Ironically enough, it’s led to me playing more games on the living room television! The steam deck helped me adapt to playing with a gamepad, as opposed to mouse and keyboard.

Until they come out with a Steam Controller 2, I will say the best gamepad for steam is the Dualsense (a Dualshock 4 also works). It’s got one touchpad instead of two, but Steam lets you map the left and right half separately, which covers my primary use cases. I also installed the RISE4 remap kit, a hardware mod that adds paddles on the back of the controller which can mimic any face button. Not as good as having actual new buttons, but it does mean I can run and jump without taking my thumb off the right stick.

I play way more retro games due to packages like EmuDeck being so slick.

Games are same and playtime is same. Linux gamer even before steam deck.

My neck is more often sore.

I only bought the Steam Deck so I could play Windows games without having to give money to Microsoft, or pirate Windows. I’d much rather play games on macOS, but unfortunately, there are way too many games that don’t run on macOS (or used to run, but don’t anymore).

Now that Apple has their own Windows compatibility layer in the form of the Game Porting Toolkit, I don’t use my Steam Deck as much as I did.

I am a father of young children. Prior to my deck, I would be just too tired by the time the kids were asleep to go downstairs in my basement and play on my desktop. That just led to me playing games maybe once a week on the weekend.

Now that I have a deck, I can kick my feet up on the couch and play for an hour or two before bed.

Because of the deck I actually am able to make time to play games. Without the deck I just skip games altogether during the week.