That’s a big part of why I wanted one. Sure I can just use a laptop or build a small PC (hardware prices today notwithstanding), but the form factor alone is enough of a motivator for me.

Not particularly, it works great for what it does, but I much prefer the SRM approach. I don’t want to use a separate launcher for emulation when Steam is right there.

Honestly the only reason I’ve clung to Emudeck instead of Retrodeck is because it seems so heavily based on ES-DE which I don’t want to use whatsoever. Even their SRM support seems to require favoriting games in ES-DE.

Eh the password stealing shit definitely is but the special conditions for “israel” are hilarious (even if their code is borked and doesn’t actually work)

tbf the vast majority of that country support him and everything he stands for, so getting rid of one fascist won’t change much

It’s incredible how they had almost 0 scalper protections in place here. Like I think the Deck required a 30 day old account at launch?

Honestly same. I dabbled with Arch back in college but that was over a decade ago, and I just kept going back to Windows for everything but especially for gaming.

The deck was a bit of an eye-opener, I hadn’t kept up with linux news basically since I deleted that old Arch install, and I had no idea things were this good over here now. The deck convinced me to give a desktop distro another shot, and I’ve been daily driving CachyOS for over a year since.

I won’t lie, it hasn’t been flawless, as it’s a bleeding edge distro with a much smaller userbase than its desktop counterpart, but it’s served me well enough for 6 months or so now. Only ran into one major bug, which promptly reported after finally finding a workaround/root cause (i.e. steam’s background recording seems to break their latest customized gamescope).

If you like to tinker with your devices and SteamOS wiping out anything installed via pacman after an update pisses you off like it did me, then it’s worth a try, but if you literally just use it for gaming and never really touch desktop mode, it’s not really worth considering.

Hate to admit that when I first got my deck at launch, I immediately set up a dual boot just so I could play Destiny 2 on it.

Needless to say, I no longer play Destiny 2 or even use Windows at all on any of my machines. Hell, I even installed CachyOS Handheld on my deck over SteamOS for shits and giggles.

I’ve done a good amount of maintenance on my home server setup through my deck on the couch. Just a keyboard and the touchpad. Works just fine, no Windows needed. Basically just a weird shaped laptop.

And if you really do want to activate it (which is kinda worth it because some system settings are locked behind it), Massgrave takes 2 seconds.

Oh for sure. They’re no saints but they’re very far from the worst option out there, and they’ve been making some massive contributions to the linux space in general. I’d gladly grab something they made if they happen to be one of the first on the scene - look at the Steam Deck and what it’s done for the handheld space.

Yeah this is the important bit to me. Valve does good work and contributes to FOSS, sure, but I’m not going to blindly follow everything they do. Right now the Linux phone space just flat out isn’t viable for daily drivers. If Valve are the first ones to really address this, cool! But I’m not going to put them on a pedestal over any other options.

I’ve got 2 sitting around, never use it but it’s a neat gimmick and I know a lot of folks still swear by this thing. I love how all 3 of these new things are just major upgrades to hardware from like 2016ish

Par for the course for this country

Big vouch for streaming. I mostly use my deck at home so I can play on the couch instead of staying cooped up in the office after spending all day at the same desk for work.

The deck can run a lot of games natively surprisingly well, sure, but sunshine/moonlight are incredible. Even games that run fine natively, I’ll still typically stream to my deck instead just for the battery life.

I remember when I first got my OLED it refused to connect to my router until I disabled the 160hz band. That seems to be fixed now, but I wonder if they reintroduced that bug or something in the beta at some point.