this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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Steam Hardware

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Planning on buying a SteamDeck. What should I know before purchasing? (piefed.ca)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by pentastarm@piefed.ca to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
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Optionally, what would you have wanted to know before you bought one?

Thanks!

Edit: Hey, thank you all very very much for your comments and suggestions, I really appreciate. I will most likely save up more and get the 1TB OLED model rather than the LCD model I was initially planning on. A couple of reasons for that, one, I am not good with electronics and I'd probably screw something up putting a new storage drive in. And two this thing will most likely be a permanent replacement for my old gaming laptop, which at this point is more than 10 years old, and seems to be on its last legs (I installed Linux on it, which was a struggle, but that is probably on me rather than Linux or the computer being at fault).

Anyway, I appreciate everyone's responses and thanks for helping a gal out!

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[–] ClobberBobble48@lemmy.zip 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Simple stuff to prevent you from panicking early on:

  • Say you're playing docked with an external controller and you put your steam deck to sleep while playing a a game. After it wakes up the next time you use it, 99% of the time, the game won't respond to the controller input anymore. You need to reorder the controllers in the menu and it'll come good again. Only in extremely rare cases have I had to restart the game.
  • Less so now, but early on there were definitely cases where I had to power cycle the steam deck because something went wrong. Even if the screen is black for a bit, just give it some time.
  • There's years of tips/tricks or software mods that people have collected that may/may not be relevant anymore. Just play it for a week or two before tweaking things. For instance, I love Decky loader for adding things like protondb support and how long to beat times to the library... but you definitely don't need it.

If you do decide to play docked, Sony Dualshock 4 or Dualsense 5 controllers are great because they have touchpads. This makes them super useful in games with half implemented controller support (i.e. the games work fine but the menu controls still use a mouse) or using desktop mode from the couch. They also have gyro support too.

I haven't had many issues with PC usb-c hubs... but all hubs are created differently. If you care about 4K output, VRR, HDR or anything above basic usage, I found a dedicated jsaux docking station works pretty well (note: I never considered the official dock as it was only officially available in my country well after I already had a steam deck).