I 100% agree with you on your first 2 paragraphs. I really love my Deck, but God damn is it annoying getting things like Battle.net, GOG, and/or Epic games working inside of it in Game Mode sometimes.

Apps like NonSteamLaunchers or Heroic help a lot, but they don't always work smoothly. Like I had the itch to try out WoW again this week after not playing for numerous years (I'd heard War Within was really good). Getting battle.net installed and working within Game Mode was a major pain in the ass. I'd done it a few months ago for Diablo 4 without much headache, but somehow when I tried launching BNet last night, it wouldn't. NonSteamLauncher's BNet integrator also wasn't working for whatever reason. So I had to do a few workarounds before I got one that worked.

It's scenarios like that where I truly wish Valve would try harder to work with companies like Epic or Blizzard to get better native integration. I know Epic is a competitor, but really it'd be beneficial for both companies to have good integration between each other. I'm much more inclined to buy games on Epic if I can easily play them on my Deck, and I'm more lore inclined to stay within Steam's ecosystem if I'm not constantly encountering these annoying obstacles. It will likely never happen, but I can dream

As for your last paragraph, are you referring to wiping your Deck and just installing Windows? I've been hesitant to do that due to how often I use the sleep mode function in games. I've tried using sleep mode on my desktop PC like that when I can't save a game and I need to stop to do other stuff, and it's really hit or miss if a game will resume without issue after waking. Have you had any problems? Also, how is your battery life impacted? The Deck has crazy good battery life, and I attribute a lot of that to how efficient the underlying OS is with power management, but maybe I'm wrong. Also, do you have issues with drivers? The APU on the Deck is a custom AMD chipset, but have people ported the drivers for it over to Windows now?

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh, no, I'm talking about Windows native handhelds, which may be getting SteamOS support in the future, as per the original post.

I think a lot of people (reviewers included, weirdly) assume that you need to navigate those with a mouse replacement every time, so you get a lot of complaints about how bad using Windows without a mouse is compared to Steam OS on Game Mode. But you can absolutely set up Steam to a) autolaunch on boot, and b) launch straight into Big Picture mode. At that point once you unlock your Windows handheld you're straight in the Steam fullscreen mode interface and can do everything (within Steam) with a controller.

Not that I think tapping the Steam icon to manually open it up is that much of a hassle, anyway.

I do have a Deck, but they never made good on their early promises to make it easy to use with Windows. Which they did make, I remember. But nope, if you have a Deck you should probably stick to Steam OS. Valve should just find a better way to integrate third party launchers.

[–] bassomitron@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ahhh, I misunderstood your earlier comment, my bad. Yeah, if I had a windows handheld, setting it up to boot straight into Steam Big Picture would be a no-brainer for me, just as a minor QOL thing.

As for your other point, I don't remember them saying that, but that's pretty crappy they fell through on delivering on that promise. I'm just hoping as SteamOS/Linux gaming continues growing in popularity that developers just start putting more effort into native support.

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago

I have tried it but Big Picture mode in Windows is extremely limited because

Cannot change system settings (Power usage/fan-curve/FPS/Refresh rate)
Cannot add Bluetooth device (controller/headphone) within Steam; need to switch back to Windows
Floating windows interfere with application focus since there is no gamescope. You need to use the touchscreen from time to time which is annoying
No Decky Loader