Have always loved handhelds and portable computers in general, something novel about them to me and they are super convenient. I got my LCD 512gb steam deck back in march of last year and it’s easily become my favourite handheld, dethroning my beloved PSP 3000. A couple reasons why I love it.

1. It plays all my games - This point is going to be hit or miss depending on what type of games you play and how much you are willing to tinker to make things work, but in my case the deck has been able to play every game i wanna play with acceptable performance.

95% of stuff works outta the box with the rest working with 1-5 minutes of tweaks from protondb. The “Unsupported” tag often just means “Needs some tweaks to work” or “you won’t be able to play online” in my experience. The only game I could not get working was deadly premonition 1, which is a notoriously shoddy pc port that struggles to run on modern windows systems anyways. Thanks to the deck being great with emulation however, I was able to play the switch version just fine.

Speaking of, absolutely stellar emulation handheld. Everything pre ps3 worked mostly flawlessly (the exception being saturn which needs some messing around to get some games working, just the nature of saturn emulation tho.) ps3 is hit or miss, some games run perfectly, others with frame dips, some unplayably slow and a handful just crash immediately. Switch emulation mostly works, but a handful of games have issues or unacceptable performance. let both ps3 and switch games compile shaders the first time you run them, performance gets better when you are a lil bit into a game.

3rd party pc games work well provided yer comfy with navigating desktop mode and the dolphin file browser. Was able to get my GOG library up and running with heroic games launcher. Itch.io and Archival Backup games I just added manually to steam via it’s add non steam game feature and enabled proton in that game’s steam settings. Lutris helped for some edge cases like silent hill 2’s enhanced edition fan mod.

Overall, i was able to play whatever i wanted on the thing. Which is great if you like going after and playing old or obscure games that haven’t seen releases on stuff like the switch.

2. Customisable with not a ton of hassle. Out of the box you have brilliant steam input support. The ui is presented in a way that makes it easy for tech newbies to bind a button or two for a game to the back buttons while still allowing maniacs like myself to create elaborate setups with gyro controls, touchpad menus, contextual inputs, automated actions etc. The ability to share layouts also means even if a game needs major mapping to play on the deck you can just download someone elses who has already done all the work for you if you don’t wanna.

For 3rd party customisations. Decky is easy to install and opens the flood gates with addons with custom ui’s, The ability to change your boot and sleep videos, Ability to change your system sound effects and add background music to the menus, custom loading icons, custom game art, easy music control, easy bluetooth device pairing, discord game status. You can pretty much redo the whole user experience in 20 minutes with minimal computer knowledge.

3. It’s an improvised computer in a pinch too. a cheap usb c dock, keyboard, mouse and display with desktop mode make the deck a pretty nice desktop if you need a semi portable pc solution or like to LAN with yer mates. You can totally live with the deck as your main pc if you are comfortable with KDE, Linux and getting strange looks when you take out your games console to give that PowerPoint/Impress presentation.

Desktop mode with no accessories is an okay experience provided you start steam in online mode while using the desktop, otherwise you won’t have your on screen keyboard for some reason, it’s not ideal but if you just need a desktop for one thing or just wanna watch something it’s completely serviceable.

I was really impressed by the deck, and if you play handhelds enough to justify spending €400+ on one the deck will probably be worth it for you.