With all the hype around the Steam Deck OLED release, I wanted to throw my two cents on whether or not a Deck is right for you. Really, it depends on you and your use case.

Full bias disclosure: I love the steam deck and consider myself a Valve stan. I will try not to sound too gush-y.

I am going to divide this review into three categories of users. The deck does different things depending on what your inclination is as a user. I am going to divide this into “Casual”, “Nerdy” and “Power user”.

I’m only going to be covering the games and functions of the deck. Battery life, screen, framerate, and so on have been covered ad-nauseum elsewhere. I want this to really focus on being a functional review, not a hardware review.

If you only plan to play the Deck in docked mode, then my recommendation is to get a gaming laptop instead. Docked mode works well, but the whole point of buying a Steam Deck is portability, and the performance will not be as good as a comperable gaming PC. And, believe it or not, you can plug a computer into your TV and use it like a console :D

##Casual

This section applies to you if: You don’t want to tinker with anything. You want a device that works “out of the box.” You don’t really want to monkey with software, and you aren’t interested in knowing the difference between “Proton” and “Proton-Experimental”.

I’m happy to report that for the most part, the Steam Deck “just works” if you stick to verified games on steam. Your library’s Steam Deck compatability can be found here. Graphics feel good, the controls are almost always plug-and-play, and even higher-end games look great.

If a game is marked “Playable” then it may require some manual tinkering, or it may just have small text. If you try to install a “Playable” game you’ll get a popup telling you what the “catches” are. They range from livable (the game doesn’t show Steam Deck buttons) to very annoying (launchers are a headache). YMMV and it depends on how nitty-gritty you want to get with setting up “Playable” titles.

With a quick visit to the settings, many “Unsupported” titles can actually work on Steam Deck! If a game just says “Valve is working on adding compatability” that means it’s untested and could work with minimal intervention. You’ll need to enter the game settings and force it to use Proton, but that is two buttons. “Unsupported” titles are, however, very touchy and might require more tinkering, which isn’t what you want.

Bottom line: The Steam Deck works well with minimal/no tinkering if you stick to Verified and some Playable titles. If that sounds worth it to you, then the Steam Deck may be for you.

##Nerdy

This section applies to you if: You have rebound controllers before. You’re comfortable with navigating filesystems, setting launch options, configuring graphics, and don’t mind weird/janky keybindings. Your Google-fu is at least Blue belt.

I recommend you read the Casual section since it applies to you as well.

Playable titles are various levels of painful, but I haven’t found one yet I couldn’t get working. Some of them (cough, cough, Ubisoft) have been absolute headaches. Your mileage may vary.

Setting up Proton for unsupported titles is easy and pretty painless for someone with your skillset, which drastically opens up the games in your library that work on Steam Deck. Thanks to community bindings, a lot of them are also well-adjusted for the Steam Deck controller.

But for you, my nerdy friend, I have a treat: If you don’t mind dipping your feet into the desktop mode (which is easy-ish to do with the bezels but I highly recommend a dock with a mouse/keyboard) then you have the miracle that is Emudeck. I am happy to report that Emudeck was pretty easy to set up, albiet requiring moderate technical skill to get some of the emulators working.

This thing is an emulation beast. The battery life is amazing and the display makes everything look good. I cannot stop gushing about how awesome the emulation is. I’ve worked with emulators before and by comparison Emudeck makes everything so flawless.

Hot take time: Cryo Utils is good if you like to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the deck, but games the Deck struggles with without Cryo Utils it usually struggles with if you have Cryo Utils. It’s a definite performance boost, but it’s not a miracle pill.

Speaking of performance, don’t expect framerate miracles on new games. Ghostwire is nigh-unplayable, and Baldur’s Gate is tough to run. Jedi Survivor is a mess. The Deck handles last-gen games fine, but struggles with current-gen. You can get them to playable, but playable and acceptable are different thresholds - YMMV.

If you don’t mind dipping your toes into the world of Linux Compatibility, a lot of non-Steam games can be installed and run via Lutris. I was able to get League of Legends, Hearthstone, and Warcraft 3 Reforged running in docked mode with minimal difficulty. Note that Fortnite and other Epic games WILL NOT run on SteamOS.

I do not recommend SteamOS is you are looking to take your first steps into the wide world of Linux. SteamOS is a very specific distro with a very specific function, and as such is a poor example of the “Do whatever you want” freedom of Linux. The filesystem is read-only and I DO NOT recommend changing that unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing. Read the next section for more info about that if you are interested.

Bottom line: Almost any last-gen game not marked explicitly “Unsupported” with a note from Valve can be run on the deck. Emulation is relatively painless. The Deck’s desktop mode is robust, but a bad introduction to Linux. Current-gen games struggle on the Deck. If these caveats are okay by you, then the Steam Deck may be a good choice.

##Poweruser

This section applies to you if: You know what sudo pacman -Syu does, and what makes it different than sudo pacman -Syyu . You are familiar with wine, flatpaks, snap (ew), and git clone makepkg pacman -U before. You once accidentally caused a kernel-panic on a computer you were using to write an essay due tomorrow (speaking from experience).

Let’s get this out of the way: SteamOS is very cumbersome if you try to get into the back-end. The filesystem is read only to keep the system as light and seamless for casual users as possible. Any changes you make will be reverted any time the system updates.

You’re going to have to live with flatpaks. It’s just the nature of the beast. You can install from the Arch repositories or from the AUR, but that’s like saying you can replace your car’s steering wheel with a pinball plunger. You’ll need to deal with keyring issues (that seem to be unending), synchronization issues (since SteamOS is behind Arch releases) and your packages will vanish every time you update SteamOS.

Of course, the deck is a computer. You are totally free to replace the OS. Windows works, so do the major Linux distros. Steam will even configure the control scheme once you install it on your OS of choice. Note you will lose some performance, built-in FSR, and you will lose the default bootup menu without SERIOUS tinkering.

And frankly, I don’t think it’s worth it. SteamOS works so well out-of-the-box that I haven’t felt the need to tinker with it too much. Minor tinkering (like rebinding keys with systemd-hwdb) is usually fine, though it needs to be repeated every time there’s an update.

I would put it this way: The Deck is an excellent portable gaming machine that doubles as a workable desktop, but it is not free as in freedom out-of-the-box, and making it free as in freedom compromises much of its value.

Bottom line: The Deck is the deck. You can tinker with it endlessly, but if you want to, and frankly I don’t think it’s worth it.