Love it or hate it, fail or succeed, the Steam Deck will go down in gadget history. Its a bold attempt to make PC gaming more portable and affordable than ever before, an ultimate gadget with exotic features and infinitely customizable controls, and perhaps the most powerful gaming PC ever sold for a mere $400. But it also shipped incomplete. We titled our February 28th review Steam Deck: its not ready even though I also called it the most fun Ive had in years.One month and many updates later, has anything changed? Yes and no!Heres what I learned spending another month with the Steam Deck, as well as the answers to many burning questions I wasnt able to address in our original review. Consider this our Steam Deck FAQ.Its a Linux gaming PC that runs many but not all Windows games, on the go like a Nintendo Switch, only with way more horsepower, shorter battery life, and a seriously noisy fan. Or, optionally, its a Windows gaming PC that runs more games but often poorly without as much portability, without speakers, and a whole bunch of other weirdness because Valve isnt officially supporting Windows on Deck. Ill talk about Windows more later, but TL;DR: I dont recommend Windows on Deck at all.How noisy is that fan? Here, take a listen!It doesnt exactly overpower the Decks excellent speakers, and I dont think itd be audible over the noise of an airplane, and my wife hasnt kicked me out of bed for repeatedly playing Elden Ring past midnight yet. Isnt it... heavy to hold above your head in bed? Its no Nintendo Switch, thats for sure, and at 1.47 pounds, I tend to lie on my stomach and play it prone instead. The USB-C ports on the top, so you can still charge it that way. How much does it hurt to drop it on your face? (Is it more late Harry Potter or A Game of Thrones?)Do you really need to know? The things I do for readers... OW, MY NOSE. Yes, thats definitely worse than a Nintendo Switch. At least theres nothing pointy on the Steam Deck, unlike some of the book corners Ive brained myself with over the years.Just how powerful are we talking?Should I buy this instead of the PS5 that never wants to hop into my online shopping cart?Its more PS4 than PS5 and our friends at Digital Foundry have the video to prove it, running God of War on both the Steam Deck and a PS4 at the same settings. But PS4 power in a handheld is unheard of. (Compare to the Nintendo Switch, where The Witcher 3 looks like dirt by comparison.)And in some games, Id argue the Steam Deck does better than a PS4, at least at its given resolution. When Im playing games like Control at 60fps, it feels more like a PS4 Pro.OK, but can it run Crysis / Doom / INSERT GAME HERE???Yes. Yes. Probably? Like I say in the video review, you cant be 100 percent sure a game will play brilliantly even if Valve has verified it and over the past month, early adopters have discovered Valves verification system is anything but foolproof. Examples:Deathloop has a green Deck Verified badge but doesnt play well, with slowdown and stuttery controlsVampire Survivors has a green Deck Verified badge, which worked perfectly for me at launch but no longer detects the Decks controls at allSlay the Spire has a green Deck Verified badge, which worked great at launch, but the controls are broken and buggy nowLinusTechTips saysHorizon Zero Dawn, which has a green Deck Verified badge, only started stuttering after the first six to seven hours of the gamePerhaps as a result of this, Valve is now polling Steam Deck owners to verify its verification system so it can adjust its testing.All that said, most games seem to work! Ive put loads of hours into the brand-new Elden Ring and Control Ultimate Edition on the Deck with no real issues, and even the majority of unverified games Ive tried generally worked. Some games that didnt work at launch, like Cyberpunk 2077, now do with caveats.When games didnt work for me, it was mostly due to anti-cheat software allegedly an easy thing for game developers to patch. If its so easy, why arent game developers enabling anti-cheat? Thats the question, isnt it? Fear, uncertainty, a sense that it wouldnt be worth the effort. But some companies actually are: Elden Ring and Apex Legends now have working online multiplayer on Deck because their dev enabled Easy Anti-Cheat. Neither of those games worked at the Steam Decks launch one month ago. And though Halo Infinite still wont even let you launch its single-player mode, Microsoft did update Halo: The Master Chief Collection so you can do classic Halo campaigns. Can the Steam Deck be my daily driver gaming PC? (Is it yours?)If Im being totally honest, its my daily Elden Ring machine right now. It works great native, and