I’ve heard the gulikit sticks are an upgrade from the originals, and they’re not supposed to be hard to install.

For the a button, a sticking button can frequently be fixed by spraying an appropriate cleaner in around the button. Usually it’s just debris or residue making it stick causing duplicate presses. My power button was sticking recently causing the deck to wake up and immediately go back to sleep, and I fixed it by turning the deck off, spraying a plastic safe electric cleaner in around the power button, waiting for it to evaporated, and then restarting the deck. It’s been fixed ever since.

For the plastic safe electronic cleaner, I would recommend CRC brand QD cleaner, it’s available at Walmart and most auto parts stores so it’s usually easy to find locally.

Some recent games I’ve played in that range are No Man’s Sky, Nier Automata, Doom Eternal, Yakuza 0, and Hades.

I’m perfectly fine with 30fps, my biggest concern is battery life. At 30fps I don’t really like to see a game go much higher than 15-16w of draw. Lower is even better.

Any game in that range can be pushed harder (higher fps, higher graphics quality, etc), but at that point it’s up to the player whether they want to prioritize battery, graphics, or smoothness. If you go above that threshold there usually isn’t much room for player choice in how they want the game to run.

Yeah, my understanding is that it’s not an insurmountable issue, it’s just one that the steam deck hardware team wasn’t able to solve in a cost effective way.

Sorry, the elite series 2 supposedly uses hall effect, but not the original elite apparently. I’ll update my comment.

Ok turns out neither of the elite controllers use hall effect, and I was completely wrong. My mistake.

Most of the stick caps sold for the deck are capacitive, they can even help you maintain a good capacitve connection because it’s easier to keep in contact with the rubber cover than it is to stay touching the depressed part of the stick cap.

As for the feel of the sticks, they use potentiometers which might be the cause of the feeling difference you’re talking about. I know some xbox controllers (like the ones on the elite series 2) use hall effect sensors. You can buy replacement sticks for the steam deck that also use hall effect sensors, they may feel smoother to use.

Edit2: apparently the source I read was wrong about the elite 2 controller having hall effect sensors. Disregard.

As I recall, valve said that they wanted the battery to be more easily replaceable. The issue was that the battery expands and shrinks during use, and they couldn’t find a good way to secure it that both kept it easily replaceable and kept it from sliding around during use. Ultimately, they had to use glue to hold the battery in place.

There’s a setting (under developer options I think) to show advance update channels. Once you’ve turned it on, you can choose different update levels for both Steam OS and the steam client. The most cutting edge version of SteamOS is main, which will put you on 3.5. This has several advantages (including better shader handling and SMT being worth using in emulated games).

However, updating to the bleeding edge software update is not without downsides. Expect things to break fairly often. I tried the main update channel for awhile, decided too much was broken, and then found that something else that was broken was downgrading back to stable or beta. I ended up being stuck for awhile until the next update came out, at which point I was able to successfully downgrade. So proceed with caution.

Possibly try restarting steam or the deck, and then try the decky plugin again. Sometimes if plugins aren’t working a restart will fix it.

There’s a company called Immersion that owns a lot of patents related to rumble/haptic feedback.

They recently sued Valve saying that the Steam Deck and Valve Index violate their patents and the Valve hasn’t paid for a right to use something that infringes on their tech.

If valve didn’t pay to license the tech, we can assume that they consider their feedback tech to be different enough from the Immersion patents that it was worth selling without licensing it. The lack of stronger rumble in the deck may be partially an attempt to avoid an additional license fee in a budget priced device.

Right now it uses EAC, but the devs had mentioned plans to switch to Faceit anticheat. Faceit anticheat doesn’t support linux and hasn’t announced any plans to support it, up until now.

So basically Steam Deck/Linux players can play right now, but the assumption was a future update would block us from playing. This announcement means it’s actually safe to buy and play without worrying about losing access next update.

I’m not sure on activating Maliit, but I don’t have recommendations for improving your typing experience.

Typing with dual trackpads is much more reliable than typing on the touchscreen. With practice it can be decently quick.

Another good option is using KDE connect, which will let you type on your phone keyboard instead.

It’s pretty great that “optimized for steam deck” is a worthwhile feature for games now. I was really happy to see it listed as one of the main selling points in the Dragon Quest Treasures ad email that Square sent out.

My understanding is that this compiles the shaders when games load their D3D shaders, rather than at draw time.

I believe steamOS 3.5 is making this default behavior for games.

There is a decky plugin that let’s you adjust the volume of individual games. It might let you correct things like this from inside game mode.

Have you tried re-running non-steam launchers and reinstalling just the EA app? Hopefully it will install the latest version for you.

Honestly after seeing how much the 1080p screen hurts performance on the ROG Ally, I’ve decided I’m very happy with the 800p screen on the deck. I might be able to get some benefit rendering at 800p and upscaling with FSR, but 720p looks pretty great at this size imo.

That’s amazing looking. I really want one, but don’t think I’m willing to make the swap myself.

Might put just the back plate on. I was eyeing the Jsaux ones but didn’t like the hotplate.

I played through it before, and it ran great. I’d suggest trying the normal fixes:

1. Verify game files

2. Try a different proton version. I usually try both the highest version of proton 7 and proton experimental.

3. Reboot.

If none of those work, put PROTON_LOG=1 %command% in the launch options for the game inside the steam game properties. This will generate a log file in your home folder that you can share to help identify what went wrong.

If you’re wanting logs for a game that’s originally for windows and is running through proton, you can add PROTON_LOG=1 %command% to your launch options in steam game properties. It will generate a log file in your home folder.