I own the LCD deck and goofed off with the OLED deck. The screen is perfect, just like I imagined. But the thing that caught me off guard was how much lighter it feels. They say it’s 30% or something lighter, but because of the way that you typically hold it, it feels half the weight. The joysticks also have a deep recess on the inside, which makes your thumbs slip a lot less.

Overall, I would say that if you currently have a Deck and play it every day, if you can sell your old one for a reasonable price, the cost is probably worth it. If you’re a casual gamer and you only play every so often, the upgrades on the new Deck are great to have but probably not worth the cost. As a new purchase, OLED without question.

I’d ask Valve.

It’s more or less a consumer version of their RA2 system, which is its own protocol. The gateway interacts with the whole system using commands issued over telnet though, so you actually have a command line for operating and configuring it. It integrates with a bunch of closed systems, and it integrates right into Home Assistant with a first-party HA integration.

It’s not like you can inspect the source code for their firmware push up pull requests on GitHub, so I’m this aspect, yes, it is proprietary. However, with tools like Home Assistant, which is something you probably should be using, this becomes much less of a concern, in my opinion. It’s robust, high-quality, and is commonplace, so you can get bits and pieces at Home Depot.

If you’re interested in something that will work with mesh networks and you aren’t interested in running software like Home Assistant, you should look for Z-Wave or Zigbee hardware. Read reviews though; I’ve had a lot of mixed experiences with hardware, even from “trusted” vendors.

Try a Lutron Caseta dimmer with a Pico remote. They work together as-is without a gateway, and the Gateway Pro will join it to something like Home Assistant in the future. Or you can simply use the Caseta app.

Vim handles remote files over SCP natively:

vim scp://192.168.1.2//data/editme.txt

Yeah, it looks like junk. I have never seen it look good in any game.

deleted by creator

Goat Simulator is always fun

File a bug in the appropriate places. The game developer and Valve is not watching this community.

Hah, yeah, and it’s awesome that you can do this with a Deck. It is just a computer, after all 😄

This is what my point is. You don’t need 60 TiB of games on a device.

Would you be able to fill this 60 TB beast with games?

Why would you do that? You can only play one game at a time. You’ll really only enjoy a few games at most a day. Just keep the game data on the Deck that you plan to play.

This is like keeping every website you know open in a tab, just in case you plan to visit it.

Thank you for the great logs and very thorough reply! Here’s what I’d do!

On step 3 I went to /etc/pacman.conf and I couldnt find [multilib] I could only find [multilib-rel]. So I added ‘[multilib] Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist’ like the guide said. Then I did sudo pacman -Syu and the update failed.

holo-rel is up to date core-rel is up to date extra-rel is up to date community-rel is up to date multilib-rel is up to date multilib.db failed to download error: failed retrieving file ‘multilib.db’ from steamdeck-packages.steamos.cloud : The requested URL returned error: 404 error: failed to synchronize all databases (failed to retrieve some files)

Since the [multilib-rel] section is already there, I’d just make sure that’s uncommented. I wouldn’t add the [multilib] section. Seems like that could be a typo perhaps. In the upstream Arch mirrors, it’s [multilib], so they probably got it mixed up. If this works, I’d write the author of this guide to have them correct it.

Then after that I went through the steps and got to installing lutris. Which gave me this error for every package required. Do you want to delete it? [Y/n] y error: python-lxml: signature from "Felix Yan " is unknown trust :: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/python-lxml-4.9.1-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)). Do you want to delete it? [Y/n] ^C

Sounds like the PGP keys are either not synced or out-of-date. Assuming the Deck works like upstream Arch, you should be able to run:

pacman-key --init
pacman-key --populate

After this, try your pacman command again.

More information here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Package_signing

Hope this works! Let me know if you run into any more friction and I’m happy to help!

How did you do step 3 and 4, and how did you know step 5 failed?

What part did you get stuck on?

Windows is a choice. Vendors don’t have to choose it.

Not the answer you’re looking for, but nothing completely replaces a keyboard and mouse. I just use a keyboard and mouse.

What would you prefer? Hot-swappable batteries add bulk 🙂

You don’t disassemble the entire thing. You remove a few screws and remove the back cover. There are some plastic clips to be mindful of, but side from that, it’s not much harder than upgrading RAM in a laptop.

Compare this to something like an iPhone that is sealed shut with adhesive, and you have to peel off the fragile glass digitizer and screen off. Then remove every component, and the battery is bound to the back of the chassis with adhesive. And Apple wants to sue outlets that actually do this.

Totally different game.

It’s Linux, and you can set it up yourself, but there is no option in SteamOS to encrypt your filesystem as-is. This means if your Deck is stolen, they have your data.