I’ve heard the gulikit sticks are an upgrade from the originals, and they’re not supposed to be hard to install.

For the a button, a sticking button can frequently be fixed by spraying an appropriate cleaner in around the button. Usually it’s just debris or residue making it stick causing duplicate presses. My power button was sticking recently causing the deck to wake up and immediately go back to sleep, and I fixed it by turning the deck off, spraying a plastic safe electric cleaner in around the power button, waiting for it to evaporated, and then restarting the deck. It’s been fixed ever since.

For the plastic safe electronic cleaner, I would recommend CRC brand QD cleaner, it’s available at Walmart and most auto parts stores so it’s usually easy to find locally.

Some recent games I’ve played in that range are No Man’s Sky, Nier Automata, Doom Eternal, Yakuza 0, and Hades.

I’m perfectly fine with 30fps, my biggest concern is battery life. At 30fps I don’t really like to see a game go much higher than 15-16w of draw. Lower is even better.

Any game in that range can be pushed harder (higher fps, higher graphics quality, etc), but at that point it’s up to the player whether they want to prioritize battery, graphics, or smoothness. If you go above that threshold there usually isn’t much room for player choice in how they want the game to run.

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.

Sorry, the elite series 2 supposedly uses hall effect, but not the original elite apparently. I’ll update my comment.

Ok turns out neither of the elite controllers use hall effect, and I was completely wrong. My mistake.

Most of the stick caps sold for the deck are capacitive, they can even help you maintain a good capacitve connection because it’s easier to keep in contact with the rubber cover than it is to stay touching the depressed part of the stick cap.

As for the feel of the sticks, they use potentiometers which might be the cause of the feeling difference you’re talking about. I know some xbox controllers (like the ones on the elite series 2) use hall effect sensors. You can buy replacement sticks for the steam deck that also use hall effect sensors, they may feel smoother to use.

Edit2: apparently the source I read was wrong about the elite 2 controller having hall effect sensors. Disregard.

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.

There’s a setting (under developer options I think) to show advance update channels. Once you’ve turned it on, you can choose different update levels for both Steam OS and the steam client. The most cutting edge version of SteamOS is main, which will put you on 3.5. This has several advantages (including better shader handling and SMT being worth using in emulated games).

However, updating to the bleeding edge software update is not without downsides. Expect things to break fairly often. I tried the main update channel for awhile, decided too much was broken, and then found that something else that was broken was downgrading back to stable or beta. I ended up being stuck for awhile until the next update came out, at which point I was able to successfully downgrade. So proceed with caution.

Possibly try restarting steam or the deck, and then try the decky plugin again. Sometimes if plugins aren’t working a restart will fix it.

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.

There’s a company called Immersion that owns a lot of patents related to rumble/haptic feedback.

They recently sued Valve saying that the Steam Deck and Valve Index violate their patents and the Valve hasn’t paid for a right to use something that infringes on their tech.

If valve didn’t pay to license the tech, we can assume that they consider their feedback tech to be different enough from the Immersion patents that it was worth selling without licensing it. The lack of stronger rumble in the deck may be partially an attempt to avoid an additional license fee in a budget priced device.

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’m not sure on activating Maliit, but I don’t have recommendations for improving your typing experience.

Typing with dual trackpads is much more reliable than typing on the touchscreen. With practice it can be decently quick.

Another good option is using KDE connect, which will let you type on your phone keyboard instead.

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 is a decky plugin that let’s you adjust the volume of individual games. It might let you correct things like this from inside game mode.

Have you tried re-running non-steam launchers and reinstalling just the EA app? Hopefully it will install the latest version for you.

I had a 3-4 year old gaming laptop, and a mandatory windows update would corrupt the hard drive forcing a fresh install. I say mandatory because it installed no matter what I tried. Disabling updates in settings and registry never would prevent this update from wrecking my computer. I could get a few days to a week of use and then it would crash and require a fresh install.

