Steam Deck

Looks like all the refurbished models are out of stock on steam at the moment.

I spilt some water on my deck earlier today. Mainly on the screen and touch pad and joystick. I'm a little worried some may have gotten into the vent on top. I dried it off ASAP. I powered it off and stuck it in some rice.

The screen didn't glitch or anything which I think is a good sign. Anyone want to guess how screwed is my deck?

Edit: Thank you all for the advice! I took it out of the rice before I left for the day. I'm going to open it up tomorrow and see if there is any visible wetness and then maybe try turning it on. I hope y'all had a good day!

I've been considering getting a mini PC for my living room, basically only to watch online videos without ads or watch locally stored videos.

Since I have a Steam deck available that I already often dock to my screen for gaming, could I use it instead of buying a new computer?

My main concern is the impact this would have on the battery if it's plugged in for long periods of time, does it bypass the battery when it's plugged in and the battery is full ? Will other components be impacted?

Steam deck (LCD model) will, at no point, turn on unless plugged into charger or hooked up to the dock, regardless of how much battery is left. No response when trying to do things like booting into bios or anything else. Works perfectly fine when plugged in, docked to TV or standalone. No feedback at all, either, from buttons or trackpad haptics either when unplugged.

I've done a bios/firmware reset thing while plugged in and let that go for a while, following the advice of a Steam community forum (not sure whether the blinking power indicator thing is supposed to stop blinking when it's done, but I definitely let it go for longer than the forum post was saying). Went through the process of going through and enabling the main channel OS updates as well through dev settings and updating didn't fix it.

Have taken the backplate off and everything looks fine (I'm not an expert on mechanical things, though) and thankfully no spicy death pillow.

Any advice? At this point I'm even willing to back up anything important and do a factory reset if I have to. Also, if need be, I have a photo of the internals just in case I need to show it (again, not good with electronics on the hardware side of things).

If so, which ones? I am looking to game and talk to friends over discord on my Steam Deck. No FPS, more bullet hells, ARPGs, etc. Thank you!!

https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/gadget/steam-deck-play-work-case

Note: it's not a free model, costs about $9.35

I thought this was pretty cool design though, definitely something I've wanted to have before.

I'm planning to buy Sonic ~~& SEGA~~ All-Stars Racing Transformed ~~(what a title...)~~(Edit:I'm stoopid) and I remembered how fun it felt to control the first game on the Wii.

I tried looking up if you can replicate the same on the Steam Deck with its gyro, but my searches mostly talk about connecting steering wheel controllers. Did anyone use a setup like this from the community layouts, does it even work?

Go to https://store.steampowered.com/replay/ to see yours

When the OLED decks first came out, many people found they had wifi issues after attempting to connect to 5Ghz wifi 6 enabled routers. This has thankfully been fixed with software updates, and is no longer an issue on new OLED decks.

Unfortunately, some of the refurbished OLED decks will still have this issue when first turned on. The problem will be fixed once the Deck updates, but you have to successfully connect to the internet before you can update, and this issue can make that hard to do.

The issue can also affect you if you do a factory reset on your OLED deck or reinstall SteamOS.

The issue: When connecting to a 5Ghz Wifi 6 network with certain Wifi 6 features turned on, the wifi card on the deck will crash. After that, it won't connect to any network until the Deck is rebooted.

The fix: First, you'll have to reboot the deck to restart the wifi. If it still doesn't show wifi networks after rebooting, you may have to factory reset by holding the ". . ." button while booting up the deck and selecting factory reset from the menu there.

Once the deck is rebooting and can see wifi networks again, you need to connect to a 2.4Ghz wifi network and update the deck. You can alternatively disable wifi 6/AX features on your router temporarily,

Once the deck is done installing updates and rebooting, you should be able to connect to the faster 5Ghz network to download your games.

Overall it's not a hard issue to work around, but it can be very confusing to a new user if they're not familiar with the issue and the work around.

