Managing Expectations: A Look at the Steam Deck's Hardware and Software

As we delved deeper into our testing of the Steam Deck, it became clear that this device is not for everyone. While the hardware is well-designed and performs admirably, the software experience is still in its early stages of development. In order to fully appreciate the capabilities of the Steam Deck, one must have a realistic understanding of what to expect.

One of the most significant aspects of the Steam Deck's design is its control scheme. As we showed previously, the device's hardware is well-suited for playing games on the go. However, when it comes to using the Steam Deck as a desktop PC, things can get a bit more complicated. The device requires some tweaking to get the experience you want, and that's part of what makes it so appealing. By managing your expectations and being aware of the potential challenges, users can still have a great time with the Steam Deck.

The hardware itself is a testament to Valve's attention to detail. Thermally, the device performs admirably, and the acoustic profile is not bad at all. However, there are a few areas where Valve could improve. For example, the hysteresis and fan behavior can be a bit finicky at times, with some users experiencing issues with fan ramping and dramping. Nevertheless, these are minor complaints compared to the overall performance of the device.

The biggest hurdle for the Steam Deck is its software experience. While it's functional and allows you to play games on the device, it's still in a state of beta development. Valve has been releasing updates daily, which can be both exciting and frustrating at times. The user interface can be a bit clunky, and there are some features that don't quite work as intended. However, with each update, things seem to be improving.

One important point to note is that the Steam Deck is not a finished product just yet. Valve has been working tirelessly to refine the software experience, but it's clear that they need more input from users outside of the company. By listening to user feedback and incorporating suggestions into the development process, Valve can ensure that the Steam Deck becomes a device that meets its full potential.

Ultimately, the Steam Deck is a great device for enthusiasts and power users who are willing to get hands-on with their hardware. If you're someone who is used to tinkering with PCs and adjusting settings to get the perfect experience, then this may be the device for you. However, if you're expecting a seamless out-of-the-box experience that's similar to what you'd find on a console, then the Steam Deck might not be for everyone.

As a final note, we want to emphasize that the Steam Deck is not without its issues. The software experience can be a bit rough around the edges at times, and there are some features that don't quite work as intended. Nevertheless, with Valve's commitment to updating the software regularly, users can rest assured that things will only get better.

We'll continue to follow up with more content on the Steam Deck, including hardware coverage and user experience insights. If you're interested in staying up-to-date on our latest articles and reviews, be sure to subscribe to our channel and check out our website at store.cameras.net. We also appreciate your support through Patreon, patreon.com/gamersnexus. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you all next time!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe already posted a massive review of the steam decks hardware including in-depth thermals noise and even schlieren imaging testing and we followed up with a tear down today we're focusing entirely on user experience the deck is now officially out we are now allowed to talk about the software so that includes steam os the linux desktop option and overall our experiences using the deck for the last couple of weeks now we've been using it since we got it in for our initial coverage and that includes taking it on a plane when we flew out the new egg so we got some real in the field used for this one let's get started before that this video is brought to you by leon lee's 011d evo case the 011d evo is a mid tower that tested well previously with us and is most interesting for attention to fine details and its unique features one of those is the easy to use invertible layout the o11d evo inversion process is the easiest we've ever worked with on a case allowing it to flip entirely for a unique upside down build or work as a standard layout the 011d evo has two chambers for the system and the power supply support for up to nine storage drives and edge-to-edge glass for a showcase while still offering excellent airflow through side and bottom intakes learn more at the link in the description below so quick primer on the goals for this video we'll be looking mostly at things like how the controls feel ergonomics positioning of things so that's far more on the subjective side of things keep that in mind it is the collective opinion of everyone here on the team this is about five people or so putting into this and then we'll also be looking a little more objectively at the software and the user interface and experience that's where things start to it doesn't fall apart but it's not as solid of an argument as the steam deck had with just the look at the hardware that we did previously and again if you want in-depth hardware we're not going to talk about any of that here we'll link it below there's no need to do it all a second time so key points up front when we were flying out to do the new egg video we spent probably in total about 12 hours or so on planes going back and forth the steam deck was used for much of that time up until its battery died which on the first leg of the trip was about two and a half hours and on the second leg of the trip we got a good maybe three hours out of it with lower end games but we already have battery testing so you could check out we'll put the charts up on the screen now from the previous results anyway the point is andrew stone and i all worked on the steam deck plate on it while we were flying and the most immediate thing we wanted to point out after that experience was that this is a device that as much as it resembles a console obviously it's it's really not it's a computer except it doesn't have a keyboard and so in that regard it's much more like an eye neo or a gpd or something and because of that it means you have a lot of freedom just like you do with a computer and that also means you're going to have a lot of problems like you would with a computer so we wanted to really manage expectations immediately getting into this uh this is not the steam deck it's not going to be like buying a nintendo switch where everything basically just works and if it doesn't work with the switch there's not a lot you can do about it anyway so it's really not worth even worrying about if software doesn't work on the switch because you have no recourse with the steam deck the cool thing is you could probably fix whatever the problem is the uncool thing is that there will be a lot of problems because software is complicated and there's literally millions upon millions of combinations of things you can do in software that has given the user as much control as steam os or windows or anything else you might put on the steam deck now we see that as a positive but our core audience and what we do relates to power users enthusiasts people who are not afraid of troubleshooting something and fixing it and might even enjoy that aspect if it affords them some extra freedoms and capabilities in the hardware that they own what it also means though is that if you're buying this for uh someone who maybe doesn't have quite the troubleshooting capabilities as you do or as our core audience or you are that person then just just don't get too frustrated when an error message pops up or something doesn't quite work well and to be clear that's not all just because of valve and steam in the os it's it's because it's not railroading you so all that out of the way up front uh software is not perfect it's pretty good though for what it is but we do have some key criticisms we'll be going through and uh managing expectations we also wanted to note that steam os 3.0 it's a custom version of arch linux and that's a big hurdle for most pc games to clear so this isn't steam os 1.0 which was tried with the steam machines previously valve has tried this before when valve works with third-party manufacturers for hcpcs that would run valve's own debian based linux distro or debian fight me linux users uh it was an interesting idea but it didn't go anywhere so valve signaled this time that it doesn't want steemos to fail it has iterated significantly it's put four years into building proton up which is the compatibility layer to help windows games run successfully on linux proton is by no means perfect and we've seen that in the past month or so but the community maintains a list of proton supported games and by extension those games probably work on the steam deck so that's at proton db and you need to know that if you're gonna buy one of these or you already have because it will make your life a lot easier if you can just look for the games that'll work instead of downloading them to find out they don't work well this database also has games that are completely inoperable a lot of the time this is because of anti-cheat software so you really you have no way to work around it it just won't work valve also has its own semi-crowd-sourced verification system that it calls deck verified you can check this one as well and that's officially public now but the bottom line is that many games work with some tweaking many games work out a box and then a