Steam Deck

I'm not sure what sort of information do you expect... it's fun? It's just a portable PC, not much more to it, I love mine.

So I got my steam deck as a late Christmas present and I loved mine. One thing I do in 3D games is set the R5 (right bottom back button) to A so I can play stuff like Deep rock or no man’s sky and be able to jump while still being able to look around

Both the back paddles and the trackpads have so much customization (and the normal buttons if you want) being able to bind them to normal controls like I did with the jumping thing. You can also create menus for the trackpads, I mostly use it on emulators with save/load state, full screen mode, some utilities

You can also make the buttons emulate pc controls, when I was feeling particularly insane I got planetside on my deck and mapped joysticks to WASD and mouse movement and triggers as mouse 1 and 2 with my left trackpad 1-9 for equipment

One thing I like to do in shooters is a half trigger pull only activates the trigger but a full trigger pull does trigger and activates gyro

The only exception is deep rock since right trigger is mine so I have one of the back paddles be a toggle

As far as games go if you stick to verified and playable you’ll have no problem. The playable games sometimes have small issues such as small text (the deck has a built in magnifier) a 16:9 resolution leading to small black bars at the top of the 16:10 screen

You can boot into desktop mode and have a full on desktop environment, not some half desktop but like a full on computer. It does use a Linux system so I can’t really say much about that as I don’t use Linux on my computer. But I did get Emudeck going which has a ton of emulators ready to go and makes it easy to use in game mode (the mode where you’re not in desktop)

So I’m super happy with my OLED, I switched my Switch for in and have zero regrets. I play mainly on my PC and use the Deck for couch gaming mainly for games that don’t use mouse/keyboard, like older games, emulation, rpgs, twin sticks shooters, etc. I play most of the time in handheld mode.

But there are a few things I would wish they were better, some are personal preferences so take them as they are:

• I wish the screen was larger. Im in my mid forties and on games with tiny characters (e.g. Hades) thi is particularly noticeable.
• The back buttons suck big time, like really, you then go back to your controller of choice with back paddles and it’s even more noticeable how bad they are. In general the controls could use some better ergonomics.
• The whole dock situation is very broken in my opinion, especially if you compare it to something as seamless as the Switch. For several reasons: when docking, sometimes the image doesn’t fill the TV screen because the Deck is 16:10 and the TV is 16:9 and they have different resolution. There is a setting to mitigate that, sometimes it works, sometimes it’s not. And when it’s not you either have to deal with it or restart the game. HDMI CEC is a whole world of its own, you may have a dock that supports it or not and if not is a pain to deal with. Have a third party controller for when it is docked? Well, you’ll have to fiddle in the settings every time you dock or undock for it to work properly.
• The cloud save thing is finicky too. You will be surprised at how many games in your library don’t support it, well, at least in my library, probably because I play lots of older games. But even in the games that support it, it lacks a lot. See. The point of cloud saving would be to be able to seamlessly switch between your Deck and PC and vice versa and continue playing there, right? Well, not quite. In order for Steam Cloud to work you need to EXIT the game first (and pray that the game you are playing allow for saving freely anytime), then wait a few seconds for it to sync (sometimes up to half a minute). It might sound picky but you are playing on the Deck, you want to just press the standby button, leave it resting on the dock and go play to your PC. Well not so fast.
• There are other minor gripes like when sometimes it takes an eternity to wake from standby or when the mouse doesn’t work on desktop mode for some reason and you have to keep the Steam hey pressed for it to work.
• Getting your GOG, Epic or Amazon games to work is not always as straightforward as Heroic Launcher makes it seem and sometimes you’ll need to troubleshoot stuff.

Is still a great machine that allows your entire PC library on the go and works great on all games I throw at it but my point is that it is not as seamless as some people want to make it look. It is not a console and it shows. I don’t have a problem with that but it is worth noticing it.

Controversial opinion, but if cost isn't an issue then a steam deck isn't a great buy. It fills a niche for sure but honestly a gaming laptop with a gamepad is 100% more useful IMHO.

I struggled to find it anymore portable than a laptop is and worse performance/screen/utility in almost every measurable way.

It's incredible as an emulation machine. And emudeck made it incredibly easy to set up.

Also, kinda silly but I regret not switching to Bazzite OS earlier. I still have not done it. In theory it's got several benefits over stock SteamOS but being comfortable, I haven't put in the effort to try the new thing.

If you are planning to buy steam DOCK, don't. It has been a complete shitshow.

Updates fails dozen times before finishing without crashing. Sometimes you need to disconnect power, so it switches to deck power for the update process even start and same trick works, if the dock refuses to see the external displays. Connect power back after it spasms in the right direction.

30 euro garbage from local supermarket works better.

Look into framegen. It actually works quite well and can make the difference between 40 fps not stable to 60 fps stable. It will introduce some artifacts, but on this screen size they are quite negligible.

The multi user experience is really bad if you share any games

If you aren’t familiar with Linux I would spend a little bit of time in a BASH shell playing around with commands. You really don’t want to be stuck in a scenario where your steam deck cannot boot, for some random reason, and all of sudden you know no commands to troubleshoot with or a brief idea on the structure of the filesystem.

I don’t own a steam-deck personally but I always recommend this advice for anyone moving into the Linux ecosystem.

Best of luck.

Edit: Seems like SteamOS is on a whole other level of stable, while I still recommend this advice it certainly isn’t mandatory. Thanks to others who provided feedback.