1. Balatro - 157
2. Deep Rock Galactic Survivor - 103
3. Metaphor: ReFantazio - 101
4. UFO 50 - 76
5. Factorio (2020) - 48
6. Prince of Persia The Lost Crown - 30
7. Baldur's Gate 3 (2023) - 26
8. Persona 3 Reload - 26
9. Ghost of Tsushima - 24
10. Diablo 4 (2023) - 23
11. Nine Sols - 22
12. Fields of Mistria - 19
13. Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance - 19
14. Halo Master Chief Collection (2019) - 16
15. Kingdom Hearts Collection - 16

~~Friend of mine bought a refurbished OLED model, it's on its way and I wanted to provide them with some links so that they can have a smooth setup and options / ideas of what they can do on the Deck, I'm thinking of sending them the following :~~

~~- https://www.protondb.com/ for checking game compatibility~~ ~~- https://www.emudeck.com/ and~~ ~~- https://retrodeck.net/ for emulation i'll just let them choose for themselves~~ ~~- https://lutris.net/ and~~ ~~- https://heroicgameslauncher.com/ for games not on steam~~ ~~- https://decky.xyz/ for plugins and whatnot~~

~~Do you guys have other suggestions? They like to tinker so even more obscure stuff is welcome!~~

Forgot to read the pinned post my apologies for the redundant post

DeckSight is a 1080P AMOLED display panel that drops into an LCD model Valve Steam Deck with no major modifications. DeckSight surpasses the stock LCD in almost every specification, making your games look sharper, more colorful, and with perfect black levels.

$130-140 for the screen

• Display Technology: AMOLED
• Size: 7” diagonal, 16:9 aspect (slightly shorter and wider than stock)
• Resolution: 1920 x 1080 (up from 1200 x 800)
• Color Depth: 10-bit, 1.07 billion colors (up from 8-bit, 16.7 million colors)
• Brightness: 800 nits
• Surface Options: Matte: Anti-glare and anti-fingerprint etched glass (similar to highest end stock LCD) Gloss: Anti-fingerprint coating (similar to 64 and 256 GB LCD models)
• Refresh Rate: 60 Hz (currently), may be improved in before release or with BIOS patch (likely 80-90 Hz)
• Contrast Ratio: > 1,000,000:1
• Compatibility: Valve Steam Deck (LCD models, 64 GB/256 GB/512 GB)

Getting my steam deck tomorrow. Already had Linux like steam deck on my laptop a while ago (didn't work well because fuck Nvidia)

But wanted to know what you all think is important to put on a steam deck, that's not something that's not what duckduckgo says with the websites it has. (I worded that horribly)

What are some niche things can I could do/install/play on the steam deck that most people wouldn't really do or think about doing?

I don't know a lot about Linux as I wish but I know a ok ish amount. Just wanting to find anything really interesting or useful to do with my steam deck

Also anybody know any casual games I can play randomly on public transit and don't have to sit down and play. Things that I can just easily stop. (Something like balentro kinda way you can just stop whenever)

Quote from Reddit post:

I spotted this change in the Steam Deck kernel by a Valve employee that is testing HDMI CEC for a new device. Interestingly, it appears to share at least some hardware similarity to Google ChromeOS devices (only because the change is in the ChromeOS Embedded Controller driver).

The device appears to be being developed on a platform codenamed the "AMD Lilac." Whether this is the SOC or refers a development board that Valve is developing with is unclear to me. On Geekbench there are references to the AMD Lilac, most of which use the AMD 8540U (it's possible that this won't be the final SoC of the device, as these are all likely prototype boards). There are a few earlier references in Geekbench with earlier SoCs.

Pure speculation: I'm guessing it's a console, set top box, or something similar that is supposed to connect to a TV and not a handheld or VR headset, given that HDMI CEC seems to be an important feature. The inclusion of ChromeOS hardware is confusing.

