Hey everyone,
I just wanted to share my first impression after coming from a Windows Gaming-PC and how my worries about linux ended up being true (or not). I ended up getting the OLED 512 GB so that’s the device my impressions are based on.
What I was worried about before getting the device:
- Having to tinker with Proton all the time, finding the right version for every game
- Having to set up control schemes manually for every game, that’s not supported on deck
- Receiving a device with greenish screen in dark areas, as I read about that issue here
- Receiving a device with pixel errors
- “Performance might not be good enough”
So, how did it turn out after the first day of tinkering around?
Proton, Controls and Performance:
First of all I installed a bunch of games and didn’t think about proton at all. I didn’t activate a special proton setting anywhere. Result: Every single game I installed ran perfectly, right out of the box. Even Heroes of Might and Magic V, which is consideres unsupported by the Deck, just started and was playable without doing anything except installing the game. Even the highest rated community Profile activated automatically and I could see in a nice graphic which button does what. I didn’t expect at all it would be so easy. The Games I installed where:
- Heroes V as mentioned
- Dark Souls 3
- Crysis Remastered
- Tomb Raider 2013
- Rise of the Tomb Raider
- Prey
- Doom
These where the games I tested and it turned out that I don’t have any hassle with any of them.Performance where great through the whole lineup. Both Tomb Raiders are easy to get between 70 and 90 fps on native resolution without even setting everything on low. Rise of the Tomb Raider is running on medium-high setting stable on 70fps without FSR. Realtalk, this is surreal. i remember a few years ago, that my pc struggled to reach 60 in that game on medium settings.
All the other Games run flawless as well, even Crysis running at stable 90 frames on low. The good thing is, and I underestimated this SO much, that you don’t even really see a difference on a small screen like this. You really have to search for the differences between Rise of the Tomb Raider on Ultra VS on Medium and the fps difference is like 40 vs 100fps. Even on low, every game look gorgeous on that screen and perfectly playable. Until now I used a PC with a RTX 3070 and a 1440p Ultrawide Monitor where I always tried to crank every setting possible to the max and had an energy consumption of about 900W for my whole setup… Now I’m at 15W on the Deck and I’m really questioning if that PC is still necessary. (Except for the newest highest End games like Alan Wake 2 maybe)
How is my screen you may ask?
Perfectly fine! It might be very possible, that what’s posted here on reddit is a small percentage of people having problems, while people who get a good device are all quiet. My screen gets dark as night without any sign of green artifacts or faulty pixels.
Addtitional stuff worth talking about: Linux is awesome. I’m seriously considering changing my main rig to linux, after doing a bit of research how Games run on a ‘normal’ pc. The whole OS seems so damn thought through, there are no popup warnings and everything is so snappy. (Even coming from a Windows PC with a samsung 980 pro m.2 SSD and Ryzen 7700x)It’s the small things that stand out for me sooooo much but make life so much easier.Also you get to feel what perfect freedom means again, after windows becamer more and more like apple and tries to dictate the user what he is able to do with his PC. There really is a special vibe especially when using Desktop mode. Though you still get what I’m talking about if you experience first hand, what you can even do while gaming.Just think about a nintendo switch letting you change your tdp, show your cpu-core-clocks, change GPU-clocks and stuff like that. Just unimaginable!
Even things like the ‘explorer’ (Dolphin here) are kind of a Wow!-Moment. you can customize literally everything on that device and it makes me so damn happy to finally have bought that thing after over a year of thinking “Is it really worth it?”
Yes, goddamn, it WAS worth it all the time and I hate myself and my electricity bill for not getting that thing a year ago already!
That’s my tiny little loveletter. Hope you liked it. Have a great day!
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The whole OS seems so damn thought through
Go to the file explorer, open a directory; let’s say the "home
directory. Make the size column visible. What’s this? It says how many items are in it. Now sort by size. What? It’s sorting by how many ITEMS are in the directory, not the actual storage size of the contents?Remember:
The whole OS seems so damn thought through
Now try saying that again…
It’s a robust and customizable OS, yes. But there are ton of things that are counter-intuitive, or require more than the average casual computer user should need to do. I can use it, but I wouldn’t give a non-techy family member that OS to use.
