3 weeks ago, I spent the entire day waiting for the FedEx truck, and I got my Steam Deck! And boy oh boy, have I loved it since getting it. 3 weeks later and I still have so much to do with it. Some of the things I have done thus far include: replaying some old nostalgic titles I never played before, like Portal, and Half Life. I have also played nostalgic titles I have played before, like RCT1 & 2 via OpenRCT2, SPORE, Minecraft, and many more titles. The controller support on this device is awesome. You can find really good mappings for TONS of games made by the community in the controller settings. Some games you would never think would work good on the Steam Deck, such as Spore, or Minecraft, work great by using a community controller config.

If I had to gripe about anything, it would probably be that SteamOS is locked down. You CAN turn on writing the root fs, but it is not recommended or ideal. This is why Valve says SteamOS 3.0 is not designed for traditional desktop PCs. When you get SteamOS updates, SteamOS will usually re-enable rootfs readonly, and might even nuke any packages you installed via pacman. Now I understand why they’re doing this. It’s to prevent normal people who don’t know how tf Linux works from breaking their systems. That said, I wish there was a way to turn on a developer mode, like on Android, so you can keep the rootfs open between updates. But this is a minor nitpick anyways. You can always install your own Linux distribution of choice, or Windows on the Steam Deck, if you want. But I don’t see why you would, that seems heretical. It’s like installing anything other than macOS on a Mac.

I have also recently started emulating on the Steam Deck. Originally I was planning on emulating only old systems (like the NES to the N64/PS2 Era, but not GC). But after a bit of fooling around, I decided to emulate everything, from the NES to the 3DS and Switch. And I have to say the Steam Deck is quite the emulation powerhouse. It is even capable of running some PS3 games. You probably won’t be able to play Red Dead Redemption for PS3 on here, but it can handle something simplistic like Little Big Planet pretty well. Switch emulation runs super well on this device. So well, that I have to turn down the FPS cap to 30 in games like Animal Crossing, so the audio and video don’t desync. I am using emudeck to accomplish console emulation.

Looking forward, I have intentions of eventually buying a kickstand and wall mount from deckmate. That way I have an easy place to mount it to charge that isn’t on it’s dock at night, and so I can use it in tabletop mode similar to my Switch, with a steam controller or small bluetooth keyboard with a touchpad when traveling.

All in all, I have been very pleased with this purchase, and I’ve really enjoyed it so far. One thing I am aiming to do in the future is setup Origin so I can play some Sims on deck. From TS2, to TS4. Eventually I may attempt to emulate Windows 9x using 86Box on this device as well, so I can play classic Sims 1, and other classics like Zoo Tycoon, LEGO Island, etc. That’s all for now, but I will leave you with some pictures. 🙂

4 Week update: Welp the battery died and I had to send it in for a repair or replacement. This sucks. 🙁