whole lot won't work at all or have mixed success just because this is all very new there are tens of thousands of games probably at least on steam and um they're not all gonna work obviously so that's what you need to know that's the expectations management we wanted to do the hardware was very exciting and interesting pretty well designed as we showed the software needs time to mature the good news about software is that it can be downloaded so it's not like hardware where it's fixed they got they got the part that is unchangeable done right so that's good out of that let's talk about how the controls feel and go through the software as well this is a collection of notes from primarily patrick and i worked on it as well and then we had input from everyone on the team as they played around with the device let's get started talking about the physical hardware and usability for the most part the deck is more comfortable to hold than a flat device like a switch but the sheer quantity of controls leads to crowding and it also explains the size the d-pad the face buttons and the touch pads are all competing for the same space but the placement of the joysticks and the face buttons is less awkward than it appears at least visually both of them fall within the natural arc of thumb movement we're less happy with the buttons on the back which are hard to press on purpose and easy to press by accident for most of us the ideal grip position was with the index and middle fingers resting on the bumpers and the triggers and with the ring and pinky fingers on the rear buttons that keeps all the face buttons in reach but unfortunately makes it even harder to bear down on the rear buttons we'll be interested to see whether user created controller configurations make more use of the touch pads and the grip buttons as they take up significant space but aren't part of the traditional control schemes some quick information on how everything works our teardown video previously shows how all this comes together the triggers actuate a compression spring providing resistance and then the press is registered typically controllers will use either a potentiometer or a hall effect sensor to do this this is standard for a controller for construction of the trigger the grip buttons are a little bit different since they're less common these are plastic springs so it's just a piece of plastic that moves and hits a standard tack switch the face buttons and the d-pad both use conductive ring and pill pads the conductive pad contacts the exposed trace on the pcb when pressed triggering the button press in software this is also standard and in basically every controller on the market so in short the face buttons the d-pad the triggers and the joysticks work as you would expect from any other controller on the market there's nothing revolutionary going on inside the steam deck in terms of controller design so this is mostly a good thing because it doesn't really need to be reinvented so no new construction in this aspect the analog joysticks are also standard for modern controllers and they have an added capacitive touch sensor joy-con drift isn't specific to just joy-cons these types of joysticks can also develop drift with time but these are relatively easy to replace on the steam deck compared to some of the other parts of the steam deck so this is one that you wouldn't need to worry too much about it's three screws after you get through the initial eight in terms of sizing the deck is relatively large in order to accommodate all the controls extending six centimeters out past the edge of the screen in both directions but devices like the io neo and arguably the switch have already exited the pocket-sized realm anyway so the size matters less to us than the weight does a deck weighs 676 grams about one and a half pounds while the switch oled with joy cons attached weighs 420 grams with the original at 400 or about 0.9 pounds for both that can make a difference when there's no table or armrest to lean on for long periods and we have thoughts on that after using it on a plane when we flew out to newegg overall though we found the deck comfortable to use or at least not any less comfortable than similar handhelds the grips are isolated from electronics and mostly hollow which ensures that they stay cool for skin temperature the front-facing speakers are worth the real estate that they take up audio sounds good and it's surprisingly directional and it won't be blocked by resting the deck on its edge in a dock if you had one the anti-glare screens on our units are subtle it's an improvement over the original screen but not one that we'd noticed without it being pointed out to us the ssds are the only important difference then between the skus the screen we don't think is a huge difference that noted the viewing angles are extremely limited once you're at about 15 degrees the screen starts to become just black that's fine but any onlookers to your screen will need to be relatively close speaking to haptics and rumble the steam deck uses what it calls hd haptics to convey any sense of rumble at all most controllers that you're probably familiar with especially older ones really calmly leaned on a big spinning weight to create that heavier rumble so you could think of the dual sense versus the dual shock controllers as an example of this or maybe the nintendo switch's hd rumble feature the dictionary definition of the word haptic is really all-encompassing it just means quote relating to or based on a sense of touch so in that regard all rumble is technically haptic but in this industry when someone talks about haptics versus rumble there's a very clear understanding of the difference and generally speaking haptic refers to a light buzzing feedback that's created by linear actuators rather than a big spinning weight inside of the controller so that's the difference now sony and nintendo have both chosen to advertise their move to linear actuators as a feature rather than a downside valve when it launched the steam controller advertised this as a feature but with the steam deck valve came across as almost apologetic when explaining the state of haptics before our preview embargo quote during the development of this product we made an intentional decision not to prioritize beefy rumble motors for the steam deck reason being that the added weight hit to battery life and cost did not justify the added benefit the work we're doing now is to get as close as possible to emulating rumble without actually having the hardware built in so to make a long story short on what valve says it's doing is uh it's better now however in its current state the rumble has been turned down so far that it's barely noticeable at all we're mouse and keyboard users so that's fine by us but the vibrating units are located in the touch pads on either side of the controller it's diffused and spread out by that little squiggly metal bar that's attached to each side of the touchpad so the amount of feedback felt during gameplay varies greatly based on whether you're using the touch pads or not our biggest complaint about the form factor with a direct inarguable solution is that there's only one usb type-c port attaching more than one device so a charger mouse keyboard or a monitor requires a hub or bluetooth there really should be at least one other port on this thing maybe on the bottom or something which would allow creating a dock that the steam deck could slot into like a switch as it is even the first party deck dock will use a right angle cable routed out and around the back of the deck so if you want a charger and a usb stick a charger and an external ssd a charger and a mouse or a keyboard in order to navigate some of the menus then you'll need to use a hub and that starts to get about as cumbersome as using one with a modern laptop one further hardware note too the charge indicator on the deck is a white led it turns on when the deck is plugged in and off when it's not but it doesn't communicate any useful information about the charge status so some small stuff like this shows some of valve's inexperience with designing hardware devices time to talk about the biggest potential weak point of the steam deck which is its software fortunately for valve this is also the thing that's easiest for it to improve over time since it can just be downloaded steam already has big picture mode and that's a feature that offers a console style interface on windows without replacing the whole os it's not perfect but it works well enough on an io neo and it doesn't come with the compatibility issues of switching to linux in our estimation the main advantages of steam os over windows for handheld gaming are that the ui is designed from the ground up to be navigated with controller inputs and that the drivers the software and the updates are specifically tailored to the deck hardware none of those advantages are overwhelming when you compare them to the decades-long history of windows being the default platform for pc games but you could install windows on the steam deck if you wanted at least if it ever gets the amd drivers we were promised and given the history of hades canyon we're not hopeful long-term for those to be updated as they should be but we'll see steamos ui has been in flux since the day we received the decks back in january and it will continue to change unless the deck completely flops updates are nearly daily at this point the desktop steam ui has been changing for an awareness of mortality inducing 18 years now just for steam itself not even steam os and we expect that the steam os will follow the same path if it sticks around most of the deck ui changes have been too minor to bother listing but improvements are happening as of now