About the dock, I would add that if you want to do emulation stuff, a dock with kb/mouse makes it a lot easier. Can you do it with the trackpad and on screen keyboard, yes. Will you hate yourself for trying after 5 minutes, also yes. 😂 Maybe it was just me, I found doing anything other than basic settings changes nearly impossible without kb/mouse.
maaaaybe the dock (my friend is telling me to get one)
Unless you have something to replace its functionality with already, just get the dock. You are probably going to want to plug in a mouse and keyboard and monitor eventually; it's a full x86-64 linux computer with a desktop mode in addition to being a hand-held gaming console.
Personally, I usually use it more like a traditional gaming console (with my old xbox360 wireless controller plugged into the dock and hooked up to my monitor) -- that I can pick up and take with me occasionally -- but have written code on it and installed mods/patches that have to be copied into specific parts of a game's folder and such. Just being able to use it like a regular computer is nice.
I thought the case it came with was fine personally, but I've only traveled with it a little bit.
Fixed notifications stealing focus when shown in overlay.
Great that they fixed this!! It was very annoying, but not for Steam Deck, but for desktop wayland composers based in wlroots (eg. sway & co.).
This was the Github ticket, for reference: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/9458
On my PC running Fedora I had to manually kill a process called "DX Setup" after that it finally started compiling the vulkan shaders and then the game started.
I don't know why but Lutris has been consistently dependable at installing and launching gog games but installing them via heroic launcher has been hit or miss where it says it can't locate the install folder. Maybe I mishandled the mounting of the SD card but Lutris has been a simple way to install more gog games from my library so that's why I use it more than adding each non steam game one at a time.
You need a very high resultion display for each eye to make VR enjoyable. The steam deck is built with basically 720p in mind. A VR headset like the index has more than 4 times the resolution, and also needs to put out >100Hz to not make it a very rough experience. So sadly, unless its for some very basic games, VR on the steam deck is not super likely to happen.
I don't prefer it but it's very different for sure. I grew up with a Hitachi laptop that didn't have working speakers and so my NES and SNES games had no sound so I got pretty used to it.
These days as an adult it s just either or. Games with sound, great! Games without sound, so it is!
Unlike the others I do play without sound and its not as great but I still do it. I usually like to do side quests though as I don't want to miss cut scenes.
I spent 2K for a laptop with a 6900HX and a 3070 ti and I never use it for gaming (I need power for work). The Steam Deck is perfect for my use case and a generally amazing product considering it's in its first iteration. The only bug I encountered is the huge lag sometimes when the battery goes too low and I need to boot in the bios and reset the battery but aside from that (it does not happen often, is easy to avoid and fix) I'm really satisfied.
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