSP and PS Vita. Valve was just inspired by the surprise success of the Switch, so they decided to make a Switch-like gaming PC. For some unknown reason GPD (then the largest handheld gaming PC maker) staunchly refused to make a device with Switch form factor.
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.
Me too, and I was not expecting that. I've ended up spending hundreds on games through Valve's store that I wasn't expecting too, and I regret nothing.
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.
I discounted just how much I'd use the remote play feature while I'm at home for the extra battery life / performance benefits. Really impressed by the decode speed the AMD APU can spit out. Virtually no discernible input lag at all when I put the deck display next to my monitor to test.
It turns out that a big chunk of my steam library is ideal to play entirely handheld on the couch.
I got myself one recently. I haven't been able to play games for years due to time commitments, unwillingness to look after a gaming PC, etc. I fell in love with The Long Dark during a bout of COVID, and the Steam Deck allows me to play it (and many other games I since then enjoyed) when I'm in bed at the end of a long day. It also allows me to work through a vast library of games that I purchased discounted on various occasions and never had the time to play.
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).
Maybe this is an off-topic question - but has there been a device/vendor that has successfully shipped the traditional desktop Linux stack (Wayland/Pipewire/dbus/Qt etc.) on a comparably large scale before? Car infotainment, kiosks, etc. absolutely count.
If not, then the Steam deck is a historic achievement.
The new "Big Picture" mode has screwed with my Steam link. While I applaud and drool over the Deck, I wish they hadn't ditched support for Steam Link (hardware) and the Steam controllers. I don't need the Steam Deck UI, I just want my Steam Link to work like it has been for years.
I've been on an extended getaway trying to escape Wisconsin winters, so I brought my Steam Deck. I installed a 1TB SSD and created a 300GB Windows partition. At the end of the work day I can unplug my corporate laptop and plug in my Steam Deck. I'll do some .NET programming for a bit on a side project, and then jump on Valheim with friends. At the end of the day when I just want to sit on the couch or lay in bed I can undock and reboot into SteamOS.
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.
Anyone in the know about these devices care to suggest whether it's worth getting the top-end 512GB model, or is the 256GB one good enough? The SSD itself can be replaced, right? Anti-glare glass sounds nice but not sure it's worth the price difference. Anything else?
A common recommendation is to buy the cheapest 64GB model + SD card. Testers conclude that it's just as fast for games as the top model with the best SSD. So that's what I ended up doing and it's been working very well.
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.
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.
So, i unboxed a $2000 item on counterstrike, and because of their ecosystem, basically had to keep it in the "Steam Economy" so, i purchased the top end model.
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.
I hope they start distributing it to more countries at some point, I really want to get my hands on one.
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.
I purchased one recently. After one day of frustration trying to get at least one of my favorite games to work, I sent it back for a refund.
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.
As a reference point to others: I have a massive Steam library (>300 games) and every game marked as "Verified for Steam Deck" (~20%) worked out of the box. I also played many games marked as "Playable" (e.g. Fallout New Vegas) which also worked perfectly without any specific configuration.
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.
That was my experience as well. I was sticking to "verified" games (Crypt of the Necrodancer) and controls worked in the game's menu but not the game... using the developers official steam deck controller configuration. I updated the deck, redownloaded the game, same thing. I was holding a nearly $700 piece of hardware failing its first task and it was more tedious than gaming on my linux desktop because I had to troubleshoot with a controller instead of mouse and keyboard.
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.
I would have loved to tinker with my Steam Deck; it just wouldn't let me.
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.
Valve wisely filters out unsupported games by default, at least today, because compatibility can definitely be a challenge.
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.
> Don't buy this thing yet if you have a low frustration threshold. Don't listen to the fanbois.
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?
I've only had this experience with one game that was marked as not supported at all (Batman: Arkham Asylum). After first setting a different version of Proton for the game as per internet instructions I could not get past the startup menu at all. I tried all the buttons and got quite frustrated that I had to quit the game with the available shortcuts every time.
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 is more than ready, but it assumes some baseline skills to get the most out of it. It has awesome controls and its on-screen keyboard is alright, it is a game console after all.
In fact, Valve did an awesome job making it extremely usable and pushing so much performance out of such a platform.
What games were you trying? Valve is very open about what works out of the box, and it does work for those things. If you wish to push it beyond that, you can usually get it quite far, but sometimes it requires tinkering.