the least intuitive aspect is that there are four menu-ish buttons on the deck there's the three-lined hamburger menu or start button the two rectangle view back button and the steam button and also an ellipsis button getting used to the individual functions of these buttons takes some time the library could also use work many steam users already have hundreds of deck compatible games and as of this writing the deck ui is less graceful at handling large libraries than the desktop client is it's really hard to put it into concrete terms with just writing so we filmed our cpu cooler test technician mike as he was given the instructions to find the total war game already in our library mike has not used the steam deck at all at least not before this and so he was a good team member candidate to subject to this test so library he's a good one since he's a million total yeah like he he definitely owns three kingdoms on this test account okay installed all games how do i search in our in our all games is that is this supposed to help you oh that's right okay i keep feeling like i'm being made a fool of here that i'm well everyone every other person in the office has done this except for steve wait why sort by alphabetical and then i guess i just i just got down i feel like i'm taking the most caveman approach just because um the oh tomb raider tip i'll give you is that every other person that's done this is the same thing that you're doing wait hold on i see tomb raider but then no it thinks it's it's shadow of the tomb raider so i'm not in the tease never mind oh total war okay so there's our total war games all right cool so there is you see there's there's no search buttons listed down here there's no prompts to do a search thing but right there is a search bar at the top of the screen here oh and this is a search bar for games that are on here games that are in your library and friends in the store and for tools yeah there's a lot going on so the search button isn't obvious and a lot of other stuff isn't either it's just this is a microcosm for the wider issue of usability another poor usability example in the steam ui the b button functions as a back button which doesn't line up with what we're used to although it sounds like it makes sense usually it would go up a level not returned to the previous screen remember this function's more like a traditional os than like a really railroaded switch os or something and so some of the behaviors are a little bit out of line with what you'd expect on a console just as a counter to all this on the switch which is the most obvious comparison the b button always does the same thing it always goes up one level so big difference there and how they behave now valve is less capable of improving the uis for individual games because they're developed by other companies so this is another potential shortcoming where we ran into at least one instance where the text for the menu and on the screen did not scale with the device itself and it was illegible this is when i was trying to use it on a plane when we were flying out to newegg and uh opening up the menu i had to hold the steam deck about here to see it and i don't have any vision problems so it doesn't always scale adequately and that's not something valve has a lot of control over now in between when that happened to us and now valve shipped another update which is a small magnifier that is a workaround to this problem where you can magnify certain elements of the screen if you have no other way to see them so you can at least navigate the menus and increase the text size ui size so they're aware of it it's not a clean fix but it is a workaround at least so ultimately that highlights the same issue of usability now there's also desktop mode desktop mode is a bit rough it's weird and inconvenient to get to it is not designed to be navigated with a controller and it feels like it was never really intended to be used outside of a development environment the desktop is a regular kde plasma interface that isn't natively suited to the deck and installing linux applications will be a new experience for many users valve has stated that quote we plan to make it easier to add apps directly from the non-steam games tab implied here without having to go to the desktop to launch non-steam applications like discord or chrome they have to be installed in desktop mode we were able to install firefox add it to steam launch it open a youtube video and then seamlessly swap back and forth between the browser and half-life 2 with the video still playing so at least that much feels relatively fluid in terms of navigation the desktop mode we used it a lot for our earlier testing when we were looking at all the different thermals the frame time presentation metrics all of that because we needed to access certain files that was done through desktop doing so it really feels like it's best suited to a keyboard and mouse for any type of more advanced navigation using the touchscreen to navigate is a little bit awkward so short of doing a mouse and keyboard setup via a hub your next most obvious choice would be the track pads on the device we can carry this logic forward and infer that the track pads will make it easier to play games that were designed with a mouse in mind but the lack of a physical keyboard remains an obstacle in those instances and having the second trackpad which for us typically was this one on the left was really not helpful we didn't have any natural uses for it it seems like its biggest use is really just to help transfer the haptic feedback evenly across the deck rather than an actual input device in the weeks leading up to the launch the most frequent changes have been to the performance menu this menu is useful for limiting or increasing the performance and so it has a direct impact on things like battery life as of this writing this menu contains a performance overlay slider that'd be for fps gpu usage things like that a 30 fps frame rate limit toggle this control was originally more granular and will be patched back in at a later date there's a 0 to 15 watt tdp limit slider a manual gpu clock control toggle that currently hard crashes and reboots the deck there's an upscaling filter with options for linear nearest integer and amd fsr and a show performance overlay and steam toggle that we'd recommend leaving off the performance overlay has potential to be misleading so be careful how you use it outside of games it doesn't really work well that's because it updates once well whenever there's input basically whenever there's a new frame generated so if you're using it in something like blender the data is not going to be up to date or accurate if things are happening in the background there's not active updating on the screen but in games it's fine many of these options existed in menus before today but they didn't function properly some of them still don't function properly but it's a lot better than it was when we did our initial hardware only coverage of the steam deck more detailed control is also possible if you're into things like editing config files so plenty of room there to play around uh for example you could turn off individual cpu threads or you could do some basic overclocking or a frequency adjustment underclocking things like that through the tuning utilities as well one big note for today is that valve has implemented a 60 fps cap you can turn this off so don't freak out but it's a hard 60fps cap universally for release this we think has to do more with how a lot of media outlets took our testing and ran it out of context sensationalized it and made sure to only publish the worst looking number for valve yes we have a bone to pick with those of you who've done that you know who you are uh what valve says is the reason for the 60 fps cap is quote fps wobbliness and instability with the full granular controls now the reason we think it's more to do with the battery life is because we when we did our initial hardware review we were extremely clear with the methodology for everything we were really detailed we took a lot of care to make sure everything was packaged and presented in a way where in theory you wouldn't really be able to take things out of context unless you really tried and oh did we really under predict how many other excellent headlines would be created from our data when stripped out of context bringing up that battery chart from the original review what you'll see is we have one number on there that's 87 minutes and as we said in the original review that is only under a ridiculous scenario where we were running devil may cry 5 with very high graphic settings we disabled v-sync which is also it's a reasonable trade-off to restrict the frame rate on a handheld battery operated device and we boosted the graphics settings and we were pulling about 30 watts deliberately for the life of the 87 or so minute test now what happened is instead of people reporting on uh gn determines that the battery life range is between 87 minutes and approximately six hours or reporting on gn says that the average battery life range is somewhere around two hours with higher settings and maybe four to six with lower settings and that gianna was unable to reproduce valve's claimed eight hour number no instead what was wrong was the steam deck battery might die in under 90 minutes or the steam deck battery barely lives for an hour and a half the steam deck battery dies in just over an hour we talked about this internally when it happened we thought about running a standalone video at the time but it seemed like too dedicated of a callout so we just put it in here but uh irresponsible reporting anyway the information on the batteries in the original the point here though is that valve