Steam Deck after 5 MONTHS: one major concern…

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00:00 Intro
00:43 Sponsor: Secure your internet connection with Safing
01:38 How has the hardware aged?
04:49 Software experience: much, much improved
09:57 Gaming performance: good, but I have concerns
14:04 Non Steam Games and Desktop mode
17:04 After 5 months? Still recommended?
19:26 Sponsor: Get a device that supports Linux with Tuxedo
20:29 Support the channel

Well, I’m happy to report that it hasn’t aged, really.I did notice a bit more creaking when picking up the deck up, especially on the left side.

I can feel the plastic of the case “clicking” into place underneath the trigger. It’s not broken, but it definitely feels less solid than it once did.

Also, the Deck can get pretty dirty, pretty fast.

I spent most, if not all of my gaming time on the Steam Deck since I got it, I didn’t use my gaming PC, or my Xbox, for more than one or 2 hours each in total, over 5 months.

23 hours of Vampire survivors, 6 hours of Hades, 10 hours of Crash bandicoot, 13 hours of the Sinking City, 22 hours of Rise of the Tomb Raider, 7 hours of Horizon Zero Dawn, 15 hours of the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, 18 hours of God of War, 7 and a half hours of Warhammer Space marine, 5.5 hours of Lara Croft Go, 7 hours of firewatch, 5.4 hours of Hitman Go, and 6.4 hours of Portal 2, and a few more hours here and there in various titles I tested, games from the Heroic Games launcher, and more.

And in all that time, the Deck has gotten BETTER at playing these titles.

What has changed, is the size of the game library. Since I got it, the Deck has passed the 4400 titles certified mark, when it was only at around 1500 5 months ago. And a bunch of my games are already in that list. 37 out of my 203 titles are Verified, and 105 in total Playable and Verified, so slightly more than half my library. Only 44 are marked as unsupported.

Now, gaming performance is where I’m having some doubts about the staying power of the device as time moves on.

Don’t get me wrong, games run mostly really, really well. Out of all the games I played, 3 exhibited performance issues that made them hard to play in good conditions.

They’re Horizon Zero Dawn, The Sinking City, and Rise of the Tomb Raider.

These are relatively graphics intensive games, for sure, and not very old, but they’re not from 2022, and the Deck is already struggling to play them. And of course, a few examples don’t make a general statement, but it does create a bit of concern. For games that will drop in 2 or 3 years, will the Deck be able to play them in acceptable conditions, with acceptable performance? I’m not convinced.

For indie titles, there are absolutely no issues whatsoever.

You could also use Bottles to install Origin, Ubisoft Connect, or even the Epic Games Store, but I don’t have any games on these other stores, apart from the Epic Games Store, so that’s the one I tried, and I mainly played Enter the Gungeon, and Abzu.

The experience of playing these games is just as good as playing any Steam game!

Now speaking about the desktop mode, it hasn’t really improved at all in the past 5 months. Apps that you installed through flathub still receive regular updates, but the base system has not. It’s still on plasma 5.23.5, when Plasma 5.25 is out and 5.26 is 3 months away.

Updates using Discover are also super unreliable, with discover crashing very often wile updating with various error messages.