In regards to Proton:
In my experience, messing with the proton version is only necessary for brand new games. Often Times switching to Experimental already did the trick in case a game wasn’t launching properly. Once a newer proton build for the regular version releases, that can be changed back and games will run… usually.
What’s weird is I got an OG Steamdeck when they first released and Proton was an absolute shxtshow and 90% of my games with anticheat or other crxp wouldn’t work or would then not with the next update, so I went to Windows 11 Pro to solve that. Wish I hadn’t because SteamOS and Proton is so much better now, better than Windows for Windows only games too 🤷🏻♂️
Pretty sure if you factory reset the device you can return to steamOS
TL;DR I love it very much
I got my steam deck in July of 2022, The steam deck is what convinced me it was time to switch to Linux on my desktop. Haven’t even considered switching back to windows. That being said Linux isn’t for everyone, I’ve had my fair share of problems come up that I’ve had to reach out to the forums to solve and I am by no means a power user.
Glad you’re liking it!
There’s a lot of needless worry over Proton. I simply do not understand why.
It’s not like rolling back BIOS or installing outdated drivers because the new ones break everything, etc.
Check out these:
Users often (not always) post their working Proton version for any particular game on ProtonDB. There’s even a Decky plugin for ProtonDB so you don’t have to leave gaming mode.
Install ProtonUp-QT from the Discover Store and it’ll scan the games you have on your Deck and recommend which version to use, if that game is in ProtonUP-QT’s database.
And for any itch dot io game, just always use GE. It’s a miracle. You’ll find many useful tools along the way and yes, Linux is the only way to go, IMO.
I feel like the proton concerns are vastly exaggerated. It’s not at all complicated; it’s as simple as downloading it from the Steam Store or ProtonUp-QR and applying it to the game. But you’d think it’s something that’ll take hours to do, based on how people talk about it. In reality, it doesn’t even take more than 50 seconds to download a version and apply it to a game. You don’t even need 30+ versions, either. You could literally run 1-3 versions across all your games
I’ve seen the Proton downloads done automatically (my system and myself are very new) when installing a couple of games but didn’t know anything had to be applied. Can you please elaborate on what one should do with these modules aside from installing their games? Thanks
All you really need to do is go into game properties, compatibility, then select from the list of what’s available. And you could download more versions if you want. And that’s it. Its not a long process
Is Rise of the Tomb Raider good? I wasn’t sure which ones to get after the first reboot.
FWIW my favourite games so far have been Sniper Elite 5, Hitman 3 (although those hammer the battery), CrossCode, Baba Is You, Into The Breach, Tetris Effect Connected.
And I’m yet to try Dragon’s Dogma and Hades.
I find I really struggle playing shooters without a mouse now though. Like Max Payne 3 and Half-Life were both too awkward / difficult really.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is amazing. All of the new Tomb Raider games are. Kind of like Uncharted (Espacially Uncharted 4), if you played these but with a satisfying bow and arrow and a little bit more riddles than action. Story is pretty good as well in all of them. Had a great time with these games!
I’m also blown away with mine the games I can play without issue was already insane but even with some light tinkering I’ve got a few of my all time favorites running well in my hands. The possibilities are endless with this thing.
Everytime I see Prey, the recent one being mentioned I get the urge to reinstall and play it again. Arkane at its best. Still feels weird to consider playing it on a controller.
I played it on PC once. Then my Save-File corrupted about 15 hours in and while I loved it like few other games in the recent years, I never got over myself to restart from the beginning. I think now might be the time. :D
If you loved Prey, I highly recommend System Shock 2! My number one Game of that Genre, and I think I’ve played them all. The graphics can be kinda weird today but the gameplay didn’t age at all, the story is amazing and you’ll get to see one of the most iconic antagonists in video game history. :)I’ve only played it on a controller, and let me tell you - it’s perfect haha
I’ve had mine since last September. So 14 months? It is still my favorite purchase. I use it daily. Never had a single issue with it.
