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.

This is all fair complaints about Linux, but I don't really feel like windows is much better. I've had windows break on me or family members a lot over the years. Sure I've had some Linux distros break with an update and fail to boot (namely Manjaro), but windows has broken itself with updates dozens of times for me. The whole reason I started using Linux at all was because windows was breaking so often on my computer that I needed to try Linux to make sure my hardware wasn't defective.

You talk about having to fall back on the command line in Linux, but that's also true on windows without 3rd party software. I've had to use windows command line utilities to fix drives with messed up partitions and to try to repair my windows install after windows update broke it. A couple weeks ago I had to help a friend on windows do checksums using the windows command line because windows doesn't support that through the gui. Meanwhile dolphin on KDE let's you do checksums in the gui from the file properties screen.

I honestly feel like Linux isn't really that much harder or more prone to breaking than windows, people just have less experience with it. The smaller user base means there's a lot less help available online as well.

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.

I haven't tried Element X, but I'd like to recommend SchildiChat as a good matrix client for desktop and mobile. My understanding is it's a fork of element, but it works much better and more reliably in my experience. Element was very inconsistent about fetching messages for example.

To be fair, those are both issues with flatpak too. You can change the file system permissions with a command or flatseal, but I don't know of a fix for the password extension issue.

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.

I had a 3-4 year old gaming laptop, and a mandatory windows update would corrupt the hard drive forcing a fresh install. I say mandatory because it installed no matter what I tried. Disabling updates in settings and registry never would prevent this update from wrecking my computer. I could get a few days to a week of use and then it would crash and require a fresh install.

I installed Ubuntu to see if it was a hardware issue, and it ran great. Years later when I finally got another computer I tried windows again, but quickly realized how many things I hated about windows. I deleted my windows partition and have never looked back since.