 When the steam deck was first announced, I was pretty adamant that I wasn't gonna buy one I had my doubts over whether or not it was gonna have a lot of games to play because even at that time Proton was still kind of getting off the ground yet. It had gotten way way better But there were still a lot of games that had some significant problems on Linux So I had my doubts but also I've just never been that much of a gamer at least not recently So I couldn't justify spending the money on a steam deck and I've talked about that several times on the channel And on the podcast over the course of the last year. I had one pre-ordered, but Did decided not to actually go through with it. I pre-ordered it again And then then go through with it again. It just you know, I was so indecisive about it I just you know at the end of the day I just decided you know, I don't really need this thing, but I changed my mind so I have a steam deck and What I wanted to do today was talk a little bit about my first impressions and what changed my mind So we'll start off with that what changed my mind truly about the steam deck and why I decided to buy one Well, honestly, it was two things first of all, I want to do more gaming content on the channel Now I don't want to go all gardener Bryant on you guys So there's not gonna be a ton of gaming content on the channel So don't worry about that But I do want to do some more Linux gaming content on the channel just because it will broaden up the amount of topics That I have access to so I'm not doing all racing videos all the time even though I would I desperately want to so That's one reason I want to do more gaming content and maybe Get into more games because I have a fairly large steam library Most of the games I've never played before every time steam has a sale And I see a game that I might someday in the future Probably not want to play I buy the game and then it stays in my library forever And I never play it. So I have some steam games there for me to try so, you know, I I just Decided that maybe I want to be a gamer now You know I've started gaming channel or something become a twitch streamer something I don't know probably not but the point is is that you know I have some plans for content in the future based around Linux gaming and a steam deck will help me do that the other reason why is that I've seen some articles online from Organizations that aren't notoriously Linux forward or Linux friendly say astonishingly positive things about Linux on the steam deck and That kind of just made me think well, you know, maybe there really is something more to the steam deck than just being kind of cool So I had some money lying around and I decided to buy one. I bought the middle Ski you of it though the one that's right in the middle with this that 256 storage and The non-fancy screen and I've had it for four or five days now and I've been playing with it So let me talk about my first impressions. So the very first thing I thought when I got it out of the box was man this thing is much heavier than I thought it was gonna be and It's going to be very uncomfortable to game with for any significant amount of time And my opinion on that hasn't really changed all that much It is heavier than I thought it was gonna be and it's not the most Comfortable gaming experience I've ever had from a handheld console But then the last handheld console that I had was the ps Vita didn't play it very much because again, not a gamer but that was a lot smaller and lighter and That's just obviously the last thing that I have to compare it to before that it was the original Game Boy, so I Don't in terms of handheld consoles I don't have a lot of experience, but it was heavier than I thought it was going to be and while I've gotten used to I've been getting into the thing. I have gotten used to the weight of it because I've been playing it more often It still does shock me every once in a while about how, you know, meaty it is, right? It's just a very hefty boy. So I'm not saying that that's a bad thing really It's not it's the size of it doesn't bother me as much as it did when I first got it I've gotten used to it. It's not the most comfortable thing, but again It's something you can get used to the one thing that I really haven't gotten used to is the amount of heat that it puts out Now it does only put out the heat I don't know if you guys are able to see this it only does put out the heat through these vent holes here and That's good. At least they didn't put it on the bottom that could have been bad but it puts out a lot of heat and The more windows like game that you're playing the more heat it puts out So if you're playing Spyro for whatever reason Spyro is not well optimized for anything Linux It plays well But it doesn't like any hardware whatsoever and it kicks in the fan really bad and it creates You could it's very toasty now not the big deal because you're not gonna put your hand up here anyways, but You notice it. That's the other thing that I noticed so so those are the first two things that I kind of noticed You know whatever the other thing I noticed is that the buttons are really really nice like for the price of it I expected the buttons to be kind of mushy, but I Don't know if you can hear that or not, but they're very Very quicky and you know It was very surprising and the touchpad things on there that you guys might be able to see there Those are you know Not useful at all From the games that I've played so far now. I've only played three or four games But for the most part the the touchpads are completely Useless inside of a game I found myself using them sometimes in it in the you think like the UI or whatever if I can turn this on and show You like the UI here the you can you know, whatever I sometimes use the touch pads But most of the I find myself using the d-pad to navigate the UI too So I don't really