has implemented a 60fps cap you can turn it off but it's there for a reason and the reason is it will help preserve the battery life and no it is not unreasonable to limit the frame rate on something like this we would do the same on a laptop you're not really using it to try and get max fps in rainbow six siege for competitive play when you're operating on battery on a screen that is the size of a phablet and just in case those media outlets are watching some basic math here a 40 watt hour battery should be able to sustain 30 watts for about 1.33 hours basic 40 divided by 30. the deck died in 1.45 hours so that's almost right on the money so it is possible to kill the deck in under two hours but in most instances it should be easy to avoid within game settings or the fps cap also something that was oddly left out of all those pieces was that this isn't something that's gonna sneak up on you you'll know it's very easy to see how fast the battery is dying when you're running it at those settings and you can adjust for it before you get too far along and just before anyone does it you could use a screwdriver and a paper clip and kill the battery much faster probably in under two minutes maybe even nearly instantaneously depending on how you do it but that doesn't count couple other things for software so in steam mode there's a complete lack of control over resolution right now or refresh rate or anything else for external displays this is something that we'd like to see fixed before valve ships the official dock right now the deck simply runs at the resolution of the display that it's connected to anecdotally as well we didn't have any issues playing games in offline mode this will vary greatly by title but it seems much easier to launch and play a game without a wi-fi connection than it has been in the past which was one of our major concerns about a mobile pc without a sim card games that support saving data to the steam cloud also worked really well you could feasibly play your game at 1280 by 800 on the bus you go home synchronize with the cloud pull down the save file and continue where you left off multiple accounts also very easy to work with so this is this is on the upside of the ui and ux design where valve's done really well uh you can keep the accounts logged in you can log them out if you want and switch between them no problems if one account has a gain that the other account does not have like your roommate or your friend then the user logged in who does not have the game can request to borrow the game from the account uh also on the device that owns the game this is within steam's base functionality but it works extremely well on the steam deck so that's awesome to see and finally here sleep states like s3s4 hibernate sleep have always been a major challenge point for windows software testing and in this scenario suspending and resuming single-player games with the latest version of all this and then putting the device to sleep bringing it back up works fine it worked every time we tried it it doesn't sound like praise to say a feature simply works but sleep states are notorious for breaking software and we were able to get it to work just fine so that's good too and these weird ui behaviors happen everywhere in fact as we're writing and filming this just about 12 hours before embargo list for this there was another update that came out that gives you the option to now launch multiple applications and run things in the background so when we were done with one game instead of closing it properly we just went back to the steam menu opened another game and it pops up a prompt and the prompt says you can close the instance you just attempted to launch and leave the original in the background you can switch to the original and cancel launching uh or you can launch both anyway which obviously isn't advisable for performance reasons what is not present though is an option to close the original application and then switch to the new one and the only reason this is really worth mentioning as a minor thing overall is because it illustrates a general lack of sufficient focus groups where valve probably needs to be working with more people and now it will be uh by its customers in order to collect enough information to figure out how to fine-tune the behaviors and options but then there are upsides too so controller support is fantastic we tried every controller from every major console in the last two or three generations we even tried the amazon luna one and it worked fine so steam deck didn't really seem to have any issues picking up controllers at all uh and that stands true for the oddities finally here one other note gyro control is a feature that valve showed off when the steam deck launched but it wasn't active in any of the games that we could show in our preview now we've had a chance to try it out and it's exactly what you might expect the gyro movement is distracting and it interferes with normal controls we'd actually prefer a system-wide setting to turn it off entirely rather than having to do it on a per game controller configurator basis it was pitched as a way to help fine-tune aim and things like doom but we actually found it harder to work with and i would prefer to not use it technically the gyro works exactly as expected it is functional it's just that the function is not well applied to anything we've tested maybe there's some use cases in the future perhaps in vr hardware for example but with the deck the controller configurator has become an extremely important part of steam now the deck has lots of inputs touch screen track pads face buttons rear buttons gyro and capacitive joysticks with access to the entire steam library now it can be used to play both games that have native controller support and games that need third-party controller profiles the first works pretty much out of box a steam deck has all the buttons of an xbox controller so that's easy the second kind of game requires the configurator either selecting a preset profile or manually creating one which isn't hard anyone who's tried to use a controller in counter-strike go more than a couple months ago knows how spotty controller support on steam can be on the deck each game page has a button that can be used to access controller settings and from here the current layout can be viewed or edited or individual settings can be edited quickly there are many templates available as well so although it's visually overwhelming it's awesome that there's this much customization available probably some of these should be hidden under an advanced menu to not overwhelm people who are expecting a switch experience but this feeds back into what we were saying earlier which is that the steam deck is really for a midstep between a sort of power user and someone who just wants an off-the-shelf console to work you will be able to do a little bit more and sometimes you'll have to do a little bit more in order to get the experience you want but that is sort of the beauty of basically a pc anyway so concluding then it's really it's what we said in the intro leading up to the controls discussion which is that it's all about managing expectations the hardware as we showed previously it's well designed it works pretty well things are in spec thermally uh the acoustic profile is not bad we thought it needed to change the hysteresis and the fan behavior fan ramp and dramp but overall we were pretty positive on the hardware which is rare for us so that was good as stated earlier though it's the software that matters software can be downloaded so if you're willing to be the beta tester and you think that valve will stick with this then the hardware's in good shape so all you'll have to worry about is valve updating the software the software now is functional you can definitely play games on it as stated before the biggest thing you need to do is check proton db or valve's own deck verified list and make sure the games you care about are on those lists they will be adding more they've been adding more there have been daily to i think we've seen as much as three times a day updates to steam os at this point it is changing rapidly that means mostly good things but sometimes valve breaks stuff on the way to implementing new things so really then the the takeaway of thinking about that end of things is that this we think is still in the camp of being largely an enthusiast slash power user device uh where you are very close to being in a live development environment for the software as we've experienced it maybe they'll change that in the next weeks as it goes public but that's been our experience which is fine and we like that because it's not foreign to us but um if that doesn't sound like the experience you want then our recommendation is obviously going to be to wait a little bit and see how things mature in the very least so that it's less frustrating as valve ships updates and so if you're in a later round for the pre-orders you don't really have a lot to be too upset about because when you get it it's just going to be easier for you to use so for the user who's expecting take it out of the box and it works like a switch experience that's not what you're getting but that is why it's cool just as long as we're all on the same page there it's a bad thing if you think that's what you're getting it's a good thing if you understand that you're buying a pc that looks like this and has linux on it you can put windows on it though one final point we really want to get across here is that the steam deck is not a finished product the steam os the ui and the user experience are easily the weakest aspects of this entire thing it's very clear to us now why valve had delayed the launch so much it's not because of the