I installed Ubuntu to see if it was a hardware issue, and it ran great. Years later when I finally got another computer I tried windows again, but quickly realized how many things I hated about windows. I deleted my windows partition and have never looked back since.

Honestly after seeing how much the 1080p screen hurts performance on the ROG Ally, I’ve decided I’m very happy with the 800p screen on the deck. I might be able to get some benefit rendering at 800p and upscaling with FSR, but 720p looks pretty great at this size imo.

That’s amazing looking. I really want one, but don’t think I’m willing to make the swap myself.

Might put just the back plate on. I was eyeing the Jsaux ones but didn’t like the hotplate.

I played through it before, and it ran great. I’d suggest trying the normal fixes:

1. Verify game files

2. Try a different proton version. I usually try both the highest version of proton 7 and proton experimental.

3. Reboot.

If none of those work, put PROTON_LOG=1 %command% in the launch options for the game inside the steam game properties. This will generate a log file in your home folder that you can share to help identify what went wrong.

If you’re wanting logs for a game that’s originally for windows and is running through proton, you can add PROTON_LOG=1 %command% to your launch options in steam game properties. It will generate a log file in your home folder.

This is the what I did. My wife still uses windows so I configured the mouse on her computer, saved the configuration, and have it working smoothly on my PC.

While it was easy to set it up this way, I really don’t like the idea of needing windows to configure my mouse though. I really wish logitech would start offering official Linux support.

3.5 includes a ton of new stuff, and I’m assuming it’s not all kernel based. Things like the saturation slider for example.

3.5 is a huge update, is just rather they shipped smaller parts of it more frequently.

They’ve been making steady revisions and improvements to the hardware since it was released. Better buttons, better acoustics on the fan, new heat shield, etc.

There’s no way to know when the next hardware revision will be, but if you buy it now you’ll be getting a pretty great piece of hardware that has had all the major kinks worked out.

It’s certainly possible their write distribution isn’t as good as SSD’s. Honestly it feels like there should be a bigger tradeoff I’m not seeing in my reading here, so I’m kinda hoping someone knowledgeable on the subject will jump in and confirm or deny.

But ultimately I don’t think that using a microSD for running windows is necessarily a terrible idea, sounds like it could work out ok.

Nicer microSD cards now claim to have comparable or better numbers of write cycles compared with average SSDs. Samsung claims their nicer cards have 100,000 writes per sector for example, while many SSDs seem to report having 40,000-100,000.

Unless I’m misunderstanding something it seems like running windows on a microSD should be fine. You can always go with a cheaper card too if you want low risk.

It’s pretty easy to pick them up on ebay, many people are selling them for around $20-30 shipped.

Windows doesn’t always play nice, windows updates will frequently break the bootloader and prevent SteamOS from booting. If you don’t plan to use windows as your main OS I’d probably recommend installing it to a microSD. Performance may take a bit of a hit, but it’s safer and much less likely to cause issues with the device as a whole.

Last I knew playing Halo MCC in coop still requires manually syncing your ucrtbase.dll files.

I made a guide for it on reddit, I’ll probably repost it here sometime.

That’s very handy, my case unfortunately did not come with any adapter like that.

I bought this Ivoler one, and it works really well while being super cheap at $20-25. It also has a large enough slot to fit a steam deck in a protective case, which was a plus for me.

The only downside to this one is that it doesn’t include Ethernet, but they have more expensive models that do. Personally I get excellent wifi where my dock is so Ethernet wasn’t worth the extra $10 or so.

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’m doing the same, have 4 Stadia controllers that I’m using as deck controllers now.

To test it, just set your update channel to main.

They released new hall effect joysticks that drive require soldering and work with both stick types.

It runs just like any other steam game, so you’ll need to set a desktop friendly control scheme from steam input.

I’d recommend doing the default web browser one. It has both mouse control, scroll wheel control, and several other useful keybinds.