Steam Deck

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A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.

Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.

As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title

The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.

Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.

These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.

Rules:

Follow the rules of Sopuli
Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
No piracy, there are other communities for that.
Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
Have fun.

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founded 3 years ago

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On screen keyboard and mouse - what are your survival tricks? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Excluding adding an external keyboard and mouse, what quality of life changes can be made to the deck to make keyboard and mouse work less terrible?

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[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Okay, I feel a little silly for not realizing there was an adjustable threshold on the trackpads - I've been avoiding using them because of how touchy they are. (To be fair, I've only had my deck for 16 months, lol).

I'm still a bit baffled that the keyboard is so frustrating to use, given how moderately adequate most mobile device keyboards are. I hate to say it, but even MS's tablet-mode keyboard, as bad as it is, is a substantial upgrade from the deck's.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think that the Deck's touchscreen and keyboard code is just not a priority at all. It has to be barely good enough to type in your wifi password. From there, you scan a QR code to sign in to Steam (which was absolutely an amazing development), and maybe type in four letters to search for a game you want to install.

Direct manipulation of the keyboard is awkward because you aren't holding the screen very closely like on a phone. Doing that is more like "gorilla-grip one side, and poke keys with your other index finger quickly, before you drop the damn thing". In addition to that, the keys don't register very well, possibly because it doesn't have a phone's clever DWIM heuristics. And even when you're trackpad typing, the keyboard laaags, because we only have eight 3.4 ghz logical cores 🤪.

As far as I'm concerned, valve has the right priorities. Keep their noses to the Proton and Vulkan and Gamescope grindstones. Make it so that nobody ever feels the need to wipe and reinstall their system to fix some unfathomable bug. The keyboard can keep right on sucking, so long as "make games just friggin work" moves forward.