I recently bought a Steam Deck and used it for about a month. Despite seeing various reviews on the device, I felt compelled to share my personal experience.

TLDR:

• In my opinion, the Steam Deck falls short in terms of user experience, and I didn’t find it very enjoyable to use.
• Unless you have specific purposes or needs for it, I would advise against purchasing it.

Device

The device is quite large and heavy. It should not be mistaken as a portable gaming device like the Nintendo Switch. According to the official website, it measures about 300mm in length and weighs around 700g. It is as long as a MacBook Pro. Holding such a bulky device for an extended period is not a pleasant experience.

After Tears of the Kingdom was released, I used to play Nintendo Switch during my commute to work on the metro. However, I would never consider taking the Steam Deck with me as it is too big and heavy.

I hope the next version of the Steam Deck will be lighter and more compact. Currently, I can only use the Steam Deck at home, and I can only play games for a short while (as holding it for a long time becomes tiring).

Games

The gaming experience on the Steam Deck is excellent. Since I use Linux as my daily operating system, tweaking the desktop mode and Proton is not a problem for me.

Recently, I played Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Steam Deck, and the experience was quite good. The game ran smoothly, although the display quality was not as good as on a high-end PC, it was still acceptable.

While the Steam Deck is capable of running AAA games, it is particularly well-suited for indie games like Dave the Diver. Since it’s a pixel game, the display quality on the small screen is comparable to that of a PC. In some ways, the experience of playing pixel games on the Steam Deck is even better than on a PC.

Additionally, the Steam Deck is suitable for reading visual novels. I have purchased some visual novels from DLsite, and they work well on the deck. Most visual novels don’t require a lot of information to be displayed or extensive operation, making them very suitable for the Steam Deck. However, there have been some compatibility issues, and some games that run smoothly on my Arch Linux may fail to run on the Steam Deck. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a solution to these compatibility problems yet.

Tips and Tricks

• A remote desktop like RustDesk can be very helpful unless you enjoy typing words in the virtual keyboard of deck.
• To install a non-Steam game, simply open Steam in desktop mode and then click on “Add a Game”. To install patches for non-Steam games, update the “TARGET” in the “Properties” of the game and revert back after installing the patches. (Don’t forget to configure the “Compatibility”.)
• Installing a patch for a Steam game is easy with protontricks.
• If you need to transfer files between your PC and the Steam Deck, try using miniserve. (The remote desktop may also be helpful in this regard.)
• The parent directory of screenshots: /home/deck/.local/share/Steam/userdata. Search screenshots in the file manager to get screenshots.