It's available as a open source Decky plugin, but the steam version was going to be a paid closed source rewrite.
Were they public? I've been trying to find them on the homebrew server, and all I've seen is that someone joined the server, accused him, got him banned, and then left. I haven't actually found any examples of what he got banned over yet.
Yeah it's got some great additions in my opinion. It's not as necessary as it used to be thanks to valve slowly adding in many decky plugins into standard SteamOS.
Some nice plugins for usability:
- autoflatpaks: update flatpaks from game mode
- battery tracker: track average power usage of games over time. Good for getting an actual average power use for games with a wide range of battery drains
- Junk store: install epic (and GOG if you spend $6) games from game mode
- KDE connect: get notifications from your phone, use your phone keyboard to type on the deck
- MagicBlack: turn off screen on the OLED version for saving power during downloads/etc
- Pausegames: lets you pause any game, freeing up resources without closing it. Lets you pause games that can't be paused, run multiple games at once, and can fix audio issues when suspending
- Playtime: tracks playtime per game and per day
- protonDB lets you see what games will run on the deck, even if they're not steam verified/etc
- powertools: lets you adjust cpu cores/clock speed etc. Lets you get super low power usage in some games (down to 3.5w or so), and fixes some games with bugged cpu speeds
- shotty: moves steam screenshots in pictures folder to make them easy to find in desktop mode
- steamback: makes backup saves of your games everytime you open or close a game.
- volume mixer: change volume balance between programs. Very helpful if you're using discord/etc while playing.
There's also a ton of nice customization ones, which I can share if you're interested.
So I've been reading through the deck homebrew discord trying to figure that out. A user claimed he was racist, and got him banned/kicked out of Decky over it. However as far as I can tell, no evidence of him being racist was ever posted, and the user that got him banned left the server afterwards.
It does sound like he was quick to get into arguments with some other users, but that's not officially what he was banned over.
There may be better evidence I'm missing, there are a lot of messages discussing it in the server, but I see several people there claiming that banning him without evidence was an overreaction, so I'm assuming there isn't anything concrete that I've missed.
My personal opinion from what I've seen is that I think the ban should be reversed, it seems like a shame to deprive the entire deck community from a useful tool unless there's something more concrete I'm not seeing.
Yeah, a lot of long term projects have rude maintainers it seems.
It's probably a year or two out, at least. They want the Steam Deck 2 to be a proper power jump from the original, and there hasn't been any significant hardware improvements that would allow that yet.
Other handhelds have more power, but they do that by dumping way more power into the chipset for increasingly small returns. It's not really worth it to make a new Steam Deck with one of those chipsets because you would be trading off most of the battery life for any power increase.
There are unofficial imports, but they cost more and you don't get Valve's great warranty coverage.
The current plug-in let's you add games to the normal list of steam games.
Finally, about time.
The biggest downside right now is the need to boot into desktop mode and install Decky loader. That isn't hard by any means, but it does go beyond what someone who isn't tech saavy may be comfortable doing.
The steam store version will make epic and gog games usable without ever having to step past the "console" part of the steam deck.
It's already available as a Decky plugin.
That's still for games sold through Steam. Most importantly, that's for games that the companies agreed to sell through Steam.
If I was Valve, my biggest concern here would be that officially selling a tool for sideloading Epic games could be seen as approving of breaking Epic's ToS. Epic is also very sue happy when it comes to attacking rival companies.