have use of the the trackpad I know some people really like those things But I don't the other thing that I want that I've noticed over the last four or five days is that battery life is mediocre and honestly During gameplay I expected that there's not a big battery in here And it's running like full-on Windows games on that little bitty battery So it's not that surprising that the battery life doesn't last that long during gameplay What was surprising to me was that the standby wasn't better So I haven't played it at all today, and I charged it last night, and it's at 45 percent right now I've done nothing on it other than turn it on that one time. I just showed you so the standby time is Maybe there's something running in the background on my machine, and I don't know what it is But it's not that great which is unfortunate because I'm not gonna use it every single day But there will be times when I want to go use it that if I find that I go back to it and the battery is dead I'd be very upset about it right like it when I decided to game one of the reasons why I got away from gaming back in the Xbox 360 days I was never a big gamer then but it was more of a gamer than I'm now I had an Xbox 360 before they had a PlayStation 3 I think and one of the reasons why I got away from it Was because every time I went to the console to game which wasn't very often I'd always have to sit there through an update right and when their Xbox back in at least in those days When it had an update you had to do the update it forced you to do it You had no choice and it would sit there for like an hour and a half to update this thing Reboot multiple times and then by the time the update was done I didn't want to game anymore So if I have to charge this thing after it just sits there for a little while I'm a little bit disappointed because I'm gonna come to it You know in a couple days from now and decide I want to play some dead cells and it's going to be dead now I can obviously just plug it in and play it, but it still kind of has that same experience The another thing that I wanted to say about the hardware itself was that they put the I don't know if you'll be able to see this on camera but they have the USB-C the USB-C port up at the top and I'm of two minds about this first I think it is actually good design or I can see why it could be good design because when you're playing it You know against your chest or against your stomach You know you you don't want a cord bending down there. That'd be bad But also you don't want to cord dangling at the top. So I don't know if there's a good solution for where to put the USB-C I think they probably chose the best option. They possibly could but it would I don't know where else they would put it in order to make it better so it's just Simultaneously a good decision and a bad decision another thing that I really really Be awesome in terms of like power thing is if this had wireless charging And you could just set it on top of a wireless charger when you were done with it and just let it sit there and charge Forever and then your battery is always going to be full right? I know it's not good for the battery But it would always it would take away that whole standby Battery training thing that I just talked about so wireless the chart wireless charging in the next version would be really cool All right, so I talked about the hardware. It's very sturdy very Well made for the price. It's fantastic to be honest with you heavier than I thought it would be very sturdy in construction and The buttons are really good. So I should actually talk about the screen the screen is fine I'm not one of those people who has to have a 4k OLED screen I have two 1080p screens and sitting in front of me I have a 1080p screen there the TV that I have in this room is a 1080p screen You're getting a you're getting the pattern there. I don't need 4k can't tell the difference between HD and 4k I never have been able to and Probably just because my eyes are crap, but I don't need that big of a resolution on any screen So a screen that's like seven inches, you know, I don't need a huge resolution And I know this is only like what 720p or whatever is I didn't have a problem with it It looks fine I will say and this is where we can get into the software a little bit the biggest problem I have with the games that I have on there, which I'm first on I'm astonished at how well the games play So the games play like all granted. I haven't played a lot of games so far. I've been playing dead cells. I played a Rocket League I played a couple others a Spyro was one of them and I downloaded like dirt rally or something So there's like before games that I played so I haven't played a ton of games But the games play really well all of them are Windows games and they just they're they're very You know, like I'm not gonna I'm not pixel peeping and I don't see any drop frames because I hardly ever notice those things unless they're Blatons so the games play really well But the one thing that I wanted to say about the screen in association with the software is that when you're in game The text is really small now some of the games that you see in the store will actually tell you hey that the Some text in game can be really small and small and hard to read But I haven't seen a game that I've played so far that doesn't have small text like it's Astonishingly small now obviously not much you can do about it It's a small strain that either you can't make these some of it is just because I need to have my glasses on more often When I play games I should do that But the text is just kind of small and in some games like dirt rally that I was playing which I'm not good at it all because the controls are wonky I had to fix those but the text on that is like black on transparent white background and It's like in a really weird mono space font It's not well designed