It looked good, but the gyro is apparently awful and the trigger travel is basically non-existent.

There are a ton of PC gamers who think the only way to play a video game is 1440p 60-144fps and anything below that is unplayable. The reality is the steam deck is a 720p 30fps handheld device that can occasionally make it to 60fps if pushed far enough.

IMHO a device that can run a game like God of war Ragnarok at 30fps in handheld mode and still play fine when docked is succeeding on the performance front in several aspects. In comparison, the switch version of Wolfenstein the new Colossus had to remove entire sets of geometry to even hit 30fps where the deck can hit that easily with the same settings without removing geometry and using AMD FSR. I think the deck has at least 3 more years in it before we even start to see any needed upgrades at that performance. Only time will tell.

With the recent crowdstrike nonsense and Microsoft reviewing their kernel access policies, it may be a non-issue in the future, but we just have to see what happens. I do wish valve would start really pushing these companies with kernel anticheat solutions to support proton and steam deck. It’s like they pushed for the first 6 months of the steam deck’s life and then gave up. They are really on the cusp of something truly disruptive in the pc gaming space with the steam deck, getting those last few games like cod, fortnite and valorant would really push that momentum away from Windows. Maybe they simply don’t want to pick a fight with the 1000lbs gorilla that is Microsoft, only gaben knows.

Yep, every competing product, whether it’s the rog ally or legion go had to compromise on something and it’s usually battery life, which defeats the purpose of having a handheld. I can get close to 4 hours in some games, you can’t say the same for the competition putting 1080p VRR panels with high nit values and more powerful GPUs when the SoC itself hasn’t reduced in power consumption. I just don’t see any compelling reason why valve would make an incremental product like a steam deck pro.

Hal effect or GTFO

I use an Anker USB hub with power delivery and it’s completely hot swappable, I would be incredibly surprised if the official dock wasn’t.

If they upgraded to Wayland they would have to rework their streaming protocol to function with Wayland and probably several other things need to be reworked. I use plasma 6 with Wayland on my endeavor install, but I still can’t use discord streaming or steam in home streaming without problems. The x11 to Wayland video bridge by the kde devs isn’t even updated to work properly.

Honestly just shows how dialed in the steam deck is, it’s why I won’t ever buy one of their competitors.