Assessments

This page contains ramblings about different devices or items that I feel like writing about from time to time. They'd might be "mini-reviews" but that has a tone of permanence that I don't associate with the writings here.

Steam Deck

I received my Steam Deck on the ninth of September in 2022 after placing my reservation way back in February. It arrived in the 64GB flavour as I had a spare 512GB 2240 SSD from my recently-upgraded Surface Laptop Studio. It turned out to be a blessing as, at the current point in time, the Steam Deck's firmware doesn't have full dualboot capabilities. It is due to be released alongside Steam OS 3.0, but that isn't available at the moment.

Desktop Mode

What that means is that a typical user is restricted to choose between Steam OS and Windows as operating systems. I decided to use my time with the preinstalled OS as a means to demo its functionality out.

What a buggy train wreck it is.

Steam OS is a serving of Arch Linux which autoboots to a built-in UI for the Steam Launcher. It is meant to be used in handheld mode as a means to offer a handheld console-like experience for running Steam games... and only Steam games...

While it is possible to add non-Steam games to the Steam library, therein lies the majority of the problems I've had with the band-aid solution Valve adopted to transform PC hardware into a console experience.

Not many versions of software support Linux natively. The ones that do often have compatibility issues or different featuresets entirely. Proton, a compatibility layer for Windows applications to run within a GNU/Linux OS, has been employed to full this gap. However, the user only ever interacts with it via the desktop mode of Steam OS, which drops you into a KDE Plasma 5 desktop where you have almost full-reign over the system. Within a desktop, it sure would be nice to have easy access to a touch keyboard on this handheld device...

Access to your keyboard is locked behind a button combo. The keyboard itself is also poor; I found myself double or triple tapping on keys just to get it to register once. The UI doesn't always shift up, so you don't know what you're typing in a lot of scenarios. There were situations where I'd need a physical keyboard to escape full screen modes of some applications. In short, the desktop mode was an abnormally poor experience, partially in part of the nature of GNU/Linux based OSes. However, that, in addition to the PC's form factor, worked directly against each other.

Steam OS

Desktop mode is all but unusable. Moving on, I attempted to use the PC as intended, primarily within the Steam portion of the system. I considered myself to own a decent amount of Steam games; over $1.5k worth. The amount of incompatibilities and games that straight-up don't support the hardware made me feel as if I was a new consumer to Steam outright who didn't have access to anything at all. Some games with anti-cheat will refuse to function. For the games that worked, they worked as expected with no issues. However, as a Nintendo user, the button layout by default goes for Xbox-style buttons, where the bottom face button is the confirmation button instead of the rightmost button.

There's still no way to swap this within Steam OS itself.

The lack of customisability in Steam OS essentially ensured that no trace of it would exist on my 512GB drive.

Windows 11

After Windows 11 was installed, I have never looked back for a millisecond. I have full functionality with all of my games and usual software. Valve released a minimum amount of drivers, but these ensure almost full functionality of the handheld PC as a standalone workstation.

For the controller inputs, Valve does not have an official solution for applications to recognise the controller as a gamepad. However, there are open-source solutions for this. I have personally employed this Steam Deck Windows Controller Driver that seamlessly allows for use of the trackpads and buttons between Windows UI and as a gamepad in games almost perfectly.

I never actually went through the process the process of installing Windows 11 onto this unit. The SSD from my Surface laptop happened to have a working, non-encrypted installation of Windows 11 that worked without any fighting, out of the box. After the Valve drivers were installed, all that was left for me to do was to install/customise my gamepad drivers, update the OS, and remove the previously-installed bloat that I won't be needing on a handheld PC, like Photoshop. Weirdly, Wi-Fi worked straight out of the box, unlike the what the Valve website implies. I've not had to connect the system to Ethernet at any point.

I am more than satisfied with the device as it is running now. I have not had a single incompatibility with the software I've wanted to run; I'm able to run Epic Games Store software without fumbling with Proton or third-party launchers; all of my emulators are available and run almost better than the base console in terms of performance. I've even run Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in online multiplayer mode comfortably. I have a badge in the taskbar to bring up the keyboard if the UI doesn't launch it automatically. The typing experience is significantly better, though not perfect.

The Steam Deck Windows Controller Driver lets you map the buttons to keyboard keys, which I've used for both escape and the Windows key, eliminating any need for an external keyboard to bail me out. With these configurations, my Steam Deck is a fully independent and functional handheld Windows PC.

Paired with a kickstand and a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo, this may very well replace my desktop and laptop. If I were stuck with only Steam OS, I would have sold this machine.