I'm not convinced that the Steam Deck is relevant for "PC Gaming". Sure, it's not locked down and you can use it as a general purpose PC, but that is not its primary purpose and most people won't.
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.
One minor but glaring thing for me is it’s really challenging to connect to any Wi-Fi (hotel, airplane) that requires accessing a webpage to acknowledge T & Cs. This seems like a core use case.
I was in a situation where my WiFi hotspot died and I couldn't launch any new games because I didn't have internet. The offline mode button didn't work because... I didn't have internet.
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.
switch to desktop mode, connect to wifi, kde should either give you a pop-up or you can just agree to the T&C from a browser.
you can even setup the browser to launch directly from game mode, i never did this though so can't walk you through.
When I did that, KDE did not give me a popup, and also there's no browser installed. Had to install Firefox over a phone hotspot. Not a great experience.
Love the Steam Deck but I wish we had been able to get an Nvidia GPU in there. For desktop it does not matter much but Nvidia mobile GPU's are killing it compared to AMD (as far as I know).
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
I think the Deck's AMD GPU is part of an APU, so CPU and GPU on one chip. That probably helps thermals a bunch. Also, I wonder how much the decision to use AMD was influenced by terrible Nvidia drivers on Linux
I would wager the terrible Nvidia drivers were a big factor. I personally won't buy another Nvidia card unless they make sweeping changes (like open sourcing it completely. Their open source announcement earlier is a good step but not far enough to win me back). I do wish the AMD pro driver were open source though.
As a dumb person with too much money, I avoided Steam Deck and instead went for a slightly more powerful and perhaps 4 times as expensive gaming laptop with AMD CPU and GPU. I installed Nobara Linux[0] on it and everything has been pretty much perfect.
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 happy to see the callout of the GPD win series - these days there are a lot of options for handheld gaming PCs, but for a long time, GPD was the only game in town.
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.
I really wanted to buy one of these. I created a steam account to buy one, made the purchase, but then I got stuck in their fraud loop. They required me to send a picture of my drivers license and I wasn't comfortable with that. Such a bummer because this is my ideal device! I want this more than any gaming device I have ever encountered.
I play PC games because I like having a comfortable gaming chair, a keyboard and a mouse in front of a large screen. I've never understood the point of the Steam Deck - if I want to play 'mobile friendly games' I'll use my switch, but the games are definitely not the sort of games I'd play on the PC.
I already spend 8 to 12 hours a day in that "keyboard and mouse" position for work... I ended up never playing any PC games (other than a few Civ games here and there) because of that.
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.
Sure, each to their own. I'd just argue that comments like the one that concludes the article, 'Could the 2020s become the decade when mainstream PC gaming turns handheld?' sound about as credible as the hype around how the iPad was going to replace the desktop.
I got the dock also and am running two 1440p@144hz monitors with the deck. Shutdown the PC .. do the same thing but using at least 2-300w less. In today's context it's a huge difference.
I wasn't playing any AAA...A anyway so the deck is just what I needed.
There's not a single mention of Wine in that article. Valve's contributions via Proton are certainly a game changer, but it's highly unlikely that they would've happened without literal decades of work before hand.
i might probably never buy one. but i am glad it exists and what it has done for many otherwise "niche" areas of gaming (low-spec gaming, gaming on the go and linux gaming).
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.
AyaNeo looks interesting but too expensive for me, and . I also adore SteamOS and it's Arch underpinnings, so Windows would be a downgrade for me as well.
That's the neat part, you get the entire steam library (not all of the old things do run or run well) but as an example of a good older game, Halo is awesome and all of them are around $15 on sale (total). And the graphics are somewhat improved.
I just don't have the time or willingness to have 1 location to play. Playing Halo anywhere and on the go or quickly hooking it to a usbc->HDMI port and Xbox controller for big screen is very, very nice.
I think the same. It may be headline-bias though. I hope dang and the mods are looking into the potential marketing bot army on this thread. Because the opinion here is extremely biased compared to anywhere else. I wanted to buy a Steam Deck myself, and I have never found a barrage of such positive opinion anywhere else, even on Steam reviews and forums.
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.
You have to add context to it.
Steamdeck is imho no device for your grandma or any non-tech savy user.
(Even in this i am not sure anymore for basic gaming.)
HN is a site full of very tech savy users.
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 am not screaming marketing bots. Another commenter pointed that out, and I wouldn't rule it out. It is a possibility I can entertain. But not really screaming marketing bots.
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 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.