Pure speculation on the updates to ChromeOS EC: This is the most surprising thing to me.

• Maybe the device could just be using the hardware and drivers for ChromeOS devices while still running just SteamOS, but I don't see the point in Valve doing that.
• Maybe there's some sort of collaboration with Google, as Valve is actually working with them to bring Steam to ChromeOS.
• I think it's plausible (at least) that fremont will run a Steam client on top of ChromeOS instead of SteamOS.
• Diving into deeper speculation, this may allow Valve to run existing Android apps on the same device, specifically Android TV apps, which would make sense if this is something like an Nvidia Shield competitor. ChromeOS is just about the only OS that can officially run both Android TV apps and desktop Steam on the same OS.
• I find it likely that for a gaming and media-focused Steam box, Valve will want to have an existing ecosystem of media and streaming apps optimized for TV. If so, I think it’s a smart way to push into this market without needing to convince, say, all the streaming services to build apps for a new device.

The prototype board is much faster than Steam Deck:

Geekbench CPU result for Lilac (8540U): 2550 for single core and in the 9000s for multicore https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8301932

• Steam Deck is in the 1300-1400 range for single core and in the 4000s for multicore

Geekbench GPU result for Lilac (8540U): 66807 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/compute/2323659

• Steam Deck tends to be within the mid 10000s to mid 20000s

The greatly improved performance, to me, suggests a TV box, as the 8540U at handheld TDPs would score much more competitively with the Steam Deck.

Commit by a Valve employee 4 weeks ago adding code to test CEC for a new device \"fremont\"

Shows testing of an CEC implementation on an \"AMD Lilac\" in the ChromeOS Embedded Controller driver.

Just wanted to let others know that you can install Nix and Home Manager on your SteamDeck which allows for persistent software across system updates without anything breaking. You might need sudo for this.

Simple step by step guide with commands:

• sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --no-daemon - single user installation, from official documentation
• source .bash_profile - load the nix env into your current session
• nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-24.11 nixpkgs - replaces your nix channel with the current stable (nix default to unstable for some reason)
• nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-24.11.tar.gz home-manager - adds the home manager channel
• mv .bash_profile .bash_profile.bckp
• mv .bashrc .bashrc.bckp - these two commands backup your bash config files
• nix-shell '<home-manager>' -A install - installs home manager standalone, as per the official documentation
• kate ~/.config/home-manager/home.nix - open your nix config file in the default text editor and put the following content there:

{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
  home.username = "deck";
  home.homeDirectory = "/home/deck";

  programs.bash = {
    enable = true;
    initExtra = ''
      if [ -e $HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh ]; then . $HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh; fi

      export NIX_SHELL_PRESERVE_PROMPT=1
      if [[ -n "$IN_NIX_SHELL" ]]; then
        export PS1="$PS1(nix-shell) "
      fi
    '';
  };

  home.stateVersion = "24.11"; # don't change this even if you upgrade your channel in the future, this should stay the same as the version you first installed nix on

  home.packages = with pkgs; [
    
  ];

  programs.home-manager.enable = true;
}

• home-manager switch - applies the configuration from the above file
• close the terminal and open it again, everything should work

The config file tells nix to automatically load the nix environment into your terminal session. This is a fairly minimal setup where nothing is installed. If you want to install some software, simply add it to the home.packages array like so:

  home.packages = with pkgs; [
      nmap
      cowsay
  ];

After running home-manager switch, you should be able to run two new commands: nmap and cowsay.

Other very cool possibility is to install them inside a temporary shell by running: nix-shell -p nmap cowsay. This is perfect, if you only need the package(s) this once and not something you run regularly - after you exit the temporary nix-shell, the packages won't be on your system.

Anyway, nix survives even across system upgrades, because it installs all its files into /nix or your home directory, which are preserved even when upgrading, unlike system directories.

P.S. Don't forget to run nix-collect-garbage from time to time if you install a lot of temporary packages.