Looks like almost all of this update is focused on improving support for other handheld devices.

Awesome, glad to hear it!

Someone very recently was complaining about ubisoft not working on their deck, so ubisoft may have changed something.

Not an ideal solution, but if you have a working install for it you may be able to copy your prefix folder for the game to her deck.

Alternatively you might be able to install and get her set up on a windows PC, then copy the install folder from that. This will be trickier though since you’ll need to probably copy install and config folders for both the game and ubisoft connect I’m guessing.

Great writeup as always!

The Project Hailstorm link isn’t working for me, it’s showing an app ID of 338 instead of 3388760 so I’m guessing it got cut off. It’s an interesting looking game though, I’ll be sure to check it out.

Currently I’m playing 1000xResist, and it’s absolutely hooked me. I’m a sucker for games that that jump back and forth in time, showing me a very different future and a relatable past, leaving me to puzzle about what happened to cause the changes. Interesting world building or large scale mysteries like that tend to grab my interest much faster than character/story drama, so I really appreciate when a game hooks me that way as they set up everything else.

Been having a blast with Make Way lately, it’s a top down racer where you start each round by building new sections of the track and adding traps to it. It’s really chaotic and fun, and supports up to 6 local or online players

I’m not sure, one proton db review mentions they can usually hit 40fps on high graphics, which sounds decent.

Clicking on the beta link should download a EmuDeck-beta.desktop file that can be run on the deck to install it. The download is working for me, but you might have to right click on the link and hit “save link as” if it doesn’t download normally.

Communities organizing themselves into squads to handle criminals and undesirables is also how we ended up with the KKK. Also the kinds of people who volunteer for unpaid security work tend to be pretty conservative in my experience.

That’s unfortunate.

Make sure you’re logged in, it will always show out of stock if your logged out.

Do you know if it’s hardware or software issue? If it’s software, you can make a steam recovery drive and fix it that way. There are options to re flash everything or just repair steamOS system files. You can actually get stuck in a boot loop by maxing out the internal storage, so it might be worth booting into recovery and deleting some files if you think you’re close to maxed out.

As a cautionary warning, the SteamOS recovery media doesn’t properly support wifi 6 on the OLED deck, and might crash the wifi card, requiring you to reboot and start over. If you’re on an OLED deck and your router supports wifi6, I’d recommend only connecting to the 2.4GHz network provided by your router and not the 5ghz one to avoid this. Ethernet is also safe if you have a dock.

If your issues are hardware based, you can still send it into valve and they’ll give you a quote on the repair cost. Obviously it will depend on what’s wrong, but I usually hear of people getting pretty fair repair quotes.

For additional context, handheld PCs in general were estimated to have 6 mil in total sales during that period, so the steam deck is 2/3s of the market.

Some additional quotes from the source material:

“I think it’s amazing,” AMD gaming marketing boss Frank Azor tells me, discussing IDC’s numbers for handheld gaming PCs. “This didn’t exist three years ago; we went from nothing, zero, to incremental category creation in the millions of units.”

But out of those 6 million shipments, the lion’s share have been the Steam Deck itself, according to IDC’s estimates. All of the 2022 shipments are the Steam Deck, and Ward tells me upwards of 50 percent of the 2023 shipments and 48 percent of the 2024 shipments are the Deck as well. Doing the math, Valve has now shipped upwards of 3.7 million Steam Decks and has quite possibly crossed 4 million by now.

With as few as 2 million Windows handhelds shipping in two years, it’s not a huge surprise that AMD and Intel aren’t spending big on more custom chips like the one that’s still working perfectly well for the Steam Deck — particularly if the rumors are true that early Windows handheld buyers returned their purchases at unusually high rates. (Anecdotally, I’ve seen lots of open-box stock of the Asus ROG Ally when I’ve looked at Best Buy online and in-person.)

Rock and roll and stone!

Ok so origin is apparently being killed off in two weeks, and they’ve already started killing the origin APIs

People with it installed already are able to get some games to work still, but functionality is now broken and the devs aren’t going to try to fix it since origin is supposed to die soon anyways. So I’m not sure what the way to play origin game with friends is now.

TheWINEDLLOVERRIDES="version=n,b" %command%'launch option is necessary, so we’ll need to troubleshoot that. I’ll look into it and see if I can figure out what’s going on.

Just swap the buttons to match Nintendo layout, and then there’s a toggle in the steam settings>controller to switch to Nintendo layout

Edit ok actually I guess that won’t work, the b button specifically is special and can’t be swapped looks like.

If you’re not wanting to play real demanding games I would suggest the deck. It’s cheaper, has much better warranty, better input options, etc.

I’d really only consider the Ally if you actually need the extra performance and aren’t worried at all about the cost. if you do decide you want the Ally, I would recommend reading up on their recent warranty scandal stuff first.

According to protondb, you need to replace the EA app with origin.

Check the second review by “L4ZaRu5”, it has a guide.

I don’t think valve will change the price due to tariffs. The deck was originally sold at a major loss to reach valve’s target pricing, and they can afford to lose money on it because it drives game sales.

The deck has sold a lot more than expected, which has brought manufacturing costs down. I suspect the Deck is fully profitable now, but if tariffs make it unprofitable again I’m pretty sure valve would rather eat a loss on the hardware and keep enjoying the increased software sales per steam deck owner.

Glad you found a working driver for the tablet! There are drivers available through aur, but they mention they’re deliberately out of date because the newer drivers won’t support older devices. Looks like quite a mess to identify the newest driver that would work with your device, and that would be on top of needing to find a good way to permanently install it with the deck’s locked down file system.