I have the OLED 1TB version for a week now and I finished Miles Morales on it.

It looked and played wonderfully. The power of a HDR PS3+ in the palm of my hand. Playing HADES on it is good. Touch screen is very responsive. It’s built so it keeps your hands away from the hot stuff so you aren’t sweating on the grips. It feels suprisingly light.

The controls feel comfortable and responsive. It is versitile. Got a gaming rig in one room and want to just chill on the couch or bed - it can stream the game from your rig to the Deck and take a 4 hour session to 10 hours. They worked out a lot of problems with thier streaming games since their first attempts. I’m in a pretty crowded wifi area with my neighbors and controls felt (0 It charges up pretty fast too. Have yet to see how the dock and 4k screen do so I can’t say to that yet.

Copy paste on the virtual keyboard I havent quite figured out. Bit of a PITA trying to bypass EA launcher but those are few. I’m having some difficulty trying to tether it to my phone net. Not sure if its a me thing or a Deck thing. So seek more info if you want to connect it to a cell for those “I need to beam home to the mothership to play a single player game…games.”

It has the latest bluetooth and wifi capabilities.

RTS games…they’re doable…but it’s rough. Probably better with a bluetooth mouse.

Audio is ok. It’s not Dolby Atmos virtual surround, but it’s functional to do the job. Voices are clear. Music is good. The bluetooth option can be used to beam to external headphones or speakers. It has a USB C port and a dedicated old school headphone jack. You can connect an external keyboard if you want.

It has a linux desktop behind the scenes you can access to tinker with everything or run your own say…emulators. i don’t know enough how to yet so I can’t attest to them, but it’s got enough under the hood to run most.

You can tweak this thing any which way you want. They let you have full control of the experience and are pro self repair. Either preset or customize the power, the display, the graphics. It’s all open to you if you want. Haven’t needed to use that and dont plan on it maybe except a larger nvme down the road, but I think an SD expansion will do for now.

It’s a great comanion to take my games library on the go with me. Especially on the off shifts or on trips away from home. There is an opt in user experience that would ask you if the game ran ok. Then there’s a feedback option in the main deck menus for bugs and such.

While it’s not perfect, I am happy with it for what it sells itself as and what it can do.

Yes I think this is a game changer for linux gaming. Granted its through Proton, but the games work.

It think it’s great, already had a ton of time playing many of my favorite games multiplayer on the couch, or in bed, or when travelling.

Don’t really care about desktop mode, but I’m glad it’s there so I can go behind the curtain and configure discord and emulators and stuff.

I really really wish they would implement CEC so my TV can turn on and jump over to it from my Roku or Switch automatically.

They need to find a way to do better than Bluetooth controller support. It’s a bit laggy for games like Rocket League, and I wish it could wake up the device and kick in the CEC (see above).

Getting it to show up on my TV when docked took a bit of poking (I think I had to force it to use 720p).

I know I spent a lot of time on the “rough edges”, but I have no regrets at all about the purchase. It’s a “very good” device that will hopefully get even better.

LCD, got a 256gb second pre-order batch but I got mine sooner than a lot of the first batch people. Probably because I’m the only one in this and several surrounding zip codes who would have bought one.

Love it. Very easy to use. Takes some remapping of your brain for controls but if I spent enough time using it it would be faster with the dual track pads than I ever was using the clit mouse on my old Dell laptop which I put at least 1000 hours of mine craft with since that was one of like 5 games than ran on Linux in 2010. I’ve always used KDE so I’m very happy.

I don’t think it helps with adoption as far as users wanting it goes, but it does help in that there’s millions of dollars and a huge market that’s now behind Linux gaming. Users just want to play games easily.

Steam has severely decreased in quality but for me they make up for that with consistency. They’ve done a lot of great stuff, they’ve had some major flops, they’ve stopped making things that people demand they want. But at least they’ve stuck around and still don’t seem like they’re going anywhere. Only hardware(including consoles) manufactures have been able to stay in the gaming market as long as valve/steam has.

Have always loved handhelds and portable computers in general, something novel about them to me and they are super convenient. I got my LCD 512gb steam deck back in march of last year and it’s easily become my favourite handheld, dethroning my beloved PSP 3000. A couple reasons why I love it.

1. It plays all my games - This point is going to be hit or miss depending on what type of games you play and how much you are willing to tinker to make things work, but in my case the deck has been able to play every game i wanna play with acceptable performance.

95% of stuff works outta the box with the rest working with 1-5 minutes of tweaks from protondb. The “Unsupported” tag often just means “Needs some tweaks to work” or “you won’t be able to play online” in my experience. The only game I could not get working was deadly premonition 1, which is a notoriously shoddy pc port that struggles to run on modern windows systems anyways. Thanks to the deck being great with emulation however, I was able to play the switch version just fine.

Speaking of, absolutely stellar emulation handheld. Everything pre ps3 worked mostly flawlessly (the exception being saturn which needs some messing around to get some games working, just the nature of saturn emulation tho.) ps3 is hit or miss, some games run perfectly, others with frame dips, some unplayably slow and a handful just crash immediately. Switch emulation mostly works, but a handful of games have issues or unacceptable performance. let both ps3 and switch games compile shaders the first time you run them, performance gets better when you are a lil bit into a game.

3rd party pc games work well provided yer comfy with navigating desktop mode and the dolphin file browser. Was able to get my GOG library up and running with heroic games launcher. Itch.io and Archival Backup games I just added manually to steam via it’s add non steam game feature and enabled proton in that game’s steam settings. Lutris helped for some edge cases like silent hill 2’s enhanced edition fan mod.

Overall, i was able to play whatever i wanted on the thing. Which is great if you like going after and playing old or obscure games that haven’t seen releases on stuff like the switch.

2. Customisable with not a ton of hassle. Out of the box you have brilliant steam input support. The ui is presented in a way that makes it easy for tech newbies to bind a button or two for a game to the back buttons while still allowing maniacs like myself to create elaborate setups with gyro controls, touchpad menus, contextual inputs, automated actions etc. The ability to share layouts also means even if a game needs major mapping to play on the deck you can just download someone elses who has already done all the work for you if you don’t wanna.

For 3rd party customisations. Decky is easy to install and opens the flood gates with addons with custom ui’s, The ability to change your boot and sleep videos, Ability to change your system sound effects and add background music to the menus, custom loading icons, custom game art, easy music control, easy bluetooth device pairing, discord game status. You can pretty much redo the whole user experience in 20 minutes with minimal computer knowledge.

3. It’s an improvised computer in a pinch too. a cheap usb c dock, keyboard, mouse and display with desktop mode make the deck a pretty nice desktop if you need a semi portable pc solution or like to LAN with yer mates. You can totally live with the deck as your main pc if you are comfortable with KDE, Linux and getting strange looks when you take out your games console to give that PowerPoint/Impress presentation.

Desktop mode with no accessories is an okay experience provided you start steam in online mode while using the desktop, otherwise you won’t have your on screen keyboard for some reason, it’s not ideal but if you just need a desktop for one thing or just wanna watch something it’s completely serviceable.

I was really impressed by the deck, and if you play handhelds enough to justify spending €400+ on one the deck will probably be worth it for you.

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