hardware it's because of the software but they're updating it every day so there's a light at the end of the tunnel there it's just that if you don't want to be a beta tester you shouldn't be buying this anytime soon that's just kind of our opinion on it now that said we think it's cool and fun but we're also technicians who work on this stuff because it's fun for us to work on it so if you don't have that same perspective then just keep that in mind maybe you should wait a little bit longer we do think there's a lot of potential here it's in a pretty good spot right now overall but it is a little bit cumbersome at times and we want to make sure everyone knows that because there's a lot of hype behind this and it's not for everyone so rapid recap then hardware attention to detail is excellent the software attention to detail it's okay but there's a lot of stuff we ran into or just frankly it really seems like valve needs to get more input from people outside the company to give it ideas on what's the expected behavior probably this is a scenario where the people working on the steam deck are so close to it that they maybe uh their thinking is influenced by knowing everything about the device and that's really common in development so they'll get there we think but it's a matter of time at this point we'll keep following up with this we have a lot more ideas we want to do with the steam deck especially on the hardware side so you will see more hardware coverage from us subscribe to catch that and check back and uh keep an eye out a lot more coming thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.cameras.net to help us out directly or you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus we'll see you all next timewe already posted a massive review of the steam decks hardware including in-depth thermals noise and even schlieren imaging testing and we followed up with a tear down today we're focusing entirely on user experience the deck is now officially out we are now allowed to talk about the software so that includes steam os the linux desktop option and overall our experiences using the deck for the last couple of weeks now we've been using it since we got it in for our initial coverage and that includes taking it on a plane when we flew out the new egg so we got some real in the field used for this one let's get started before that this video is brought to you by leon lee's 011d evo case the 011d evo is a mid tower that tested well previously with us and is most interesting for attention to fine details and its unique features one of those is the easy to use invertible layout the o11d evo inversion process is the easiest we've ever worked with on a case allowing it to flip entirely for a unique upside down build or work as a standard layout the 011d evo has two chambers for the system and the power supply support for up to nine storage drives and edge-to-edge glass for a showcase while still offering excellent airflow through side and bottom intakes learn more at the link in the description below so quick primer on the goals for this video we'll be looking mostly at things like how the controls feel ergonomics positioning of things so that's far more on the subjective side of things keep that in mind it is the collective opinion of everyone here on the team this is about five people or so putting into this and then we'll also be looking a little more objectively at the software and the user interface and experience that's where things start to it doesn't fall apart but it's not as solid of an argument as the steam deck had with just the look at the hardware that we did previously and again if you want in-depth hardware we're not going to talk about any of that here we'll link it below there's no need to do it all a second time so key points up front when we were flying out to do the new egg video we spent probably in total about 12 hours or so on planes going back and forth the steam deck was used for much of that time up until its battery died which on the first leg of the trip was about two and a half hours and on the second leg of the trip we got a good maybe three hours out of it with lower end games but we already have battery testing so you could check out we'll put the charts up on the screen now from the previous results anyway the point is andrew stone and i all worked on the steam deck plate on it while we were flying and the most immediate thing we wanted to point out after that experience was that this is a device that as much as it resembles a console obviously it's it's really not it's a computer except it doesn't have a keyboard and so in that regard it's much more like an eye neo or a gpd or something and because of that it means you have a lot of freedom just like you do with a computer and that also means you're going to have a lot of problems like you would with a computer so we wanted to really manage expectations immediately getting into this uh this is not the steam deck it's not going to be like buying a nintendo switch where everything basically just works and if it doesn't work with the switch there's not a lot you can do about it anyway so it's really not worth even worrying about if software doesn't work on the switch because you have no recourse with the steam deck the cool thing is you could probably fix whatever the problem is the uncool thing is that there will be a lot of problems because software is complicated and there's literally millions upon millions of combinations of things you can do in software that has given the user as much control as steam os or windows or anything else you might put on the steam deck now we see that as a positive but our core audience and what we do relates to power users enthusiasts people who are not afraid of troubleshooting something and fixing it and might even enjoy that aspect if it affords them some extra freedoms and capabilities in the hardware that they own what it also means though is that if you're buying this for uh someone who maybe doesn't have quite the troubleshooting capabilities as you do or as our core audience or you are that person then just just don't get too frustrated when an error message pops up or something doesn't quite work well and to be clear that's not all just because of valve and steam in the os it's it's because it's not railroading you so all that out of the way up front uh software is not perfect it's pretty good though for what it is but we do have some key criticisms we'll be going through and uh managing expectations we also wanted to note that steam os 3.0 it's a custom version of arch linux and that's a big hurdle for most pc games to clear so this isn't steam os 1.0 which was tried with the steam machines previously valve has tried this before when valve works with third-party manufacturers for hcpcs that would run valve's own debian based linux distro or debian fight me linux users uh it was an interesting idea but it didn't go anywhere so valve signaled this time that it doesn't want steemos to fail it has iterated significantly it's put four years into building proton up which is the compatibility layer to help windows games run successfully on linux proton is by no means perfect and we've seen that in the past month or so but the community maintains a list of proton supported games and by extension those games probably work on the steam deck so that's at proton db and you need to know that if you're gonna buy one of these or you already have because it will make your life a lot easier if you can just look for the games that'll work instead of downloading them to find out they don't work well this database also has games that are completely inoperable a lot of the time this is because of anti-cheat software so you really you have no way to work around it it just won't work valve also has its own semi-crowd-sourced verification system that it calls deck verified you can check this one as well and that's officially public now but the bottom line is that many games work with some tweaking many games work out a box and then a whole lot won't work at all or have mixed success just because this is all very new there are tens of thousands of games probably at least on steam and um they're not all gonna work obviously so that's what you need to know that's the expectations management we wanted to do the hardware was very exciting and interesting pretty well designed as we showed the software needs time to mature the good news about software is that it can be downloaded so it's not like hardware where it's fixed they got they got the part that is unchangeable done right so that's good out of that let's talk about how the controls feel and go through the software as well this is a collection of notes from primarily patrick and i worked on it as well and then we had input from everyone on the team as they played around with the device let's get started talking about the physical hardware and usability for the most part the deck is more comfortable to hold than a flat device like a switch but the sheer quantity of controls leads to crowding and it also explains the size the d-pad the face buttons and the touch pads are all competing for the same space but the placement of the joysticks and the face buttons is less awkward than it appears at least visually both of them fall within the natural arc of thumb movement we're less happy with the buttons on the back which are hard to press on purpose and easy to press by accident for most of us the ideal grip position was with the index and middle fingers resting on the bumpers and the triggers and with the ring and pinky fingers on the rear buttons that keeps all the face buttons in reach but unfortunately makes it even harder to bear down on the rear buttons we'll be interested to see whether user created controller