it works great streamed from my desktop to the Deck, too. And if I were just playing single-player games like that, theres no end of titles to keep me busy: Ive been sucked back into Into the Breach,Resident Evil 2, The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, even Metal Gear Solid V,which seems to run butter-smooth at 60fps. (I guess Im on a sequel kick.)And thats before we talk about the wide array of things you can access from the Linux desktop, like GameCube, PlayStation, Wii and even Nintendo Switch emulators, as well as launchers like Heroic that can give you access to the Epic Games Store and games from GOG.com. Some community members are so enthusiastic theyre building custom software for the Deck like EmuDeck, an app designed to automatically configure emulators for the system. But no, I cant quite make it my only computer because buds play online games that still dont work on Deck no Halo Infinite, no Duck Game, no PUBG. So Im still swapping back and forth between the Deck and my desktop PC. Whos actually going to play competitive games with joysticks on a 7-inch screen? Yeah after an Apex Legends session or two, I dont think I enjoy the challenge of spotting distant enemies on the Decks display. Its hard! But remember: you can plug in a USB-C hub for monitor, mouse, keyboard, power, and wired internet simultaneously. And the Decks built-in global AMD FSR upscaling makes the Deck look remarkably OK blown up to a 1440p monitor. Heres a close-up with Elden Ring (more examples at this link).What about streaming games to the Deck? Google Stadia, Xbox Cloud Gaming, GeForce Now, or maybe from that desktop you mentioned?They all work as of today if your internet and Wi-Fi are up to snuff, you can play Destiny 2, PUBG, and Fortnite on a Steam Deck without installing Windows. But each has caveats, so lets do a quick rundown.Google Stadia is the lowest hanging fruit because its free, easy, and responsive. Flip over to the Steam Decks desktop mode, use the Discover app to install Google Chrome, log in with your Google account at stadia.google.com, maybe set a Chrome profile to automatically launch that website, then add Chrome to your Steam library so you can access it from the Steam Decks regular interface. The only time-consuming part is mapping controls unfortunately, Chrome still doesnt support the Steam Deck as a gamepad, so youll need to have it emulate a keyboard and mouse. Still, thats free access to Crayta, Destiny 2, Hitman, PUBG and Super Bomberman R Online.If you pay Microsoft for Game Pass Ultimate, Id definitely recommend giving Xbox Cloud Gaming a go, too. Its a lengthy setup process, but when youre done, it almost feels like a native app with a whole additional library of games, including Halo Infinite and Microsoft Flight Simulator. But Microsofts cloud gaming service is a tad laggier than the competition Dead Cells and Hades felt playable but maybe not as responsive as on my Nintendo Switch, and I wouldnt play Halo multiplayer that way.GeForce Now has largely the same simple setup process as Stadia, and its impressive but expensive RTX 3080 tier is incredibly responsive, too. If you told me its copy of Fortnite was running natively on the Steam Deck, Id probably believe you. But Nvidias web client and / or the Chrome browser need work: not only do they not detect the Decks gamepad, but the login fields also wouldnt properly detect the Decks virtual keyboard, and I had to stab the touchscreen to get past prompts before games would fully load. GeForce Now refused to launch for me in Microsoft Edge, even though it claims to support it.Steam In-Home Streaming lets you sling your games from any gaming PC to another over your home network, and it works beautifully on Deck with two annoying quirks: youll need to set the Deck and / or your streamer PC to send higher resolution video (because by default, it looks real bad), and you cant properly map the Decks controls because Steam In-Home Streaming still uses the old controller configuration interface. For gamepad-first games like Elden Ring, its OK, but I really miss the Decks gyroscope for games where I have to aim. Oh, and dont forget to turn off the Decks built-in framerate limiter, which can make these streaming services artificially choppy. I learned that the hard way. Can you stream from Steam Deck to another PC? Yes! If you want to stream your Deck to a shitty laptop that happens to have a larger screen, that totally works. Its way uglier than just plugging the Deck into a monitor, though, particularly since you dont get AMDs fancy FSR upscaling. Sounds like theres a mountain of games to play on Deck and more all the time. Whats