Steam Deck

I’ve found playing games off an SD to be absolutely fine, even fairly demanding ones. The odd minor hiccup here and there but totally tolerable.

I’ve said this before I think but my own SD experiences have been hit and miss. Once a game is on it, it works great, no performance issues, but actually installing and downloading to it seems to have problems - trying to sleep while a download to SD is happening effectively locks up my system, for instance, and when it’s writing to it after an install it can take absolutely ages to finish. So if it’s a newer game with frequent updates I’m putting that guy on the internal storage. This is with a top end non-counterfeit SD. Other people have reported the same thing, but then others have had zero issues.

I wouldn’t personally go the route of upgrading the internal storage though. It works but seems like a lot of hassle for something that even Valve have kind of gone “yeah, maybe don’t do that because it could cause unforeseen issues”. I have replaced the fan though, and that was worth it.

It's only money that will be spent on a fpga optical drive emulator for my Saturn, I'll push that off and do the fan and nvme the same time. I'll get a model and wait until the black friday/fall of society sales.

I kept wondering why my R1 button wouldn't respond sometimes in games and on the steam menu I thought it was a lag issue. Turns out it's just fucked, and it's a common issue. Going to have to raise a ticket and send it off for repair

Actually, I'm not sure they're great for the deck. I find myself modifying them a lot, in particular I'm baffled by the "activate gyro when you put your thumb on the right stick" thing I've seen a couple of times, I want to activate gyro on L2, I have my finger on the right stick constantly and don't want double movement from it and gyro all the time...

I'm using a L2+gyro profile for Fallout New Vegas, which is from a community profile, but I've had to adapt it a lot more. Let me know if you want a screen of the settings.

I find the buttons on the back incredibly hard to depress. I pretty much can’t use them.

I though that too, until someone on YouTube pointed out I was using them in completely the wrong way!

I was trying to squeeze the part of the buttons on the grip section, but it's much much easier to press the bit the extends onto the back with your fingertips. Revelatory!

I think I’m doing what Tony said.

Holy fucking shit the onscreen keyboard is a joke on desktop mode. Wow.

Yeah it's terrible. I bought a small flat Bluetooth keyboard that fits nicely under the Deck in the case. I only ever use the on screen keyboard for one-off passwords etc, anything longer and the BT one comes out.

In the meantime I've set up KDE Connect to sync the deck with my phone, so now I can type on the deck with my phone. Pretty cool!

Lmao I got my deck a couple of days ago and that was my first bugbear. The keyboard in desktop mode feels like a bad joke.

Other than that I'm loving it so far. Got the other launchers configured, installed around 20 steam games and mainly been having a blast on Titanfall 2 and Vampire Survivors.

Well, that was much, much quicker than expected; just got a notification saying my Deck is available to purchase. I really expected I would have to wait until next year or at least the end of this year.

And I had pretty much decided a couple of months ago to not bother and bought a laptop instead. I had been meaning to cancel the order and just hadn't gotten around to it.

Not that I can't afford to get it, but it really does feel like something I probably won't get much use out of, when I already have a Switch for going out and about with, as well as the laptop for around the house away from the desk. Still tempting to just go for it...