Do you really think a website that was created to cover the steam deck, shouldn’t also cover steam machine/controller/frame? It’s already pretty niche, and I think most people interested in the Deck will also be interested in other steam hardware.

I’m pretty sure it does

My issue was that by default it wasn’t sensitive enough, requiring a much longer time and lots of lifted thumb time to move the cursor across the screen, especially across multiple monitors. But when I turned the sensitive up a lot, I started having trouble having the precision needed to click small buttons. A nicer trackball might have enough weight and smooth enough action to “fling” it, which I could see working, but the one I had didn’t work for that.

The deck trackpads have a larger contact surface that the thumb ball I used, and have pretty predictable “fling” ability which helps them move large distances easily while still being reasonably precise.

The fingerball I used was much larger, and I found it easier to have a suitably high sensitivity while still being accurate enough. Although over several months of use I never quite got to the same ease of use as my preferred mouse setup, and the actual shape of the fingerball body was too flat which was ironically unergonomic for extended use.

In the end I went back to using a mouse. I did realize that I kinda use my mouse like a big trackball though, I keep the base of my palm in a fixed location on the desk, and do the majority of moving the mouse by moving it around with my fingers. The sensitivity is pretty high, but using it this way gives me pretty precise control without any ergonomic issues.

I have actually, I tried using a thumb ball for awhile before swapping to a 52mm fingerball.

Felt like the ball was too small and my thumb lacked the precision to make it a good alternative to a regular mouse. Your mouse looks to have a larger thumb ball than the one I was using, which would help but wouldn’t be enough (I think). To be honest, I prefer the deck trackpads to that thumb ball mouse I was using.

Good to know!

That works, but my preferred setup for controller shooters is gyro+flickstick. I don’t think the trackpad would be as good for flickstick.

For FPS games, I’d rank it Mouse>Finger Trackball>Gyro Aim>Thumb Trackball/Trackpads>>Thumbstick

So yeah, if mouse+kb is available, use that. But that’s not a good option on my living room couch.

I started to add sc-controller, but stopped when I saw the last commit was 3 years ago, well before the new steam controller.

Not surprised there’s a vibe coded fork.

It’s a really good controller, if you want trackpads/backbuttons/gyro/etc it’s hard to beat. That said, it is just a controller. If you don’t need those features you can definitely find other options.

Without steam it defaults to doing a combination of keyboard and mouse inputs, meant to let people use a desktop. Idea is you could boot up computer, and then be able to navigate the computer to launch steam/etc.

You do have options for playing games from outside of steam:

• add games as a non-steam game to steam, allows managing inputs/etc.
• any games that use SDL will have native steam controller support (many emulators etc)
• software like Steamless controller (windows) or SISR (windows or linux) allow you to use the controller outside of steam, allowing different levels of input customization.

edit: removed sc-controller because it’s apparently not updated for the new steam controller yet

Trackpads are crucial if you want to play strategy games or anything mouse based. They also offer a lot better aiming control in fps games (although I think using gyro for aiming is even better than that). They also can be used for fancy touch menus and things like that.

The back buttons are also extremely nice.

Probably that they’re actively testing in on Deck through Proton, fixing related issues, and adjusting performance to make sure it’s a good experience.

New CEO can’t stop Xbox from killing any studio within reach.

There’s speculation that Arkane will be shuttered soon as well

Pretty scary, my desktop had the libgdata package left over as an orphan from something I had installed in the past. Thankfully I hadn’t updated on the day of the attack, my package logs show my build of libgdata was from a February update instead.

People using the aur on steamOS probably are doing so through distrobox. Distrobox doesn’t sandbox as far as I know, so the infostealer part of the malware would still be a risk. The rootkit part I’m guessing would fail, since I think distrobox on Deck usually runs in rootless mode.

It also seems like there was a fairly short window of time before the infected packages were caught, anyone who didn’t update one of the compromised packages on that exact day should be fine.

Especially with this, I would fully expect the game to be playable on Deck.

That said, I’ve seen devs preview their game on Steam Deck before, and then have anticheat that won’t actually allow it to run on SteamOS

That’s definitely costing them more than running it on their own hardware, but it doesn’t mean AI is costing them more than the AI startups. Anthropic for example is already paying SpaceX 1.25 Billion a month for compute, and has agreed to pay Google 200 billion over the next 5 years for access to Google’s compute and TPU chips.

Google’s deal with xAI specifically lets them terminate the deal with 90 days notice after the end of the year. Google is also investing heavily in building new data centers with their hardware. I’m assuming this deal means they’ve eclipsed their current TPU capacity, and are just looking for a short term bandaid until they can catch up with their new constructions.

They have big plans to build more data centers for themselves, so they definitely want more compute than the have access to right now. But even if they’re paying more to rent xai compute, they’re still paying less overall for hardware/access than their direct AI competition.

I respect that.

If running a windows game through wine, there are some risks if the game contains a virus.

The biggest risk is that wine typically makes your Linux user files available by having them mounted as the z: drive. If you run an exe that’s actually ransomware, it can possibly encrypt some of your userfiles if permissions allow. This isn’t an issue if you run the games through steam, because it runs windows programs in containers.

There’s also a risk of keyloggers, but they should only work for things running inside the same wine session.