the issue?One month ago, the Deck was a buggy mess and while I think its getting better, I still run into issues almost every day. Sometimes the Wi-Fi just drops out. Itll often forget to reconnect after waking, too, and always asks me for the Wi-Fi password even though the Deck has it saved. The last time I tried to connect to a new Wi-Fi network, it wouldnt recognize the input from the Decks own virtual keyboard. Sometimes it wont reconnect to the Steam servers until I completely reboot the system. Occasionally, it wont recognize my USB-C hub until I reboot the Deck. A few times (including today), its refused to fully power on without a hard reboot. Ive had a handful of crashes and freezes, including one that Valve introduced when it rolled out a new way to install the Chrome browser that wasnt ready.Last I checked, Bluetooth audio was still too laggy for me to use in games, and the auto-brightness adjustment still doesnt work. And though youve been able to launch multiple apps simultaneously since launch, it doesnt work for multiple games: each app continues to run simultaneously, audio and all, consuming processing power instead of pausing. My Deck is also often confused about what it does and doesnt have patched after I wake it from sleep therell always be a handful of patches for my Steam libraryevery time I wake the Deck, and some of them look suspiciously similar. I downloaded a 654.6MB patch for Halo: The Master Chief Collection three times in two days, for example. The Deck also still refuses to move some games between the SD card and internal storage.A lot of games also refuse to use the Steam Decks full 1280 x 800 screen resolution, forcing themselves to run at 1280 x 720 instead, which makes the Steam Decks big bezels look even bigger. Elden Ring is one of those games.Those... dont seem great. Is Valve fixing any of this?Im a little bummed that some of the issues I pointed out in my review are still kicking around a month later, but Valve is indeed issuing lots of patches nearly a dozen since launch, read their changelogs and Im pretty sure Im seeing fewer big crashes and slightly smoother UI than before. Valves added a few new features, too: you can now see which games your friends are playing, set the framerate limiter to 15 fps instead of just 30 or 60, theres an added average-FPS-only overlay that doesnt block as much of your game, and a return to gaming mode button on the Linux desktop that pops you back into Valves controller-friendly interface.Oh, and though I complained about patches coming too quickly during the review period and introducing new bugs, thats not (quite) as much of a problem anymore: you can now choose from Stable and Beta update channels from the system menu. Why not just install Windows and make the problems go away?Ha, afraid it doesnt quite work that way!I tested Windows 10 on Deck for a week, and I found it a worse experience in almost every way, due to unfinished drivers, games that wouldnt launch properly, similar or worse performance to Linux, and a complete lack of features to make Windows comfortable on a 7-inch portable gaming PC. Id launch a demanding game like Red Dead Redemption 2 or Cyberpunk 2077 and sometimes find it would bluescreen or tell me it wasnt properly installed or launch at an incredibly low resolution and / or ignore my attempts to fullscreen the game. With games that did work reasonably well, like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the framerate wasnt any better and in Elden Ring, where it did seem to be a minuscule 1-3fps faster, it also came with some nasty hitches. And while worst-case battery life seems similar I got two hours of demanding games, same as with Linux theres no Gamescope or similar performance overlay to let you fine-tune the battery vs. performance equation here. Its one of the best things about the Steam Deck, but Valves Greg Coomer told me theres currently no plan to add anything like that on the Windows side of things. Given that weve gone two weeks without an audio driver (the speakers and headphone jack still dont work on Windows), I wouldnt hold my breath.I also had a whole bunch of glitches just navigating around Windows, with disappearing cursors and randomly popping-up Steam virtual keyboards. Brightness adjustment is finicky, too. (There was also a major issue with writing data to SD cards on Windows, though a new SD card driver appears to fix it.) Oh, and youll have to wipe your Deck if you want to install Windows on the internal SSD because theres no dual-boot installer yet. If youre looking for a Steam Deck alternative built for Windows, my colleague Sam Byford recently reviewed the (comparatively