[aarpmcgee]

I liked the Steam Deck well enough; I bought one and tinkered for several weeks before returning it. The potential is clear, even if the current iteration is pretty rough in terms of software usability and performance.

What seems less clear to me is if they will ever address the abysmal battery repairability[1], until which I will not be purchasing.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+Battery+Replacement/...

[TheFreim]

> current iteration is pretty rough in terms of software usability and performance

I am interested in the Steam Deck, could you give a specific example or two? I've heard mostly positive things so I would be interested in some specific pain points.

[aarpmcgee]

Sure, I was referring to the UI of the OS itself. I had the device about 3-4 months ago so perhaps it has been improved, but it was pretty janky in my experience at the time. It would often outright freeze on me for 10-20 seconds at a time.

Press a button, wait several seconds for something simple to happen on screen.

Felt like it was all held together with duct tape.

[viraptor]

I got one ~2 months ago and the experience is extremely different. I've not experienced a single freeze yet.

[TheFreim]

I watched a review and the first thing they mentioned was how much they enjoyed the UI compared to other devices.

[coder543]

For me, the Steam Deck was just too large, and the screen was truly terrible. It made games that I'm familiar with look visibly wrong with how poor the color gamut coverage was. I ended up selling it. The Steam Deck was also a bad experience for launchers outside of Steam, and I didn't want to get banned from Overwatch or Fortnite for trying to play them on an unsupported operating system, if they were even compatible.

I currently have a Nintendo Switch OLED which is fantastic in many ways, and I also have an AYANEO Air, which has a beautiful OLED screen too. The Air is also an equally good (or arguably even fuller, given Windows 11 + WSL) "desktop" experience compared to the Steam Deck, which so many people around here are touting as a feature. It also uses hall effect triggers and joysticks, so drift should never be a problem, ever. The Air is also the size of a Switch Lite, so even smaller than my Switch OLED, but the Air has a full x86-64 processor and 16GB of RAM running Windows smoothly, which is just crazy to behold.

Whenever I can use the Switch OLED for a game, that is the best available portable experience: whisper quiet, long battery life, never gets hot, the kickstand is incredibly good, and I can always take the controllers off when I want to put the Switch on a table. The only exception is a few titles that had truly terrible ports, but those aren't common in my experience at all. HD Rumble is also a really good implementation of controller rumble. With the Switch, it is also possible to buy physical versions of many games, and sell those when you're done, which really isn't possible on the Steam Deck or the AYANEO Air.

The AYANEO Air is great for using Steam In-Home Streaming or playing some of the titles that I can't play on the Switch (like Horizon Zero Dawn or the various Halo titles), but the battery life isn't as good, the controllers aren't detachable, there's no kickstand, and (like the Steam Deck) it is a much hotter and louder device.

Either the Switch or the AYANEO are small enough to throw in a carry-on bag (important because I don't think I've checked luggage a single time in the past decade), whereas the Steam Deck is like trying to bring a second, chunkier laptop (4x the thickness of my M2 MacBook Air, for reference), which just does not work with the size restrictions on a carry-on bag when you're also bringing a real laptop, clothes, chargers, and everything else needed to travel.

My wish list for Steam Deck 2.0 is basically: it would be physically smaller (but shrinking the bezels would allow the screen to not shrink as much as the device), the screen would be OLED like my other handhelds (and implicitly more color accurate), perfect driver support for Windows 11, hall effect controls, and the screen would support Variable Refresh Rate, which seems like a killer feature that no handheld has bothered to implement.

It's also completely baffling to me that the AYANEO Air has a full 2280 NVMe SSD in a chassis the size of a Nintendo Switch Lite, but the Steam Deck only manages to fit a 2230 in a chassis that's probably twice the physical volume. Given how much more I use my Switch than my Air, I've considered selling the Air, but it does still offer some unique capabilities.

[tstrimple]

I appreciate the size. I've got bigger hands and they tend to cramp after a short while holding small devices. Even the PlayStation controller feels tiny, but Xbox was manageable.

[coder543]

It's always possible to make a device physically larger after you get it, but it is obviously much harder to make it smaller.

The Switch has a large variety of comfort grips available for people who want a larger device, which also lets the user choose how it is larger, instead of forcing a one-size-fits-some approach. Here's one chosen at random that appears to have great reviews: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085VHHLGK

[tstrimple]

There isn't a one size fits all approach. You are free to use a tiny Switch. I am free to use the normal size (for me) handheld console that can not only play switch games, but also has every single major game released for every console before the PS2. Oh, it also plays PC games pretty well. I'm perfectly happy with my choice.

[coder543]

> There isn't a one size fits all approach.

That's exactly why having a smaller device allows everyone to customize it to their needs. If Steam Deck 2.0 were more portable (i.e. smaller and lighter) and that made it too small for you to hold comfortably, a cheap attachment could trivially fix that. Professional photographers have used extended grips for decades when they've wanted a larger grip than the manufacturer provided. This is not some novel solution. The Steam Deck is currently trying to be a single size that fits all, since it is already at the large end of what people will tolerate, and aftermarket customization cannot realistically make it smaller, only bigger.

> You are free to use a tiny Switch. [...] I'm perfectly happy with my choice.

You're setting up a weird comparison. When I owned the Steam Deck, I owned a Switch. Now that I own an AYANEO Air, I still own a Switch. Neither device is a replacement for the Switch. The Switch is not really the competition here. It is nice to imagine a world where the Steam Deck is somehow a full replacement for the Switch (or vice versa!), but such a world does not currently exist.

For now, I replaced my Steam Deck with an AYANEO Air for the reasons outlined in my first comment.

> that can not only play switch games

No, the Steam Deck cannot play Switch games effectively. Every time someone brings this up, they proudly throw out Breath of the Wild as an example... and it turns out to be the Wii U version, not the Switch version, because the Switch version runs like crap on the Steam Deck. Certain lightweight Switch games might work, but you're definitely not going to get the benefits of almost any Switch-exclusive game, especially once you factor in multiplayer issues.

[CamperBob2]

The Air sounds like an interesting piece of hardware. How hard is it to run your own homebrew Win32 apps on it?

[coder543]

It's just a standard Windows 11 computer, so it is entirely trivial.

They have a fullscreen console-like interface you can choose to launch, but it's completely unnecessary apart from controlling the TDP of the device. So, I just use the normal Windows desktop, and launch games just as if it were any other Windows computer. You could also use the Steam Deck's game launcher interface on Windows, which is now available on any Windows computer as an alternative to the traditional Steam Big Picture Mode.