That’s the beauty of buying used! Less financial investment. In this case I went for knock-offs but I usually mod used controllers.

Dude, no need to be a dick about it. You made your point, the dunk undermines it.

• under Home -> Power, select “Desktop Mode.”
• Open Steam in desktop mode, and go to your Library.
• Select a game, and go to Properties -> Local Files.
• a file browser should open and show the game files just like you’d see on PC.

I dunno, I feel like the Steam Deck’s core audience is “people who liked the Switch’s form factor but also like mods and third-party launchers.”

Worth noting that Steam doesn’t track playtime for non-Steam games. So this doesn’t include Minecraft, Retroarch, or anything purchased through Itch, GOG, or Epic.

same here! I’m a huge fan of MessagEase, a keyboard specifically made for the cell phone touch screen form factor. I think Valve used to dabble in something like this for the controller form factor, the ‘daisy’ or whatever? I think that should absolutely make a comeback, typing with touchpads is a short-term solution but with all the buttons and analogs on a modern controller, we should really have more keyboard options! Maybe something like each stick has 8 positions, and holding any combo of left-stick + right-stick gives one of 64 virtual ‘keys’, which you can click with the triggers, and the bumpers let you swap between different alphabets.

I didn’t know that! I’d prever to use server-only mods though, for Geyser compatibility, but thanks for the suggestion!

For what it’s worth, Valve has written a steam input driver for joy-cons! You can connect them over Bluetooth! …but they’re still joy-cons, so their wireless range is really bad. You basically need direct line of sight.

I have an older switch vulnerable to fusee-gelee, so I’ve been using yuzu’s tutorial for how to legally rip my purchased games from it.

I only use my Switch now for 1) Nintendo exclusives, that 2) I’ve already purchased, and 3) don’t run well on Yuzu. So… Super Beat Sports, mostly. (Harmonix please make a PC port!)

yep! remembers up to two bluetooth connections and two usb dongles. turn it on while holding:

• A to boot in usb mode
• B to boot in bluetooth mode
• X to connect a new dongle
• Y to connect a new bluetooth profile
• Start to use the previous dongle
• Select to use the previous bluetooth profile

honestly the steam controller’s killer feature for me isn’t even the touchpads – it’s the multiple-profile support. “oh, you want to connect to your PC for a bit, then reconnect to your console later? sure, just hold select during startup, I’ll remember your last 2 bluetooth connections.”

Can’t you basically do this already by installing SteamOS on a normal PC?

if you like the in-world smelting system, try NodeCore! It’s open source, low system requirements, and is very “back to basics”.

The Rise4 remap kit for Dualsense isn’t exactly “hardcoded” to ABXY, you can map them to any combination of face buttons. You can’t create new ones, though. However! If you’re not using the trackpads, you can assign steam virtual menus to them, and get up to 16 new “soft” buttons on each side.

Can’t go wrong with a Dualsense controller. Steam Input works great with it, and it has a touchpad, tilt sensor, analog triggers, and you can even remap the ‘mute’ button. Mine has the Rise4 paddles mod, which isn’t quite like the steam deck’s remappable grip buttons, but its close enough for most games where I’d want them.

Multiplayer, the Steam Deck is great for couch co-op like PlateUp! I carry a usb-c dock with hdmi out so I can put it on a friend’s TV.

There’s an unofficial Bedrock launcher in Discover, it usually works for me! That being said I’ve had better luck running Java with a controller mod like Controllable. I run Geyser on my server so both clients work!

The one downside to syncthing is that it needs two machines running at the same time to sync them, my workaround for that is to have a raspberry pi running it at home all the time :p

Related question: does anyone here know if it’s possible to sync windows registry data across machines? Say, between a wineprefix and a real windows machine? Apparently F.I.S.H. by Fireapples (Timotainment) uses the windows registry to save your game, and I can’t find a good way to sync that.

to clarify, once you set up Syncthing, it runs in the background even in gaming mode! You do need desktop mode to add new games to syncthing, but I think there’s not really a good way around that since every non-steam game has its own save file location. Plus you need desktop mode to install non-steam games anyway.