pricey) Aya Neo Next.How easy is it to swap the Decks internal SSD, anyhow? Or are SD cards good enough? Im hoping to answer this question more fully when I get my own 64GB model in Q2 (with its slower eMMC storage), but Ive already got some pretty strong feelings about this I have found myself running into issues with SD cards, and replacing the SSD isnt quite easy enough for me to recommend just anyone do it.Patching big games on SD can be painfulEarly reviews showed that game load times arent that different between the SD card and an internal SSD, and thats been my experience, too, save a few outliers like first-time loads for Red Dead Redemption 2 and Deathloop.But writing games and patches to an SD card is a whole different story and the difference between an SD card with 10MB/sec or 30MB/sec or 50MB/sec sustained write speeds and a true NVMe SSD might mean hours of your life. When Elden Ring recently needed to update every nook and cranny of its 50GB install on my 400GB SanDisk Ultra card, downloading and patching and verifying, it took 45 minutes before I could play. It happened again with the next patch, too, and Ive seen that on a different game as well.And while its pretty neat how you can swap out entire SD cards full of games like they were a Nintendo Switch cartridge, I think its worth noting that Ive put three microSD cards into the Deck that no longer work. They worked fine before; they started behaving weirdly with the Deck, I formatted them there, and now they dont work anymore. I dont mean to scare you it could be those bad Windows drivers or user error, and some of my other cards work fine. But Im not the only one with that story, and I am one of the few people outside Valve who have been hammering the Deck with a wide variety of microSD cards for well over a month. If you know what youre doing, its actually quite easy to swap the internal SSD: just eight case screws, unsnap the case, unplug the battery, three internal screws and a bit of foil tape to remove the internal shield, one last screw to get at the M.2 drive, then swap your own single-sidedM.2 2230 drive in. (You can find small capacity drives cheap on eBay and Amazon: $40 for 256GB.) But some teardowns skip over the unsnap the case part, and that can be a little daunting there are a lot of potentially fragile plastic clips in there, and youve gotta gently but firmly shove a plastic tool into the edge of your Deck to pry them open. (If you use a metal screwdriver, you might damage them.) I managed it OK twice, but I can see why Valve warns people away.What about external USB drives?For whatever reason, the Steam Decks gaming mode only recognizes the internal SSD and a single microSD card right now, but you can mount whatever you want on the Linux or Windows desktop. I was able to set up a Steam Library on an external NVMe SSD and download games to it incredibly quickly. But youll need to plug in sufficient power for that drive, too I actually burnt out that NVMe drive by relying on the Decks own USB-C bus, which can only supply 7.5W for peripherals. No warning, just poof, no more working drive. If youre using a USB-C hub with a Power Delivery input, you should be able to prevent that by plugging in external power or using an external drive with its own power supply. What size and speed of storage do you recommend?Even with a 512GB Steam Deck review unit and a 256GB SD card, I felt like storage was filling up pretty fast with a handful of 30GB, 50GB, and the occasional 80GB and 100GB game. But with a 400GB card, Im feeling pretty comfortable with a huge library of games. If youre looking to mostly carry around older or less graphically intensive titles, you might be able to get away with quite a bit less. Personally, I bought a cheap 256GB SSD and a 512GB card to swap into my 64GB eMMC Deck when it arrives, and Im thinking that between those and the 400GB card, Ill have plenty of room for everything I want to take on the go. Can I backup games from my Windows machine and play them on the Deck? Both Windows and Linux read the NTFS filesystem just fine, so I formatted my external drive that way, and the Decks SteamOS was able to read my backups there but it took so long to decompress and install one that Id have been better off downloading from scratch. Valves Lawrence Yang says another way is to copy your steamapps folder to the root of a microSD card formatted for Steam Deck, but youd need a good way to write to the ext4 filesystem: We have ideas for improving this in the future, but for now, the best way to get games on Deck is to download them directly via Wi-Fi (or Ethernet if you have an adapter). Whats the pick-up-and-play experience like between a Steam Deck and another PC? You cant just suspend the Deck, sit down at your Windows desktop, and be playing exactly where you left off quite yet. While the Deck has an (awesome) instant suspend function of its own, it doesnt necessarily save your game to the cloud when you put it to sleep thats the idea, but developers would have to take advantage of Valves new cloud APIs. In the meantime, youll either see a lot of messages like this: Youll see a lot of these messages if you try to swap between Deck and desktop without quitting out of games.Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The VergeOr youll need to save and quit a game before you pick it up on the other end. Or, if youre home, you can just stream your desktop game to the Deck, then use your desktops mouse and keyboard when you get there. The SD card slot doesnt have a cover... does it just... pop out?Its one of those little mechanical doohickeys where you push it in, then it pops out. I dont think theres much danger of it falling out on its own, but Ive definitely had it miss my thumbnail on the way out and shoot across the room. A cover might be nice on future models. Why not just turn down the fan curve so its less noisy?Thats not something that Valve or AMD are letting users adjust quite yet on Windows, none of the sensors are exposed to apps like MSI Afterburner, either. Does the screen break if you drop it? Thats not one Im going to test because the Decks in short supply, but I did accidentally drop my phone onto the Deck and left a nasty scratch. I only see it when the screens reflecting light right back at me, thankfully. Can it get dim enough for a dark room? Bright enough for outdoors?Like LinusTechTips, Im really pleased with the range of brightness on the screen. I play a bunch of games late at night, and its important not to wake the wife. Its nowhere near as vibrant as an OLED screen, so were talking about a pretty washed-out gray image at the lowest brightness levels, but its comfortable for low-light gaming. Even with the anti-glare treatment, it doesnt get bright enough to play in direct sunlight, but I found it fine for indirect light with games that arent terribly dark. How do all the controls feel and I mean all the controls, dont skip any!The joysticks feel fantastic to me, as high-quality as the latest Sony and Microsoft, except for two things theyre a little taller than usual, presumably so your palms dont brush the touchpads, and occasionally, I can feel them brush against the unusual ribbon cables they have inside to power their capacitive touch sensors. Both things are weird at first but very manageable. Ditto the smooth tops of the sticks. Like every modern gamepad, each stick clicks in to become its own button, tooThe analog triggers have a nice long, smooth throw, way better than Switch, though they feel a little hollow and only have a single physical stage you can set a threshold for the second stage and add some basic vibration, but nothing even close to what Sonys DualSense can manageThe bumpers are a little weak, IMO. Reaching up to activate them feels weird, and the way they waterfall into the triggers just makes my fingers want to slip off and hit the triggers instead. A month in, Im finding myself binding bumper commands to the triggers or grip buttons just so I can avoid themThe grip buttons have VERY little throw and take a bit of force to press, which is nice for buttons you can hold without accidentally pressing them all the time and less nice if you imagined yourself holding those buttons down or hammering them repeatedly. I use em for quick jumps and parries and grenade throws and force powers and thingsThe ABXY, start, and select face buttons have slightly loose, rattling tops on my unit, not unlike those on an Xbox 360 gamepad, but much more than most modern controllers. I actually like the old-school soundThe D-pad is a little squishy, with a low pivot point, fully rollable, fine, but nothing to wax poetic about (but I prefer sticks anyhow)The STEAM and ... quick access buttons are extremely, annoyingly shallow for me, hard to tell when youve successfully pressed themThe volume up and down buttons are firm but with a very solid, obvious, individual press and responsive physical that makes them easy to useId describe the power button the same as the volume buttons, just shallowerThe touchpads are well, the feel differs depending on how much feedback you add, whether youve got them set up as virtual trackballs or D-pads or straight touchpads and how you set their pressure sensitivity. With the system off, they actually give a bit when you press. Theyve got a hard but smooth textured plastic