Hey, so, on 2024 (this year lmfao) I decided to buy a Steam Deck thinking it’ll be another device that I wouldn’t really use, letting it gain dust, apparently I was wrong. I wanna express my pleasure with the Steam Deck and state my reasons on why I would buy this device.

The Steam Deck is a handheld gaming PC released on the 25th February of 2022. This is a Linux device that supports a really big part of the Steam games thanks to Wine/Proton, a Windows compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows apps and even games under any POSIX-compliant operating system, such as in this case, Linux, this device uses it’s own Linux distribution so-called SteamOS

SteamOS is an Arch-based Linux distribution with Steam pre-installed, and a pretty console-like interface designed to be ready and easy to be used on the Steam Deck.

The Steam Deck is a powerful device that runs the latest AAA games with the flexibility of a full PC. It is even stated on the KDE website! My experience with the Steam Deck has been great!. Although there are some negative points on my side, but this shouldn’t really affect you. I’d like to talk about the pros and cons about the Steam Deck when I was using it.

The good things about it

It is a really powerful, and comfortable device to use. It’s made just ready to be used and ready to play some Steam games on it, the hardware is just, really good. Here are the specs:

• CPU: AMD Custom APU 0405
• GPU: AMD Custom GPU 0405
• RAM: 16 GB DDR4

I’ve been able to play games such as Slime Rancher, GTA V, RDR 2 and many more when I was outside, it’s a great device for situations such as, going to a trip, etc.

Considering the Steam Deck is pretty much a PC, there are no limits on what you can do with it and what you cannot do with it. It’s your device, it’s your choice, and this is what I really like. For example, the Nintendo Switch has some certain rules and you have to pretty much follow Nintendo’s ToS, you are forced to play only the Nintendo games (unless you modify the console). On the Steam Deck, the choice is… yours. Even the Steam Deck has a desktop mode where you can pretty much do whatever you want, download some games that are not in Steam, emulate other console games, and many more!

You can even install other operating system on it, connect it to a monitor, connect a keyboard and a mouse, use the Steam Deck as a computer. The choice is yours, you’re free to do whatever you want with the device and this is what I love from it, the fact that you can do anything with it.

The down side about it

This gets into some more technical details. And this will probably… not really affect you.

The only thing I really do not like about the Steam Deck, is the operating system. SteamOS.

SteamOS is an Arch Linux based distribution, and this Linux distro is immutable. An immutable Linux distribution is basically a distribution that it’s root partition cannot be modified in any way possible, this meaning that, you cannot use pacman (Arch Linux’s package manager). You cannot install any packages, it is extremely limited on what you can do. This is also a good measure so people don’t brick the device, as if this is the case, the user would have to manually re-install the system. (which it is pretty easy but i don’t think anyone who buys the console just to play games on it would know how to do this, although, youtube tutorials exists)

Me, as a Linux user, I would like to use the device not only to play games, but sometimes use it as a computer. This mean, I would like to install things such as Wine to install Windows applications, for instance, I often use foobar2000, which is a Windows media player. I cannot install it directly in the device unless it is by adding it to Steam directly then launching it from Steam, which that’s something that I wouldn’t really want to do. My only option would be to either use another Linux distribution that is NOT SteamOS. Or dualboot Arch Linux to it. There are some alternatives such as Distrobox, this program allows you to create different Linux containers where you’re able to install and do whatever you want with it. Which, in my opinion, it is really cool and I’d like to thank Steam for adding this into SteamOS. But it really doesn’t suit my needs sometimes.

Taking this in consideration. I decided to once install Arch Linux on the Steam Deck and install all the necessary packages to make it extremely similar to SteamOS. It was okay for some time, but I ended up going back to SteamOS, for now, I really only play Slime Rancher among some other games on the Steam Deck, so for now I don’t think I’ll ever do that again, and if I need Arch Linux or some other operating system for a certain need. I’ll probably just dualboot.

This will probably not affect you at all, so if you’re only planning to play games on it, you’ll be fine :3

Conclusion

The Steam Deck is an amazing device that can run the latest AAA games and I absolutely love it! It’s probably the best “gaming console” (it’s really a computer..) that I ever bought and I use it quite often. If you’re deciding whether to get one, trust me, go for it, you won’t regret it.