Steam Deck

I recently got a Steamdeck and was wondering if anyone had any recommendations of games that take almost 0 brainpower to play so that I can focus on listening to audiobooks.

For me that means no dialogue and no text to read. Games that have worked for me so far are:

• Rocket League (difficult to play on Steamdeck)
• Vampire Survivors (once I learned what each item does)
• Peggle

Games that I've had trouble with include

• Sifu
• Brotato (gotta read to learn the items)
• Factorio
• Baba is You

Games I have yet to really try:

• Elite Dangerous
• Elden Ring
• Dorf Romantik (this is promising)
• Powerwash Simulator (also promising)
• RollerDrome
• Halo: MCC online (is Halo 3 online viable on steamdeck?)
• Risk of Rain 2
• Hades

Anyone have any suggestions? I'm running out of ideas and may end up just forgoing this hole idea in favor of keeping gaming and books separate

Shadows of Doubt is amazing, but hasn't run very well on the deck. Inside areas run great, but travelling outside between buildings has had pretty severe fps drops even though the deck's hardware isn't being maxed out.

However this new experimental patch helps a lot. The deck power consumption jumps up a lot when outside, but the fps manages to mostly hold 30fps now which is a huge improvement. The recent patches have also brought a lot of controller support improvements, making it a viable way to play the game.

Android games are normally going to be inferior to Steam games, but this is still a nice option for games that aren't available on Steam or can't be played due to anti-cheat reasons.

You can read more about Waydroid here. There are reasons to believe valve is working on adding official Waydroid support to Deck, but until then you can install it this way.

Fallout London requires downgrading your game version before installing the mod. The people who run Overkill.wtf (who cover handheld news and have a weekly email newsletter) made an installation script to simplify the installation.

Roblox was broken on Deck and linux by the addition of a new anti-cheat. The way the Sober app gets around the anti-cheat is by instead running the android app. This apparently has some significant performance improvements over the usual PC app as well, with people reporting up to twice the performance on the same hardware.

I know people are pretty dismissive of roblox (myself included), but it's hugely popular and it's always good to have the option.

Also mentioned fixing bugs with desktop mode being blank when switching to it, and external displays remaining blank after resuming, which were both issues I've encountered.

Finally, it mentioned adding support of ROG Ally keys, whatever that means. According to gamingonlinux, this is probably just improvements to steam input that were merged into SteamOS. We can hope though that it's instead a sign of incoming support for additional devices, just don't get your hopes up too high.

Full changelog:

General

• Improved recovery from situations where the Steam installation could get corrupted.
• Fixed the frame limiter not properly applying in certain situations.
• Fixed certain specific refresh rates failing to apply on the OLED Limited Edition model.
• Fixed an issue where block corruption could appear on screen on certain state transitions.
• Slightly improved cold boot time.
• Fixed an issue where updating the built-in controller firmware could result in a blank screen during boot.
• Fixed rare situations where switching to Desktop Mode or back could result in a blank screen, or wrong colors.
• Fixed a regression with Simplified Chinese IME.
• Fixed a rare issue where sound output could be corrupted on certain boots.
• Fixed Zenity dialog boxes in Desktop Mode.
• openssh: Fix remote code execution bug (CVE-2024-6387).

External Display

• Fixed several issues where an external display could remain blank after resuming.
• Fixed an issue where an external display could remain blank if its mode required chroma subsampling.

Input

• Fixed an issue where DualShock 4 and DualSense controllers would sometimes not function properly on their first connection.
• Added support for the ASUS ROG Raikiri Pro controller.
• Added support for the Machenike G5 Pro controller.
• Fixed calibration on some third-party DualShock 4 controllers.
• Added support for the Steam Deck motion sensors to the built-in non-Steam kernel driver.
• Added support for extra ROG Ally keys.

OLED firmware 112

• Added support for the Windows Bluetooth driver.

Text transcription of image:

@everyone The Music Control plugin is delisted and should be uninstalled as it causes Steam BPM to "bootloop" in newer versions of Decky Loader such as the current pre-releases of 3.X.X. We also have users experiencing the same issue without that plugin installed so I would recommend manually deleting one plugin at a time to see which plugin is effecting you. You will need to delete any effected plugin(s) from ~/homebrew/plugins/ (You will need to use sudo to delete the files, suggest using konsole and using sudo rm -r /path/to/plugin). Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Semicolon on a USB keyboard connected to your deck should allow you to bypass the "bootloops" and delete the plugin. Best place for discussion is <#960284126701813770>. Best of luck!