surface rather than the glassy feeling of most laptop trackpads, but the actions fairly smooth. I dont mind how small they are.One month later, I still feel like almost all the controls are in the right places for me and my average-sized hands but Ive soured on the bumpers a bit, and I still feel like the touchpads only fit when I tilt the screen parallel to the ground. But I dont really mind since Im mostly using the Decks gyro aiming when I want precision control.Does the Deck work for people with small hands?Jessica Conditt at Engadget wrote about that, and it sounds like it could be a problem. Didnt I hear something about joystick drift, too?That was actually a bug Valve introduced, and its already fixed.Theres no fingerprint sensor. Is there any other way to lock it? Weirdly, no. Once you enter your password to log into the system the first time, theres no login or password check or two-factor to type in thereafter. Makes it really easy to resume games inside your house, though. Can you connect a second controller for local multiplayer?Yep and not just two! The Steam Deck lets you mix and match loads of different external controllers over USB and Bluetooth. As an example, I just fired up a four-player session of Speedrunners with one PS4 controller over Bluetooth, two Xbox 360 controllers plugged in to the ancient-but-amazing Wireless Receiver for Windows, plus the Steam Decks internal pad. Plug that into a TV, and youve got a killer couch gaming session. And because the Steam Deck itself can emulate both mouse and keyboard and gamepad simultaneously, you could technically get some two-player games working on a single Steam Deck with no additional controls. I started building a controller profile for Towerfall that lets two people play one-handed, one on each side of the Deck.Can you connect a VR headset or an external graphics card?Valve doesnt support either of them, but VR is technically possible with Windows heres Chinballs Gaming playing what looks like an absolutely terrible session of Half-Life: Alyx with an Oculus Quest 2 plugged into the system.Someone will probably hack an eGPU onto the Deck by tapping into the PCIe slot, but itll also probably defeat the purpose of having a portable console.Hows the virtual keyboard, and is typing to someone a chore? Valve has a new, fairly barebones virtual keyboard on the Steam Deck, and its not terrible solid haptic and audible feedback when you stab a key, a full number row, and you can navigate it with the analog stick or D-pad if you dont want to grease up your screen. But if you do want something better than hunt-and-peck and a bank of emoji, youre out of luck for now. Theres no swipe typing, no autocomplete suggestions, and Valves awesome dual-touchpad Steam Controller keyboard isnt available outside of the Linux desktop mode.On the plus side, the Steam Deck makes it super easy to fire up a quick Steam voice chat. Hows the touchscreen in general?Its plenty serviceable, given the price, but a far cry from what we expect on a flagship smartphone or tablet these days. Part of thats down to the SteamOS interface, which just doesnt respond instantly to any kind of input, let alone a tap. But Id also find myself missing small touch targets on the desktop and have to stab again and again. I stick with the joysticks when I can. Do Android games work?I havent dug into this myself yet, but ETA Prime shows its at least possible through emulators, getting playable performance out of a bunch of top Android games in this YouTube video though he did have difficulty mapping some of the controls to the Steam Decks gamepad in titles like PUBG Mobile. Can I binge my shows on Deck?Netflix and YouTube definitely work via the Chrome browser once youve got that installed, and you can easily set up a Chrome profile just for those for easy access via Steam. I havent checked other streaming services yet. VLC and Kodi also both have Linux clients in the Discover store, and Plex has a third-party client there, too. I havent gotten around to setting up my NAS yet, but Ill let you know when I do.Does the Deck have a kickstand?No, and not a day goes by that I dont wish it did, partly because of Netflix and partly because you still have to leave the screen on while installing games. (Connected standby is on Valves roadmap but hasnt been implemented yet.)Wheres the Steam Deck Dock? Were still waiting to find out: Valve delayed it till late spring. You can use your own USB-C hub in the meantime, though Ive heard dual-monitor ones dont yet work. Can you buy screen protectors for it?Yes. Theres a handful of protective cases, too, but I havent tried them yet.Whats that USB cable in your review, the