Things you wished you knew before setting up your Deck?

Got a Steam Deck on the way, anything I should know before I dive in when it arrives?

Play games, not just tweak all the settings.

But that’s the best part.

Yes - there’s lots of stuff on the internet about tweaking settings for games. In my experience they generally run pretty well out of the box without doing anything.

Even controls I’ve mostly not had to do anything, only for a couple of games that are really not designed for console had to do any control scheme creation (e.g. FTL).

… and put a ridgeline and a pouch on the line on it so you have a place to put the Deck in when you need it off your hands.

With the dock, you can use it as a desktop computer.It replaced my old PC.

To go along with that. The right trigger is left click and the left trigger is right click. Also, left shoulder is Ctrl.

Those things changed my life.

And there other good docks. I just bought the jsaux one which is £40 rather than £70 and seems to work very well.

The cable that came withmy jsaux modcase dock was crap and kept dropping the display. I changed every cable until I realized I didn’t change that one and it fixed everything with the dock, except for usb3 not working

I’d do the same if the deck could handle my gaming needs at 3440x1440

Install Heroic Game Launcher for Epic Games Store and GOG.com.
Install ProtonUp-Qt. It is a tool to install different version of Proton (GE).
Install EmuDeck. It is a Emulation Suit for the Steam Deck. It includes various emulators.
Maybe avoid installing plugins at the beginning. Make sure your Steam Deck is working properly first.
Play Games (?).

Almost forgot, before everything, you should drain your battery all the way to 0% to recalibrate it.

To do that, drain the battery to 1%, and turn it off. Turn your Steam Deck on holding the Vol- button, you should boot into the BIOS. Leave it until it turns it self off.

Now charge it until completely full.

Why do I need to do that to the battery?

Because the SteamOS may show the wrong percentage, as consequence, you may experience poor battery performance.

I left my Steam Deck untouched for months, when I turned it on, it shown me 60% of battery heath, but doing the recalibration fixed the problem, and the battery heath increased to 86%.

If you have a USB tool to monitor the actual battery capacity, be sure to use it here. Then store the value somewhere you will be able to find later. Like maybe on the device or charger. Then you will be able to determine battery degradation at any point in the future and also determine if there is a problem with the hardware. For instance, if the battery is going dead in half the time it did when new, but the battery still holds 90% of what it did when new, your problem is not due to the battery.

You can check the battery heath in Desktop Mode.

But ye, good suggestion.

Does Heroic Games launcher work for all games on those launchers? Or is there extra configuration required?

I just installed and download the games.

if you happen to have a desktop PC and you play while at home, sometimes remote play on the deck is better than installing a game on the deck

I can remote play Elden Ring from my desktop at 60fps with longer battery life vs 40fps if installed on the deck with worse battery life

also make sure you try out reduced TDP and GPU rates on games with simpler graphics, you can get an extra 1-2 hours of battery life and not impact performance in certain cases

Another “if you have a desktop pc” tip is you can now install a game to the SD from the PC without downloading it from the internet again. I haven’t actually had a reason to try this, but I know it’s an option that seems pretty cool.

Oh shit how can you do this?

My internet at home is usually >3mb download, >300kb upload, and rate limited at 100gb a month. Worse up/downs when it rains.

I set up a spare phone to download files to a specific folder, then automatically backup those files over LAN to my desktop at home. When I go to a friend’s house with better internet I just leave the phone there overnight. This is working for everything except my steam games, which I don’t think I can download to a phone

If I remember correctly, if you go into settings on steam in both your pc and steam deck and set them to share the downloaded games. Then just click install as per normal on your deck and instead of downloading it will automatically drag the game from Your pc. I’m sorry I can’t remember exactly but it was really simple to do and I only did it once some months ago. I only managed 36mbps over my home network but still considerably quicker than my poxy home internet

Also if doing this sometimes remote playing over Sunshine/Moonlight has dramatically better performance than the built in Steam remote play. Seems to vary by game.

On the other hand, streaming from a PC means you’ll get massively better battery life since the deck isn’t handling the graphics.

@million@lemmy.world Tangentially related, Xbox Cloud Gaming works like a champ on the deck.

Is the game also playing duplicated on pc screen like with steam link or is it just a background process?

yes the game does run on the remote desktop pc and essentially streams the video to the steam deck

I’ll admit the use cases can be limited, but if you want the ability to offload processing for graphically intense games it works well

my desktop is hard-wired into my network so I don’t have any lag when using remote play on my steam deck

I’m not sure if both machines were wireless how the performance might be impacted

Any good guides to setting up streaming from Desktop to Deck?

It’s pretty easy assuming both of your devices are on the same network:

install a game on your desktop PC via steam
from your steam deck browse to the game in your library
instead of Play/Install you click a little arrow next to the button and then select the name of your desktop PC
the Play/Install button changes to say Stream, click that and it launches the game on your desktop and streams the video to your steam deck

if you have a good home network it is pretty much indistinguishable from playing it directly on the deck
I can play Elden Ring with no video artifacts or noticeable input lag

here is a guide which has some screenshots

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/remote-play-how-to-stream-games-from-your-pc-to-the-steam-deck

I use Windows with an audio interface on my PC, and I think that caused some audio routing issues when it came to remote play. I haven’t tried it again, might have been fixed

A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.

Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.

As Lemmy doesn’t have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title

The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.

Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.

These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.

Rules:

Follow the rules of Sopuli
Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
No piracy, there are other communities for that.
Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
Have fun.

Link to our Matrix Space

Things you wished you knew before setting up your Deck?

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