configurations make more use of the touch pads and the grip buttons as they take up significant space but aren't part of the traditional control schemes some quick information on how everything works our teardown video previously shows how all this comes together the triggers actuate a compression spring providing resistance and then the press is registered typically controllers will use either a potentiometer or a hall effect sensor to do this this is standard for a controller for construction of the trigger the grip buttons are a little bit different since they're less common these are plastic springs so it's just a piece of plastic that moves and hits a standard tack switch the face buttons and the d-pad both use conductive ring and pill pads the conductive pad contacts the exposed trace on the pcb when pressed triggering the button press in software this is also standard and in basically every controller on the market so in short the face buttons the d-pad the triggers and the joysticks work as you would expect from any other controller on the market there's nothing revolutionary going on inside the steam deck in terms of controller design so this is mostly a good thing because it doesn't really need to be reinvented so no new construction in this aspect the analog joysticks are also standard for modern controllers and they have an added capacitive touch sensor joy-con drift isn't specific to just joy-cons these types of joysticks can also develop drift with time but these are relatively easy to replace on the steam deck compared to some of the other parts of the steam deck so this is one that you wouldn't need to worry too much about it's three screws after you get through the initial eight in terms of sizing the deck is relatively large in order to accommodate all the controls extending six centimeters out past the edge of the screen in both directions but devices like the io neo and arguably the switch have already exited the pocket-sized realm anyway so the size matters less to us than the weight does a deck weighs 676 grams about one and a half pounds while the switch oled with joy cons attached weighs 420 grams with the original at 400 or about 0.9 pounds for both that can make a difference when there's no table or armrest to lean on for long periods and we have thoughts on that after using it on a plane when we flew out to newegg overall though we found the deck comfortable to use or at least not any less comfortable than similar handhelds the grips are isolated from electronics and mostly hollow which ensures that they stay cool for skin temperature the front-facing speakers are worth the real estate that they take up audio sounds good and it's surprisingly directional and it won't be blocked by resting the deck on its edge in a dock if you had one the anti-glare screens on our units are subtle it's an improvement over the original screen but not one that we'd noticed without it being pointed out to us the ssds are the only important difference then between the skus the screen we don't think is a huge difference that noted the viewing angles are extremely limited once you're at about 15 degrees the screen starts to become just black that's fine but any onlookers to your screen will need to be relatively close speaking to haptics and rumble the steam deck uses what it calls hd haptics to convey any sense of rumble at all most controllers that you're probably familiar with especially older ones really calmly leaned on a big spinning weight to create that heavier rumble so you could think of the dual sense versus the dual shock controllers as an example of this or maybe the nintendo switch's hd rumble feature the dictionary definition of the word haptic is really all-encompassing it just means quote relating to or based on a sense of touch so in that regard all rumble is technically haptic but in this industry when someone talks about haptics versus rumble there's a very clear understanding of the difference and generally speaking haptic refers to a light buzzing feedback that's created by linear actuators rather than a big spinning weight inside of the controller so that's the difference now sony and nintendo have both chosen to advertise their move to linear actuators as a feature rather than a downside valve when it launched the steam controller advertised this as a feature but with the steam deck valve came across as almost apologetic when explaining the state of haptics before our preview embargo quote during the development of this product we made an intentional decision not to prioritize beefy rumble motors for the steam deck reason being that the added weight hit to battery life and cost did not justify the added benefit the work we're doing now is to get as close as possible to emulating rumble without actually having the hardware built in so to make a long story short on what valve says it's doing is uh it's better now however in its current state the rumble has been turned down so far that it's barely noticeable at all we're mouse and keyboard users so that's fine by us but the vibrating units are located in the touch pads on either side of the controller it's diffused and spread out by that little squiggly metal bar that's attached to each side of the touchpad so the amount of feedback felt during gameplay varies greatly based on whether you're using the touch pads or not our biggest complaint about the form factor with a direct inarguable solution is that there's only one usb type-c port attaching more than one device so a charger mouse keyboard or a monitor requires a hub or bluetooth there really should be at least one other port on this thing maybe on the bottom or something which would allow creating a dock that the steam deck could slot into like a switch as it is even the first party deck dock will use a right angle cable routed out and around the back of the deck so if you want a charger and a usb stick a charger and an external ssd a charger and a mouse or a keyboard in order to navigate some of the menus then you'll need to use a hub and that starts to get about as cumbersome as using one with a modern laptop one further hardware note too the charge indicator on the deck is a white led it turns on when the deck is plugged in and off when it's not but it doesn't communicate any useful information about the charge status so some small stuff like this shows some of valve's inexperience with designing hardware devices time to talk about the biggest potential weak point of the steam deck which is its software fortunately for valve this is also the thing that's easiest for it to improve over time since it can just be downloaded steam already has big picture mode and that's a feature that offers a console style interface on windows without replacing the whole os it's not perfect but it works well enough on an io neo and it doesn't come with the compatibility issues of switching to linux in our estimation the main advantages of steam os over windows for handheld gaming are that the ui is designed from the ground up to be navigated with controller inputs and that the drivers the software and the updates are specifically tailored to the deck hardware none of those advantages are overwhelming when you compare them to the decades-long history of windows being the default platform for pc games but you could install windows on the steam deck if you wanted at least if it ever gets the amd drivers we were promised and given the history of hades canyon we're not hopeful long-term for those to be updated as they should be but we'll see steamos ui has been in flux since the day we received the decks back in january and it will continue to change unless the deck completely flops updates are nearly daily at this point the desktop steam ui has been changing for an awareness of mortality inducing 18 years now just for steam itself not even steam os and we expect that the steam os will follow the same path if it sticks around most of the deck ui changes have been too minor to bother listing but improvements are happening as of now the least intuitive aspect is that there are four menu-ish buttons on the deck there's the three-lined hamburger menu or start button the two rectangle view back button and the steam button and also an ellipsis button getting used to the individual functions of these buttons takes some time the library could also use work many steam users already have hundreds of deck compatible games and as of this writing the deck ui is less graceful at handling large libraries than the desktop client is it's really hard to put it into concrete terms with just writing so we filmed our cpu cooler test technician mike as he was given the instructions to find the total war game already in our library mike has not used the steam deck at all at least not before this and so he was a good team member candidate to subject to this test so library he's a good one since he's a million total yeah like he he definitely owns three kingdoms on this test account okay installed all games how do i search in our in our all games is that is this supposed to help you oh that's right okay i keep feeling like i'm being made a fool of here that i'm well everyone every other person in the office has done this except for steve wait why sort by alphabetical and then i guess i just i just got down i feel like i'm taking the most caveman approach just because um the oh tomb raider tip i'll give you is that every other person that's done this is the same thing that you're doing wait hold on i see tomb raider but then no it thinks it's it's shadow of the tomb raider so i'm not in the tease never mind oh total war okay so there's our total war games all right cool so there is you see there's there's no search buttons listed down here there's no prompts to do a search thing