Yeah, my understanding is that it's not an insurmountable issue, it's just one that the steam deck hardware team wasn't able to solve in a cost effective way.

As I recall, valve said that they wanted the battery to be more easily replaceable. The issue was that the battery expands and shrinks during use, and they couldn't find a good way to secure it that both kept it easily replaceable and kept it from sliding around during use. Ultimately, they had to use glue to hold the battery in place.

This is all fair complaints about Linux, but I don't really feel like windows is much better. I've had windows break on me or family members a lot over the years. Sure I've had some Linux distros break with an update and fail to boot (namely Manjaro), but windows has broken itself with updates dozens of times for me. The whole reason I started using Linux at all was because windows was breaking so often on my computer that I needed to try Linux to make sure my hardware wasn't defective.

You talk about having to fall back on the command line in Linux, but that's also true on windows without 3rd party software. I've had to use windows command line utilities to fix drives with messed up partitions and to try to repair my windows install after windows update broke it. A couple weeks ago I had to help a friend on windows do checksums using the windows command line because windows doesn't support that through the gui. Meanwhile dolphin on KDE let's you do checksums in the gui from the file properties screen.

I honestly feel like Linux isn't really that much harder or more prone to breaking than windows, people just have less experience with it. The smaller user base means there's a lot less help available online as well.

Right now it uses EAC, but the devs had mentioned plans to switch to Faceit anticheat. Faceit anticheat doesn't support linux and hasn't announced any plans to support it, up until now.

So basically Steam Deck/Linux players can play right now, but the assumption was a future update would block us from playing. This announcement means it's actually safe to buy and play without worrying about losing access next update.

I haven't tried Element X, but I'd like to recommend SchildiChat as a good matrix client for desktop and mobile. My understanding is it's a fork of element, but it works much better and more reliably in my experience. Element was very inconsistent about fetching messages for example.

To be fair, those are both issues with flatpak too. You can change the file system permissions with a command or flatseal, but I don't know of a fix for the password extension issue.

It's pretty great that "optimized for steam deck" is a worthwhile feature for games now. I was really happy to see it listed as one of the main selling points in the Dragon Quest Treasures ad email that Square sent out.

My understanding is that this compiles the shaders when games load their D3D shaders, rather than at draw time.

I believe steamOS 3.5 is making this default behavior for games.

There are some minor hardware differences depending on when you bought your deck and random chance. If you buy a brand new deck for example you may find you have a different heat shield than in most of the older tutorial videos for the deck.

Another example of differences is that two different styles of thumbstick were used, and until recently you were limited in what replacement thumbstick upgrades would work depending on which type you had (now they have universal upgrades that work with both kinds).

Every negative review of the Ally emphasized windows (and Asus armory crate) as some of the main negatives of the device. Windows gives a worse UI experience, has much higher passive power usage (which prevents you from getting actually good battery life times on low power games like Stardew), and makes things like the deck's suspend mid game impossible to implement reliability.

You also mentioned that Big Picture mode having most of the features, but it's missing the QAM and all the nice tools included with that. Asus Armory Crate is supposed to cover some of those, but has had a lot of negative feedback online for not working correctly or having significant downsides like massive deadzones. There's also a ton of nice features available through decky plugins that are very convenient to use mid game through steamOS.

Not to mention that having windows at all adds to the cost of the device. Average windows license cost for hardware manufacturers is around $50 if I remember right, and they charge more for more powerful hardware. That would be a huge price increase for something like the $400 Steam Deck.

I think SteamOS has a lot to offer, and the only downside (anticheat compatibility) will become a non-issue if steamOS becomes popular enough and companies start targeting it. I really hope to see it available on other devices.

I'd recommend this one by Corsair

It's faster and more power efficient than the stock one, name brand, cheaper than most, and I haven't heard any failure reports about it.

The Sabrent Rocket one you linked I have seen a lot of reports of it dying and complaints that Sabrent didn't honor the warranty, but it's hard to know how widespread issues like that actually are. The corsair one hasn't been out as long, so it's possible there's just been less time for negative reports to show up.

You might try cryoutilities and see if it helps. Sometimes drops like that are due to the system having to reallocate RAM/swap or other system resources, causing a drop. A lot of the cryoutilites addons are meant to reduce the frequency and severity of those drops, so it might help.

Otherwise your best bet is to enable logging of your performance data through mangohud, and whenever you have a fps drop check the logs/charts and see what happened.