It’s cool to hear that you’re thinking to switching to Linux on your desktop. I do want to offer a little caution that if you are switching because it will “make life so much easier” like you mention as a benefit. In some ways, it definitely will be. But you will also likely run into issues where it makes life harder and you will end up needing to do more research on how to get something done which might be easier on Windows. You might be the type of person who enjoys that kind of tinkering, or it might irritate you. Just something to be aware of. You’re, of course, spot on about the freedom it affords you. I’m running Linux on my main desktop and I really enjoy it, but I just wanted to give you a heads up that running it on your own desktop does take away a bit of the curated environment that you get on Steam Deck. But if you like learning new things, it can be a really enjoyable experience. Good luck if you decide to go through with it!
Always nice to hear about someone’s first experience with the Deck and what stands out to them. Happy gaming!Thank you for your heads up!
I just thought about the bit of tinkering and windows being easy to use but the first thing coming to my mind reading the words “Easy” and “Windows” together is how much time I’ve spend already just to disable the ‘firewall not active’ popup everytime I want to do something where I just want my firewall turned off for a moment, which happens kind of frequently. I think the time I’ve spent with that topic alone might be counted not in hours anymore but in days. - Without a solution in sight that disables these notifications all and for once.
I’m working as IT Sys-admin so tinkering is kinda part of my job which I love. But I love it more when I do it for something productive instead of trying to disable annoying messages my OS thinks I need to be aware of. :D
I hate Linux, I’ve built computers for decades (yep old) and done some programming and yet I can’t under why most of my peers like Linux, it’s awful to use. So I was real worried about the deck being Linux based.
…yet I find no issue with it on the deck as it stays out of my way and doesn’t constantly require hours of tweaking to get it to work like Linux usually does.
doesn’t constantly require hours of tweaking to get it to work like Linux usually does.
When was the last time since you used Linux? And for what?
I seriously think the “hours of tweaking to get it to work” is a myth a lot of Linux users spread to make themselves feel “elite.” Apart from switching distros from Ubuntu to Fedora I haven’t had to tweak anything after installing for about 20 years. Not even on my laptops.
My main issue has always been hunting down drivers for various pieces of hardware, then getting those drivers to actually work.
I once dual-boot my desktop (Windows/Manjaro). After an update, Linux stuck in boot-loop, turned out to be some Nvidia driver issue. Many suggested solutions but none seems to work. Linux is fun to explore but could occasionally gives weird issues that you might scratch head for hours
True. But (and I’m not bashing on Windows here) have you not ever had a problem on Windows that made you scratch your head for hours? I can’t even think of a single (not built into ROM) OS I haven’t had to resort to just reinstalling to fix a problem at least once. Even with Windows sometimes a different version.
Also tbh, no matter what some will claim, suggesting Manjaro for a first time user is stupid unless you know for a fact it will just run on their hardware. Really better to suggest Fedora or Ubuntu. Yes they’re “boring” and “corporate” (or almost corporate) blah blah blah but they have the big money behind them and easily googleable problem solving search results.
Nice post, the only thing stopping me from going steamOS on my gaming PC is 1) state of nvidia drivers 2) lack of being able to install gamepass games
All I can say is I’m excited for how you sound excited too because I got that similar first surprised beyond doubts feeling! Have fun😄😄
Haha, thanks, you too!
I can’t imagine not to be surprised by that package though. :D
I agree that the deck gets away with a lot due to the screen quality and size…
I just got my first deck this week too (same model as you) and Cyberpunk was one of the first titles I was desperate to play.
I read so much online before my deck arrived about the steam deck quality preset being bad, but for me it looks fine!
Maybe it’s my untrained eye, or the fact I’m coming from a Switch… or that I spend a lot of time playing ‘old’ games still (eg. vanilla Skyrim) but personally I’m still in awe of 1) being able to play a game like Cyberpunk on a handheld device and 2) how great it looks even on low settings.
Right?! Low settings on that small (OLED) screen look somehow even better that medium-high settings on my PC-Monitor. Of course being OLED is a huge factor because colours and contrast are much better but even things like object counts an stuff like that are much more appearant on a large desktop screen if they’re missing.
In my opinion the brilliant colours of the screen have way more effect to the overall quality than pushing the settings from low to high and getting a few more objects or sharper textures (That you don’t even recognize that much on such a small screen anyways) out of that.
Speaking of desktop being easy, has anyone tried it with a USB mouse or keyboard? I love the controls but they feel a bit awkward when on desktop mode.