I haven’t heard many people talking about a key group here.

There are quite a few people out there who play the Deck handheld 95% of the time, so they rarely dock it… but they also aren’t out and about traveling with it.

They just play it in comfy spots around their house, without ever really hooking it up to a larger screen extendedly. There are probably quite a few of them talking in this thread.

For any of these people wanting a performance upgrade: Steam Machine is going to be HUGE, and much better than switching to a slightly more powerful handheld at nearly the same price point.

These people can hook the SM up to a TV to check on it alone if needed… but primarily they will locally stream from it to their Decks. And it’ll absolutely crush 60/70/90 FPS (the common max display rates on the Deck screens, depending on what flavor you have and whether or not you’re overclocking the LCD display) at 800p, with graphics cranked WAY up on a ton of games.

It’ll definitely be a fantastic era to be a household Deck gamer.

I’m not worried. Valve absolutely nailed the Deck ergonomics. They knew what they had to do here.

Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

To be fair, I think you were expecting something from it that isn’t part of its core.

I don’t play it myself, but I have several friends and family that do, and they all cite it as their comfy, repetitive (by design) game that they play for a half hour at the end of a day to unwind and shut their brain off. From what I can tell, THAT seems to be the goal of the game, and it sounded like you wanted the opposite from it.

I use a bunch of YouTube enhancing extensions.

SponsorBlock. so very, very good. First user into a video after it drops, who has this extension, marks the portion of it that is the YouTuber’s ad read / sponsor segment. Extension auto-skips it for every user who watches after. Saves a lot of time.

Multiselect for YouTube. Just what it sounds like, you can select multiple videos at once to add or delete from playlists, instead of doing them one at a time.

PlayerTube. Use approximations of player UIs from bygone years. I’m partial to 2013 myself.

Return YouTube Dislike and YouTube Shorts Block. Self explanatory from titles.

Others (non-YT) I use…

Change Case. I watch my keyboard and not my screen whilst typing, and this just lets me quickly flip large chunks of unnoticed caps-lock text back to normal once I discover it, rather than having to retype it all.

Simple Translate. Quickly run highlighted text through a translator on the right click menu.

Multiplayer co-op FPSes, on the other hand, are freaking fantastic. There’s a reason why my friend group gaming rotation is primarily composed of Deep Rock Galactic, Left 4 Dead 2, and Vermintide / Darktide.

It depends on what you mean by viewpoint. If they’re disagreeing about objective reality, 0/10. If we can’t agree on an objective level, there’s no point.

This is pretty much the crux of the problem right here. How are you supposed to have any kind of productive conversation about the world if they are living in a fictional one that doesn’t actually exist?

Is it possible to find a girl at the festival?

I’m going to say probably, considering that approximately 50% of the human population is female, give or take a smidge.

I wouldn’t say it runs particularly well currently. I play it at 720p lower settings and it will go 50 - 60 fps at several places and times… but then when there’s a ton of action and enemies, suddenly you’re in Jittery High 20s / Low 30s Land.

But it’s still very fun, especially with friends, and everyone picks their jobs and gets down to business. And it’s early access and early on in its road map… I imagine it’ll just get smoother as they optimize it more over time.

I haven’t noticed any increase, but I tend to use custom fan curves and play the same 5 - 10 games most of the time, so it doesn’t vary much.

Playing a lot of Jump Space and Deep Rock Galactic with friends.

Single player, Baldur’s Gate 3 continues to be my long haul game, and Brotato and Balatro remain my “20 free minutes to game” games

Day. One. Purchase.

I’m sorry friend, but I doubt you’re going to get many assisting responses here regarding this issue.

The overwhelming majority of people with a Steam Deck are running Steam OS on it, and I’d be stunned if more than a couple of dozen people on planet Earth are running your OS on one.

Add to that the fact that many, many people who play BG3 on the Deck are running the Windows version of the game under Proton (both for familiarity’s sake, and to make stuff like frame generation easier), and I don’t think that it’s just that you’re looking for a needle in a haystack… I think it’s more like you’re looking for a specific hydrogen atom inside the sun.

I don’t enjoy my current three days a week in the open office, but I’ve found that noise blocking headphones and running podcasts and YouTube videos as background noise just makes it all, for the most part, go away.

You don’t even have to go expensive with them to pull this off. I bought these off of Amazon a few months back, and they’ve been fantastic. I’d say about a 75 - 80% noise reduction, and the background stuff you play makes up the rest of that difference.

I have always had controllable lucid dreams, pretty much my whole life, but I wouldn’t call the non-control version “fake,” as the realization and knowledge that you’re dreaming is what makes it a lucid dream.

“Controllable” and “non-controllable” would be more accurate than “fake” and “real.”

Is Esperanto similar to what you’re talking about?

No, I think a true universal language is going to need minimal friction, and be as simple and vocab-limited as possible, to encourage mass adaptation.

For all its intent on being easier than other mainstream languages, Esparanto is still more complex than what I’m talking about.

I’d honestly love to see something like that become an actual universal language. Simple grammar, sub 500 words, a little more meat on the bones to eliminate some of the ambiguity, but be easy enough to teach every kid in early grade school. Something that just allows basic communication and is accessible to everyone.

Don’t think it’s going to be an evolved toki pona though, it feels like most of its fan base just wants to keep it an impractical art hobby instead of allowing it to grow up to be something useful.

Airplane 2 (1 actually had pretty common “disaster movie” plot for the time)

Your fun trivia fact for the day is that Airplane! was actually a remake of a 1950s plane disaster movie called Zero Hour! Same plot, even long stretches where they go same plot points and sometimes even shot for shot…

Airplane! just had a tonal change caused by throwing a bunch of ridiculous gags in, essentially becoming a parody of its origin movie.

If you need a YouTube rabbit hole to fill a couple of hours of dead time at some point, well, there you go.

As someone who replaced a dying laptop with a Deck, I can tell you that it’s simply this: it functions great as BOTH a handheld and a regular portable PC, both docked and not docked.

Granted, I was lucky in that I already had one of the more expensive needed extra components (a really good 1440 gaming monitor that my sister gave me after she upgraded to 4k for her rig), but I literally only had to grab a dock, a couple of cables, and a bluetooth keyboard / mouse / headphone combo, and I was good to go. Far cheaper than a new (even-low tier) laptop, and it still would have been even if I would have had to buy a monitor… and honestly, I don’t miss getting crouch-heat blasted in the least.

Also, FWIW, I don’t think the Deck is particularly good at anything that is not gaming.

Honestly, that feels like an opinion from someone who hasn’t used it in that way. It works great for non-gaming stuff, even while mobile. 800p is totally okay on a sub-8 inch screen, which isn’t too small at the distance you view it from when not docked. I also don’t have issues with needing to one-hand the Deck often, but when that happens, laps and chests exist, depending on where I’m using it, so it’s never really been a problem.

As far as desktop navigation goes, it’s great. It has a touch screen, but if you’re someone like me who doesn’t like to touch the screen and print it up, you can just make up whatever control scheme is most comfortable to you. I use the joystick instead of the touch pad, I just find it easiest.

All in all, the Deck a great experience while mobile, and isn’t anywhere near as bulky as a gaming laptop to carry around.

Literally the only thing I ever miss is the ability to easily text chat in games while docked, but most stuff I play now, I can just use the mic if I have to talk to other players.

It’s my daily driver as well, I’ve had both LCD and OLED, and native display is normally off for both when I’m docked to my monitor. Personal preference, I don’t need the small Deck screen as a second monitor 99% of the time when I’m setting five feet (1.5m) away, and I don’t like losing my mouse cursor in it.