but right there is a search bar at the top of the screen here oh and this is a search bar for games that are on here games that are in your library and friends in the store and for tools yeah there's a lot going on so the search button isn't obvious and a lot of other stuff isn't either it's just this is a microcosm for the wider issue of usability another poor usability example in the steam ui the b button functions as a back button which doesn't line up with what we're used to although it sounds like it makes sense usually it would go up a level not returned to the previous screen remember this function's more like a traditional os than like a really railroaded switch os or something and so some of the behaviors are a little bit out of line with what you'd expect on a console just as a counter to all this on the switch which is the most obvious comparison the b button always does the same thing it always goes up one level so big difference there and how they behave now valve is less capable of improving the uis for individual games because they're developed by other companies so this is another potential shortcoming where we ran into at least one instance where the text for the menu and on the screen did not scale with the device itself and it was illegible this is when i was trying to use it on a plane when we were flying out to newegg and uh opening up the menu i had to hold the steam deck about here to see it and i don't have any vision problems so it doesn't always scale adequately and that's not something valve has a lot of control over now in between when that happened to us and now valve shipped another update which is a small magnifier that is a workaround to this problem where you can magnify certain elements of the screen if you have no other way to see them so you can at least navigate the menus and increase the text size ui size so they're aware of it it's not a clean fix but it is a workaround at least so ultimately that highlights the same issue of usability now there's also desktop mode desktop mode is a bit rough it's weird and inconvenient to get to it is not designed to be navigated with a controller and it feels like it was never really intended to be used outside of a development environment the desktop is a regular kde plasma interface that isn't natively suited to the deck and installing linux applications will be a new experience for many users valve has stated that quote we plan to make it easier to add apps directly from the non-steam games tab implied here without having to go to the desktop to launch non-steam applications like discord or chrome they have to be installed in desktop mode we were able to install firefox add it to steam launch it open a youtube video and then seamlessly swap back and forth between the browser and half-life 2 with the video still playing so at least that much feels relatively fluid in terms of navigation the desktop mode we used it a lot for our earlier testing when we were looking at all the different thermals the frame time presentation metrics all of that because we needed to access certain files that was done through desktop doing so it really feels like it's best suited to a keyboard and mouse for any type of more advanced navigation using the touchscreen to navigate is a little bit awkward so short of doing a mouse and keyboard setup via a hub your next most obvious choice would be the track pads on the device we can carry this logic forward and infer that the track pads will make it easier to play games that were designed with a mouse in mind but the lack of a physical keyboard remains an obstacle in those instances and having the second trackpad which for us typically was this one on the left was really not helpful we didn't have any natural uses for it it seems like its biggest use is really just to help transfer the haptic feedback evenly across the deck rather than an actual input device in the weeks leading up to the launch the most frequent changes have been to the performance menu this menu is useful for limiting or increasing the performance and so it has a direct impact on things like battery life as of this writing this menu contains a performance overlay slider that'd be for fps gpu usage things like that a 30 fps frame rate limit toggle this control was originally more granular and will be patched back in at a later date there's a 0 to 15 watt tdp limit slider a manual gpu clock control toggle that currently hard crashes and reboots the deck there's an upscaling filter with options for linear nearest integer and amd fsr and a show performance overlay and steam toggle that we'd recommend leaving off the performance overlay has potential to be misleading so be careful how you use it outside of games it doesn't really work well that's because it updates once well whenever there's input basically whenever there's a new frame generated so if you're using it in something like blender the data is not going to be up to date or accurate if things are happening in the background there's not active updating on the screen but in games it's fine many of these options existed in menus before today but they didn't function properly some of them still don't function properly but it's a lot better than it was when we did our initial hardware only coverage of the steam deck more detailed control is also possible if you're into things like editing config files so plenty of room there to play around uh for example you could turn off individual cpu threads or you could do some basic overclocking or a frequency adjustment underclocking things like that through the tuning utilities as well one big note for today is that valve has implemented a 60 fps cap you can turn this off so don't freak out but it's a hard 60fps cap universally for release this we think has to do more with how a lot of media outlets took our testing and ran it out of context sensationalized it and made sure to only publish the worst looking number for valve yes we have a bone to pick with those of you who've done that you know who you are uh what valve says is the reason for the 60 fps cap is quote fps wobbliness and instability with the full granular controls now the reason we think it's more to do with the battery life is because we when we did our initial hardware review we were extremely clear with the methodology for everything we were really detailed we took a lot of care to make sure everything was packaged and presented in a way where in theory you wouldn't really be able to take things out of context unless you really tried and oh did we really under predict how many other excellent headlines would be created from our data when stripped out of context bringing up that battery chart from the original review what you'll see is we have one number on there that's 87 minutes and as we said in the original review that is only under a ridiculous scenario where we were running devil may cry 5 with very high graphic settings we disabled v-sync which is also it's a reasonable trade-off to restrict the frame rate on a handheld battery operated device and we boosted the graphics settings and we were pulling about 30 watts deliberately for the life of the 87 or so minute test now what happened is instead of people reporting on uh gn determines that the battery life range is between 87 minutes and approximately six hours or reporting on gn says that the average battery life range is somewhere around two hours with higher settings and maybe four to six with lower settings and that gianna was unable to reproduce valve's claimed eight hour number no instead what was wrong was the steam deck battery might die in under 90 minutes or the steam deck battery barely lives for an hour and a half the steam deck battery dies in just over an hour we talked about this internally when it happened we thought about running a standalone video at the time but it seemed like too dedicated of a callout so we just put it in here but uh irresponsible reporting anyway the information on the batteries in the original the point here though is that valve has implemented a 60fps cap you can turn it off but it's there for a reason and the reason is it will help preserve the battery life and no it is not unreasonable to limit the frame rate on something like this we would do the same on a laptop you're not really using it to try and get max fps in rainbow six siege for competitive play when you're operating on battery on a screen that is the size of a phablet and just in case those media outlets are watching some basic math here a 40 watt hour battery should be able to sustain 30 watts for about 1.33 hours basic 40 divided by 30. the deck died in 1.45 hours so that's almost right on the money so it is possible to kill the deck in under two hours but in most instances it should be easy to avoid within game settings or the fps cap also something that was oddly left out of all those pieces was that this isn't something that's gonna sneak up on you you'll know it's very easy to see how fast the battery is dying when you're running it at those settings and you can adjust for it before you get too far along and just before anyone does it you could use a screwdriver and a paper clip and kill the battery much faster probably in under two minutes maybe even nearly instantaneously depending on how you do it but that doesn't count couple other things for software so in steam mode there's a complete lack of control over resolution right now or refresh rate or anything else for external displays this is something that we'd like to see fixed before valve ships the official dock right now the deck simply runs at the resolution of the display that it's connected to anecdotally as well we didn't have any issues playing games in offline mode this will vary greatly by title but it seems much easier