No, I straight up had two different installation media’s fail until I went back and shut down windows fully. I’ve never run into that before on an install before.

First I tried ZorinOS, and it would fail to even boot into the live environment. I tried multiple times and even made a new install media. Then I tried fedora silverblue, it would get into the install environment but couldn’t do any kind of partitioning etc to the drive. I then rebooted to windows, shut it down fully, and tried again. This time fedora could edit the drive partitions, and zorin could load the live environment and install.

Previously I’ve had issues with shared drives being locked by windows, but this was the first time I’ve ever had an install fail because windows wasn’t shutdown fully. I don’t usually dual boot these days either though (I was setting up this computer for family) so I figured maybe something had changed with newer versions of windows or device security.

Currently, swapping the battery is one of the most complex repairs on the Deck,

Is it really? I know there’s some glue holding the battery itself, but otherwise my understanding is that the battery is really easy to access.

Make sure windows was shut down all the way. Normally when you shutdown windows, it only hibernates and it locks it’s partitions to prevent editing. I tried installing Zorin for a family member recently, and it couldn’t install until I booted back into windows and shut it down fully.

To shutdown fully, in windows you need to either hold shift while clicking the shutdown button, or open the run box and run the command shutdown -s -t 00

It happens to the best of us.

First, I would go to https://packetlosstest.com/ on your deck in desktop mode and see if it shows any issues. They have some game presets you can pick to hopefully test network traffic use similar to the games you’re having issues with.

Once you have a baseline test of how your internet is performing, some basic things to try to improve it are:

• Reboot deck and wifi router.
• Switch between 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz
• Try playing closer to the router and see if the lag goes away.
• Disable the wifi power management setting on the deck

Even if nothing has changed with the Deck and router, it’s possible another device in the house is causing interference, especially on 2.4Ghz networks. If the problem is something else causing interference, it can be really confusing to troubleshoot from the network side of things because the problems will be very intermittent.

Oh my bad, I accidentally skipped over that.

The default scroll settings now is circular scroll (where you move your finger in a circle on the track pad). If you don’t know it’s circular it will make it seem like it changes directions at times.

It used to default to swipe up/down to scroll, and the change in defaults has confused a lot of people.

If you have GE-proton installed, you can easily select it for any steam game by opening the game properties, checking “force compatibility tool”, and selecting the GE-proton version you want.

The tool ProtonUp-qt will also let change the setting per game as long as steam is closed. Just open “game list” and set the proton version per game.

To be fair, this isn’t normal proton doing it. In general GE-proton exists to do things that go against the design philosophy of regular proton or to include licenses libraries that can’t be normally included.

I don’t see any mention of it in the changelog, but I would expect there to be a launch option to disable this functionality as well.

Honestly I don’t remember having that issue, but it’s been awhile so it’s hard to say.

Main downside is that having swappable components adds size and cost, which is why laptops are so much less modular than full size PCs. For something like the Deck, which is trying to be as small and cheap as possible, I doubt we’ll see anything modular for a long time.

Valve could possibly sell upgraded motherboards that you could use with your original screen/etc. However before ifixit sold deck parts, there was a leak of the upcoming parts and prices. At the time, replacement motherboards were planned to be sold, but they planned to sell the motherboard for $350 (when the cheapest deck was $400). Ultimately they ended up never selling the motherboard, which makes sense when considering how expensive it was compared to the overall price of the unit.

That’s odd, I played Control on my deck and it ran great. You should definitely be able to run it on DX11, maybe try a different proton version if it’s refusing to launch.

That’s still for games sold through Steam. Most importantly, that’s for games that the companies agreed to sell through Steam.

If I was Valve, my biggest concern here would be that officially selling a tool for sideloading Epic games could be seen as approving of breaking Epic’s ToS. Epic is also very sue happy when it comes to attacking rival companies.

It’s available as a open source Decky plugin, but the steam version was going to be a paid closed source rewrite.

Were they public? I’ve been trying to find them on the homebrew server, and all I’ve seen is that someone joined the server, accused him, got him banned, and then left. I haven’t actually found any examples of what he got banned over yet.

Yeah it’s got some great additions in my opinion. It’s not as necessary as it used to be thanks to valve slowly adding in many decky plugins into standard SteamOS.

Some nice plugins for usability:

• autoflatpaks: update flatpaks from game mode
• battery tracker: track average power usage of games over time. Good for getting an actual average power use for games with a wide range of battery drains
• Junk store: install epic (and GOG if you spend $6) games from game mode
• KDE connect: get notifications from your phone, use your phone keyboard to type on the deck
• MagicBlack: turn off screen on the OLED version for saving power during downloads/etc
• Pausegames: lets you pause any game, freeing up resources without closing it. Lets you pause games that can’t be paused, run multiple games at once, and can fix audio issues when suspending
• Playtime: tracks playtime per game and per day
• protonDB lets you see what games will run on the deck, even if they’re not steam verified/etc
• powertools: lets you adjust cpu cores/clock speed etc. Lets you get super low power usage in some games (down to 3.5w or so), and fixes some games with bugged cpu speeds
• shotty: moves steam screenshots in pictures folder to make them easy to find in desktop mode
• steamback: makes backup saves of your games everytime you open or close a game.
• volume mixer: change volume balance between programs. Very helpful if you’re using discord/etc while playing.

There’s also a ton of nice customization ones, which I can share if you’re interested.

So I’ve been reading through the deck homebrew discord trying to figure that out. A user claimed he was racist, and got him banned/kicked out of Decky over it. However as far as I can tell, no evidence of him being racist was ever posted, and the user that got him banned left the server afterwards.

It does sound like he was quick to get into arguments with some other users, but that’s not officially what he was banned over.

There may be better evidence I’m missing, there are a lot of messages discussing it in the server, but I see several people there claiming that banning him without evidence was an overreaction, so I’m assuming there isn’t anything concrete that I’ve missed.

My personal opinion from what I’ve seen is that I think the ban should be reversed, it seems like a shame to deprive the entire deck community from a useful tool unless there’s something more concrete I’m not seeing.

Yeah, a lot of long term projects have rude maintainers it seems.

It’s probably a year or two out, at least. They want the Steam Deck 2 to be a proper power jump from the original, and there hasn’t been any significant hardware improvements that would allow that yet.

Other handhelds have more power, but they do that by dumping way more power into the chipset for increasingly small returns. It’s not really worth it to make a new Steam Deck with one of those chipsets because you would be trading off most of the battery life for any power increase.

There are unofficial imports, but they cost more and you don’t get Valve’s great warranty coverage.