Russ

As far as I understand, the steps you linked to are currently the only way to do this. Personally, it’s not something I’d be willing to go through. That guide explicitly states that if you accidentally lose the keys, you’re not able to disable Secure Boot.

Additionally, since the SteamOS kernel needs to be signed manually, this seems like you could run into some “fun times” when SteamOS updates the kernel and loses the signature. You’d need to re-sign the image every time the kernel gets updated.

To me, the risks outweigh the rewards - especially since we don’t know how well BF6 runs on the deck. Of course, at the end of the day its a choice you have to make yourself, but that’s my take on the matter.

Kind of. You could only open the menus IIRC when you were not in a game, can’t recall the exact key bind though. At least, this was the case when I tried replicating the gaming mode session on my PC (I haven’t actually used a keyboard on my deck either). It was quite strange.

Okay, was just able to test this with my Ally running Bazzite (which I did have with me, but was charged down). I was able to put it to sleep for a few minutes while in a town, after waking back up I got disconnected but was able to just log back in from the menu without a game relaunch!

I can’t say that I’ve tried to do that directly (I’m unfortunately not at my steam deck this moment to test), however I’ve been disconnected from the game servers before whenever they have to apply a server-side fix (or during general server issues) and it allowed me to rejoin without relaunching the entire game. So I imagine an Internet drop from putting the deck to sleep would be treated the same and not require a relaunch, unless maybe you’ve put it to sleep for an extended period of time (such as 24 hours) causing an authentication token of sorts to expire.

So far I’ve only had to do a full relaunch whenever there is a new patch available (if you try to rejoin instantly it’ll just tell you to update the game).

EHG has been putting a lot of focus on Deck related stuff, so I suspect even if it does cause a relaunch they’d be receptive to feedback to try to find a workaround on their side if possible.

Last Epoch! Haven’t had a lot of free time for gaming, so my progression of the season is slow - but I’m having a good time with it so far. Season 2 is definitely quite the breath of fresh air.

A lot of Rocket League! Additionally I’ve been having a pretty good time with Star Trucker.

Then recently I’ve been streaming Helldivers 2 from my PC to my Deck while it’s connected to the living room TV, which has been fun.

Try resetting your Firefox profile. Sometimes a weird setting can break browsers in spectacular ways.

This was a big one for me, for the longest time I could not figure out why I couldn’t get YouTube to play videos over 1080p for me in Firefox on my PC, it ended up being some weird setting that I changed in about:config (I sadly cannot recall which one) a long time ago - but I’d always copied my Firefox profile with me so that bad setting stuck around.

IIRC they also just recently launched a new setting that allows you to permanently set the target resolution for all games (this might still only be in the beta branch though).

Previously you had to go into each game’s settings from Steam, and change the resolution there (which might be how you missed it).

Thankfully I do have the Steam version! I made my Epic account far before they bought out Psyonix so I’m pretty sure my Epic account has been linked to Steam for a while, so it never asked me to explicitly login.

Rocket League! It plays at a smooth 90FPS on the OLED Deck which is really nice.

Additionally, some ARPGs - Last Epoch, Diablo 4, and I’m trying out Path of Exile (but we’ll see about that one) since I’ve been really into those as of recently.

I tried The First Descendant on the Steam Deck but unfortunately it seems to be just unstable enough FPS-wise, and for some reason the game completely disconnects you from the servers if your framerate is unstable for too long.

I can’t speak for Epic Launcher games (I know that Heroic Games Launcher exists but I’ve not personally tried it with Epic games) however Blizzard games absolutely can be played in SteamOS - you can utilize something like Bottles or Lutris to install the Blizzard launcher, and then download the games from it as normal and run them. It is how I originally played Diablo 4 on my Deck before I picked it up again on Steam. I swear I remember both Bottles and Lutris even having an “Add to Steam” option to integrate shortcuts directly into Steam (and thus, coming up in the Gaming Mode UI) but don’t quote me on that one.

Blizzard games are actually some of the earliest non-Linux-native games that I remember running very well back in the days where we just had Wine (before Proton, DXVK, etc) which is something that always impressed me.