that is not purchasing advice. it is a thing i’ve done however. so for context i was looking for a handheld, one considerably more capable than a switch, now that x86/64 handhelds exist it would be nice if said handheld was one of those since the vast majority of my games are built to run on that architecture, preferably not windows though, and preferably not as thick as a brick. i didn’t need one that was too powerful, just good enough to run what i want to run at actually playable framerates, i wasn’t looking for an amazing oled high refresh rate screen because i’m perfectly fine with using 60hz lcd displays outside of vr, and having a low amount of storage would be fine cause x86/64 machines tend to be fairly known for their upgradability. i did look at other handhelds before deciding on the deck but between their high price, high amounts of power and high spec screens that just don’t make sense for my use case, and as said earlier the thickness that they tend to have (and the weight that tends to come with it) that base model one sounds good to me.
so it arrived fairly quickly after a delivery guy turned up claiming to be from the courier that was delivering it only for them to disappear and for another dude who actually was from said courier to turn up. thinking that was an absolutely outstanding experience, i get it off the dude who actually had it and plugged it in to get it out of the battery storage mode it gets shipped to you in. i turn it on, let it update and log into my steam account, and then go into the desktop mode and use it to flash a bazzite image to a usb that i then installed over steamos.
my reasoning for using bazzite as opposed to steamos for the most part are just a few smaller things that for me add up. bazzite supports hard drive encryption, so by using my phone as a usb keyboard emulator i can keep it encrypted using a very long and very secure password which makes sense to me since it is a portable device that often sees reports of it being stolen. it won’t stop anyone from just overwriting the drive with another os of course but it will stop them from accessing my data and that’s what i’m worried most about. they claim to ship the newest software available, unlike their claim that steamos only sees bi-annually updates to system packages. they allow you the choice between kde and gnome which i like because i feel gnome works better on portable devices. you could certainly argue that steamos isn’t really the os for me. it certainly isn’t targeted towards people like me and that’s a good thing.
now, the hardware itself. plenty of people now have made the comparison between it and the wii u gamepad and since i have my 5th wii u on the way i thought i’d also mention the similarities between it and the wii u gamepad. the sticks being at the top of the system feels as nice as it does on the gamepad (although i must admit i don’t use them much, i’ll talk about that in a second), it feels as good in the hand as the gamepad does too. naturally it’s a bit heavier than the gamepad but it’s not uncomfortably heavy, whenever i need to hold the device in one hand for a second to grab a drink or something i’m perfectly able to. the trackpads are amazing. absolutely fucking amazing. they’ve completely replaced the sticks for me and i can’t wait for the new steam controller to come out because of them. they’re incredibly customisable just like the rest of the device’s controls, a lot more comfortable to me than a stick is because it’s naturally a lot closer to being flush with the case, and they can make navigating the os so much nicer than if they weren’t there in certain cases like using a mouse in desktop mode or text entry with the on screen keyboard.
performance? pretty good. at least for what i do with it. mostly a lot of indie and older games, really quite easy to run stuff. the resolution of the screen (that being 1280×800) i’m sure helps with performance too while at least to my eyes still looking really good. the very little amount of emulation i’ve done on the device seems to be really smooth too, gta 3 on pcsx2 runs stable at the 50 fps it should be at for the pal release of the game. it’s certainly not the best at running modern intensive games but if you’re like me and only do lighter stuff it’s great for that.
having access to a desktop mode i’ve found is a really helpful thing too since it allows you to run just about anything the average gaming machine running linux can. desktop software can be added to the big picture mode and steam does let you run multiple pieces of software in big picture at the same time so you’re able to do things like listen to music or a video while playing. in general the freedom of both the hardware and the software i feel is a big thing. it’s been talked about a lot but that’s because it really does matter. you’re free to install mods on your games, you’re free to upgrade the storage or swap the battery on the thing yourself, if the screen breaks you can take it as an opportunity to install a shell swap if you’ve been wanting something that looks a bit more colourful. if you didn’t buy a model with the anti-glare screen and you want that screen you can just buy one off the same people valve get them off through ifixit and install it yourself. if you don’t like linux you can install windows. if you have a death wish you can get macos running on the thing. if you like linux too much you can put gentoo on it. and that level of freedom is something that a lot of handheld devices have been missing, and something that shouldn’t be missing really since we paid for the things we’re holding.