Additionally the Decky recorder plugin can prevent you from being able to use desktop mode, just giving you a black screen instead (funnily enough having steam recording turned on can do the same thing), so it's also recommended to be uninstalled.

If you're affected by any of these issues, you will want to fix it using the console. You can bypass the loop by pressing Ctrl+alt+; and then try to enter desktop mode. If you can't get into desktop mode, you can switch to a terminal in game mode by pressing ctrl+alt+f5 once you're loaded into steam OS.

Once in a terminal, you can navigate to the plugin folder with the command cd ~/homebrew/plugin, use the command ls to see all the installed plugins, and then use sudo rm -r pluginfoldername to delete individual ones.

If removing plugins doesn't fix things for you, you can instead run curl -L https://github.com/SteamDeckHomebrew/decky-installer/releases/latest/download/uninstall.sh | sh to fully uninstall Decky loader and all plugins. Afterwards you can reinstall without the problematic plugins.

When you've finished running commands, you can type reboot to restart your deck.

If you're affected and having trouble getting it fixed, feel free to ask for help here or on the Decky discord server.

EDIT: We have an updated list of plugins that are breaking boot:

• DeckRoulette 1.1.3-0950f29
• GameView Music 1.1.0-1
• MicroSDeck 0.9.1-1 (see list below)
• MusicControl 1.1.5 (see list below)
• Network Info 1.0.1-13b914b
• Remote Play Whatever 1.0.0
• System Toolbox 1.0.2-1

Thankfully a new pre-release of Decky Loader came out this morning and claims to have fixed the issue.

As we all know, Yuzu is no longer available so I'm using Ryujinx via Retrodeck. I found the archived mods on this page but fps still drops down to 30 and below. I made sure to place the mod (on its own folder) under

/home/deck/.var/app/net.retrodeck.retrodeck/config/Ryujinx/mods/contents/01006bb00c6f0000/

I also downloaded the anti-blur mod and it is working ok. Let me know if I missed some steps here.

If you have the latest Steam client beta, you may notice a new Steam Deck icon in your friends list indicating who is on the handheld.

That should make it easier to figure out which of your friends is on the Steam Deck or Big Picture mode, as Steam previously used the gamepad icon for both.

The Jackbox Megapicker was corrupting SteamOS and forcing people to reinstall the entire OS. It's been fixed with a hot fix for now, but probably safest to avoid it until they get this all sorted out.

Just wanted to shout out this piece of software.

I've been time poor lately and the ps5 has been gathering dust in my office. Streaming onto the deck has been a godsend, as I'm not tied into locking myself away from the family to play a game. Bit of a hassle to set up but so handy once it's been added as a non-steam game.

Haven't seen a post like this recently so I thought I'd start the conversation !

I'm close to finishing Wario Land 3 (emulated GBC), which was the game of my childhood, I'm surprised of how tricky some levels are.

I also started playing The Eternal Cylinder but it's quite a demanding game so I'm thinking of playing it on PC instead

They still haven't released the specs, but a fully functional build was leaked a few weeks ago. Did anyone try to play it on the deck? I know it's unlikely but I still hope that the game will be playable.

https://www.deckhd.com/

Edited broken link.

Kernel anti-cheat systems are currently the bane of Linux/Steam Deck gaming, haven't actually proven to be effective at stopping cheaters (see Valorant for an example), and lead to various security concerns from giving 3rd parties full access to your machine to being used to install ransomware and malware.

Windows tried to restrict kernel access years ago, but backed down under pressure from various companies. However Crowdstrike's outages have shown the sever consequences of leaving kernel access open, and we might finally see kernel access to be cut off.

Edit: Clearly the model doesnt matter. My mistake. Anyway...

So far its been running at about 38 fps for me with all settings on high. If 60 fps isnt that big of a deal to you like it isnt for me, I highly recommend it, its very pretty. I'm going to test how it runs with the new water and probably play it on ultra, just to see, depending on how things go on high.

There was some slight slow down during my playtime last night, but it was negligable. Otherwise, it still ran surprisingly well. I specified 500gb because i was under the impression each tier had different performance outputs and didnt want to speak for the other models, so my bad.