one with the built-in screen?Its this! Came in super handy while testing how quickly the Steam Deck charges its battery.Speaking of batteries, can you use an external battery pack?Absolutely, but youll want to be careful which one you buy. Ive got a 15,000mAh, 54Wh, 20W PD battery that can get the Deck from 0 percent to 90 percent just fine but only while the Decks turned off. If youre hoping to play and charge at the same time, you should really look for a 45W PD battery or better the same amount Valves own AC adapter puts out. The Deck will only draw as much as you need, so it doesnt hurt to go over. Im primarily using a 100W PD battery myself, even if thats a bit overkill.How often do you actually need to use Linux, and how hard is it? Im a Linux n00b myself, and Ive been pleasantly surprised! Word is that Valves chosen Arch Linux and KDE Plasma desktop are among the more Windows-like options anyhow, and its extremely easy to download apps from the Discover package manager, navigate the Dolphin file browser and play around with desktop settings, like setting up a second monitor.That said, I did most of my navigating with a physical keyboard plugged in because KDE doesnt seem to have a decent virtual one and the way Valve segregates the user and system data, youll probably only want to install Flatpak applications from the package manager unless you know what youre doing.But if you just want to play Steam games, youll never need to touch the Windows desktop, and a few brief trips are enough to get emulators, browsers, and cloud gaming platforms up and running. Here are Valves tips on how to use the Linux desktop, including how to sudo.Can you work from the Deck?I did it for a day and mentioned it in my review if you work on the web, like me, its not particularly hard as long as youve got an external monitor and keyboard. Some are pushing it further just because they can: heres a video of Maya and Blender on the Deck. I wouldnt necessarily recommend anyone buy a Steam Deck as a work PC while it might be the most potent complete computer you can buy for $400, I think youd need to be deep into Linux to get the most out of it. Can you record and stream games from the Deck?OBS Studio came out with its own flatpack Linux app just last month and has now made its way to Steam, so perhaps... its on my list of things to try now that I finally have a worthy internet connection.Can you take screenshots? Yep, there is a built-in shortcut: Steam + Right Bumper. Theyre not the easiest to share, though you can upload them to your Steam Profile and Activity Feed, but if you want to fling em to social media or a thumb drive, youll have to go hunt down the game folder in the Linux filesystem in desktop mode. Any other handy shortcuts?Steam + Left Bumper is a built-in magnifier that works in any gameSteam + Up / Down on the thumbstick raises and lowers screen brightnessSteam + hold down B can force-close a misbehaving gameSteam + joystick or trackpad instantly gives you a mouse cursor whenever you need one, overriding your other controlsSteam + Left D-Pad is the escape key (handy for quitting out of fullscreen browser apps)Steam + Right D-Pad is enter Long-press Power to get to the power menu (sleep, shutdown, restart, switch to desktop)Volume Down + Power (when powered off) to get to the boot managerVolume Up + Power (when powered off) to get to the BIOSOh, and as RyTron on Twitter points out, you can actually activate these with the ... button instead of the Steam one. Great for quick dimming the screen without needing to be a contortionist, he says, and its true!Will developers actually optimize games for the Deck?I really think they might! I wasnt sure Valve would sell enough of them at first or make enough of a splash, but the communitys more enthusiastic and vocal than Ive ever seen for a non-Nintendo, non-Sony handheld. Some developers are already on board, too: for instance, the Cyberpunk 2077 team is working on a Steam Deck-specific graphical setting, Valheims developers tweaked a few things, and Ive heard that Fall Guys may not stay incompatible with the Deck for long. Are you still having fun? Absolutely. Even if the Steam Deck doesnt wind up fulfilling all my portable PC gaming dreams, its one of the coolest gadgets in recent memory and a fantastic way to get in bite-size game sessions on the couch while my wife and I binge television.If youve got other worthy questions about the Deck, please leave em in the comments below! Ill try to answer the best ones in a future update to this post.Update, 6:24PM ET: Added mention of the battery cable pull tab, just in case people try an SSD swap without reading a good walkthrough.