at all and does not work well on the steam deck It's just not readable like hardly at all So I have a feeling that as I go through more my steam library I'll probably see that more often because it's just kind of gonna be the thing like text is going to be super small And if you have vision problems like I do it's gonna be a problem for you I I found myself actually, you know Putting it right up against my face Which is not good when it comes to a screen in your eyesight trying to read the thing I've thought about a man magnifying glass before So it's not that great luckily on in the games that I've played so far specifically dead cells I'm having this problems because there's a lot of like stop and talk to characters and dead cells the The luck there is that the text doesn't go away until you press a key Which is good so I can maneuver however I need to maneuver it to actually be able to read it So that's one thing that I've noticed in terms of the software outside of gameplay the actual maneuverability of the OS has been really good The one thing that I've kind of been really astonished by is how seamless the SD card that I bought and the internal storage kind of interact with each other When I have a couple games that are on this the SD card You can't tell the difference between what's on the SD card and what's on the internal storage If you've been around for a long time you you know that SD cards are notoriously slow Like if you use it if you used one of the original like digital cameras back in the early 2000s late 90s or whatever Those cards which they weren't SD cards that I back then by the way, but you know the cards back then were Astonishingly slow some of them are actually loud And I had one that got super hot when when you transfer data to it So the storage technology has obviously come a long way since the last time I used this SD card It's been a while since I actually use an SD card because most phones these days don't actually have Expandable storage, so it's been quite a while. I was just kind of shocked at how well the the steam deck Integrates that integrated graphics or the integrated storage and SD card. It's actually really good One of my favorite features is actually resumed awake. So I I don't have much of a tension span for gaming I've already explained that I'm not much of a gamer But the one thing that I I love about this thing is that you can be in the middle of a game decide I'm just done playing with a game for a while and Hit the power button and it just suspends you come back to it It picks up right where you left off. That's fantastic and it's running on Linux Okay So if you if you have been running on Linux for any amount of time You know that resuming suspend on Linux is god-awful like it is so bad In some places sometimes your monitors won't go to sleep your your your laptop will just stay there The if you close the lid on your laptop sometime it doesn't go to sleep It just stays on or if it does come off it You know it messes up where your windows are the things are all over the place It just does not work well, and it never ever ever has Every once in a while you'll get lucky and it'll work fine But most of the time you're gonna have some problems every once in a while the fact that they can be running a game Suspend it come back to it and then continue on as if nothing happened. Oh god. That is just spectacular, and I hope that Linux developers everywhere are looking at that like oh man. We need to figure that out for everything That'd be so good, especially for laptops right be able to Dispend actually go to sleep or hibernate or whatever come back to see everything exactly the way it was before is Just really really good So that's probably one of my favorite features of it and because like I said I don't have the attention to sit there and game for hours on end I never have and the ability to just you know play for 10 or 15 minutes Turn it off come back the you know a few hours later continued the level that I was on really really good So yeah, those are my initial thoughts on the steam deck kind of just a rambly type video I probably could talk a little bit more about the hardware a little bit more about the software And if you guys want to hear more of my thoughts on the steam deck maybe in a full-on review or something You know in a few weeks leave a comment in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. I really like the steam deck I think it's fantastic. Do I regret not buying it from the beginning actually? No, I like the fact that I actually spent some time Thinking about it and thinking about my use case for it But also I allowed that time to pass and let them fix some of the major flaws that it had at the beginning from What I read in the reviews and now it's a machine that you can use it's very very stable It just works really really well And I didn't have to go through any of the guinea pig stuff that the rest of the people who bought it early did so I'm happy that I waited and it's a very good device. So Those are my thoughts on the steam deck if you have thoughts You'd like to share again in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you You can follow me on master down or Odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon on patreon.com slash linux cast links for libera pay and YouTube will be in the video description Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and YouTube you guys are all Absolutely amazing without you the channels. It's not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it just You guys are playing awesome. I truly do I mean I know I say this at the end of every video and it sounds like I've memorized the script which I have Memorized the things that I say here at the end But that doesn't make the words any less true. So thank you so much for your support. Thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time