to launch and play a game without a wi-fi connection than it has been in the past which was one of our major concerns about a mobile pc without a sim card games that support saving data to the steam cloud also worked really well you could feasibly play your game at 1280 by 800 on the bus you go home synchronize with the cloud pull down the save file and continue where you left off multiple accounts also very easy to work with so this is this is on the upside of the ui and ux design where valve's done really well uh you can keep the accounts logged in you can log them out if you want and switch between them no problems if one account has a gain that the other account does not have like your roommate or your friend then the user logged in who does not have the game can request to borrow the game from the account uh also on the device that owns the game this is within steam's base functionality but it works extremely well on the steam deck so that's awesome to see and finally here sleep states like s3s4 hibernate sleep have always been a major challenge point for windows software testing and in this scenario suspending and resuming single-player games with the latest version of all this and then putting the device to sleep bringing it back up works fine it worked every time we tried it it doesn't sound like praise to say a feature simply works but sleep states are notorious for breaking software and we were able to get it to work just fine so that's good too and these weird ui behaviors happen everywhere in fact as we're writing and filming this just about 12 hours before embargo list for this there was another update that came out that gives you the option to now launch multiple applications and run things in the background so when we were done with one game instead of closing it properly we just went back to the steam menu opened another game and it pops up a prompt and the prompt says you can close the instance you just attempted to launch and leave the original in the background you can switch to the original and cancel launching uh or you can launch both anyway which obviously isn't advisable for performance reasons what is not present though is an option to close the original application and then switch to the new one and the only reason this is really worth mentioning as a minor thing overall is because it illustrates a general lack of sufficient focus groups where valve probably needs to be working with more people and now it will be uh by its customers in order to collect enough information to figure out how to fine-tune the behaviors and options but then there are upsides too so controller support is fantastic we tried every controller from every major console in the last two or three generations we even tried the amazon luna one and it worked fine so steam deck didn't really seem to have any issues picking up controllers at all uh and that stands true for the oddities finally here one other note gyro control is a feature that valve showed off when the steam deck launched but it wasn't active in any of the games that we could show in our preview now we've had a chance to try it out and it's exactly what you might expect the gyro movement is distracting and it interferes with normal controls we'd actually prefer a system-wide setting to turn it off entirely rather than having to do it on a per game controller configurator basis it was pitched as a way to help fine-tune aim and things like doom but we actually found it harder to work with and i would prefer to not use it technically the gyro works exactly as expected it is functional it's just that the function is not well applied to anything we've tested maybe there's some use cases in the future perhaps in vr hardware for example but with the deck the controller configurator has become an extremely important part of steam now the deck has lots of inputs touch screen track pads face buttons rear buttons gyro and capacitive joysticks with access to the entire steam library now it can be used to play both games that have native controller support and games that need third-party controller profiles the first works pretty much out of box a steam deck has all the buttons of an xbox controller so that's easy the second kind of game requires the configurator either selecting a preset profile or manually creating one which isn't hard anyone who's tried to use a controller in counter-strike go more than a couple months ago knows how spotty controller support on steam can be on the deck each game page has a button that can be used to access controller settings and from here the current layout can be viewed or edited or individual settings can be edited quickly there are many templates available as well so although it's visually overwhelming it's awesome that there's this much customization available probably some of these should be hidden under an advanced menu to not overwhelm people who are expecting a switch experience but this feeds back into what we were saying earlier which is that the steam deck is really for a midstep between a sort of power user and someone who just wants an off-the-shelf console to work you will be able to do a little bit more and sometimes you'll have to do a little bit more in order to get the experience you want but that is sort of the beauty of basically a pc anyway so concluding then it's really it's what we said in the intro leading up to the controls discussion which is that it's all about managing expectations the hardware as we showed previously it's well designed it works pretty well things are in spec thermally uh the acoustic profile is not bad we thought it needed to change the hysteresis and the fan behavior fan ramp and dramp but overall we were pretty positive on the hardware which is rare for us so that was good as stated earlier though it's the software that matters software can be downloaded so if you're willing to be the beta tester and you think that valve will stick with this then the hardware's in good shape so all you'll have to worry about is valve updating the software the software now is functional you can definitely play games on it as stated before the biggest thing you need to do is check proton db or valve's own deck verified list and make sure the games you care about are on those lists they will be adding more they've been adding more there have been daily to i think we've seen as much as three times a day updates to steam os at this point it is changing rapidly that means mostly good things but sometimes valve breaks stuff on the way to implementing new things so really then the the takeaway of thinking about that end of things is that this we think is still in the camp of being largely an enthusiast slash power user device uh where you are very close to being in a live development environment for the software as we've experienced it maybe they'll change that in the next weeks as it goes public but that's been our experience which is fine and we like that because it's not foreign to us but um if that doesn't sound like the experience you want then our recommendation is obviously going to be to wait a little bit and see how things mature in the very least so that it's less frustrating as valve ships updates and so if you're in a later round for the pre-orders you don't really have a lot to be too upset about because when you get it it's just going to be easier for you to use so for the user who's expecting take it out of the box and it works like a switch experience that's not what you're getting but that is why it's cool just as long as we're all on the same page there it's a bad thing if you think that's what you're getting it's a good thing if you understand that you're buying a pc that looks like this and has linux on it you can put windows on it though one final point we really want to get across here is that the steam deck is not a finished product the steam os the ui and the user experience are easily the weakest aspects of this entire thing it's very clear to us now why valve had delayed the launch so much it's not because of the hardware it's because of the software but they're updating it every day so there's a light at the end of the tunnel there it's just that if you don't want to be a beta tester you shouldn't be buying this anytime soon that's just kind of our opinion on it now that said we think it's cool and fun but we're also technicians who work on this stuff because it's fun for us to work on it so if you don't have that same perspective then just keep that in mind maybe you should wait a little bit longer we do think there's a lot of potential here it's in a pretty good spot right now overall but it is a little bit cumbersome at times and we want to make sure everyone knows that because there's a lot of hype behind this and it's not for everyone so rapid recap then hardware attention to detail is excellent the software attention to detail it's okay but there's a lot of stuff we ran into or just frankly it really seems like valve needs to get more input from people outside the company to give it ideas on what's the expected behavior probably this is a scenario where the people working on the steam deck are so close to it that they maybe uh their thinking is influenced by knowing everything about the device and that's really common in development so they'll get there we think but it's a matter of time at this point we'll keep following up with this we have a lot more ideas we want to do with the steam deck especially on the hardware side so you will see more hardware coverage from us subscribe to catch that and check back and uh keep an eye out a lot more coming thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.cameras.net to help us out directly or you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus we'll see you all next time\n"