this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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Steam Deck

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A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.

Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.

As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title

The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.

Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.

These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.

Rules:

Link to our Matrix Space

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Optionally, what would you have wanted to know before you bought one?

Thanks!

Edit: Hey, thank you all very very much for your comments and suggestions, I really appreciate. I will most likely save up more and get the 1TB OLED model rather than the LCD model I was initially planning on. A couple of reasons for that, one, I am not good with electronics and I'd probably screw something up putting a new storage drive in. And two this thing will most likely be a permanent replacement for my old gaming laptop, which at this point is more than 10 years old, and seems to be on its last legs (I installed Linux on it, which was a struggle, but that is probably on me rather than Linux or the computer being at fault).

Anyway, I appreciate everyone's responses and thanks for helping a gal out!

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[โ€“] Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Can you give an example of how you use them?

[โ€“] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 2 points 8 hours ago

Usually you use them to enable gyro, and automatically disable it when you aren't touching one of the sticks. Part of this is it lets you set the deck down without the gyro going crazy from movement, but the biggest part is it lets you "reset" your position. When using gyro aiming it's easy to get the deck turned in an uncomfortable position, and all you have to do is lift your thumbs off the stick for a moment, reposition, and go back to playing.

In comparison, when using gyro aiming on systems without capacitive sticks, you usually need a camera reset button (like Splatoon) or need to make gyro aiming only available when holding down an "aim" button (like LT).

You could also use capacitive sticks to change other controls. Some games have awkward menu controls, especially when using steam input to simulate keyboard keys. In games like this, you can have the controls normal for playing when touching the left thumbstick, but when you swap your thumb to the dpad instead it switches to "menu mode" with different binds to navigate menus easier.