More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

Having written even basic tools in native code for Linux and run into compatibility issues (glibc versions, ugh), I'm not surprised.

Wine is probably the best cross-distro Linux platform, especially for closed source products that don't get compiled for every specific repo. Flatpak/AppImage would also work but that lacks the raw system access that many games depend on (even if that system access is secretly emulated by Wine).

That's with mods, right?

If you play vanilla, the Deck's 16GByte should be plenty. Most cities will hit the asset limit long before needing this much RAM.

I have had mine since April 2022 so I have ~14 months of usage on it.

It has become the only way I play games now. The single USB-C is great, I plug it into the same dock [a Dell WD19TBS] I use for my work MBP and personal XPS which provides dual screen, keyboard, mouse, Ethernet, additional USB ports, power, etc over a single cable.

I use it any time I'm travelling which can be anything from 20 mins to 15 hours. Depending on which game I'm playing, I can still get ~6 hours of battery in a single charge and it still charges quick enough. It uses the USB Power Delivery 3.0 standard so any >=45 W charger from a phone or battery pack will work.

This is a bit like the original Switch adverts when it first came out. Where people are playing a game on their sofa at home, then take the console with them to a party on a roof somewhere.

I thought I would never use the trackpads but they are probably the killer input. I use them extensively, they've very sensitive which makes them perfect for fine input controls, and they have rumble motors in them so it feels like you're physically moving something.

The suspend-resume is fantastic, it's very quick and works even though games were not designed for this usecase like they are on consoles.

One complaint I've heard a few times if from people who have already spent a lot on a powerful PC to play games, and are then disappointed that games are less impressive on a device optimised to run at 10W. I was already used to running AAA games on low->medium graphics so in some cases the Steam Deck was actually an upgrade for me.

I've clocked over 100 hours of playtime on mine since buying one in January. It's great. I've especially used it for reading visual novels.

(Unfortunately Valve broke the per-platform playtime reporting that SteamDB had, so I can only say that I've played for at least 105 hours.)

It is for me, personally. I moved over in 2022 to PopOS and haven't looked back once. Gaming is good (even better than Windows for some titles, like Elden Ring). Coding is better. Web-browsing is identical. OS annoyances are vastly better. I can stream myself playing Cyberpunk on Twitch, I can edit images in Krita.

There's nothing I want to do on desktop Linux that I can't anymore. That's really kind of insane for me to accept, but it's real. Well done guys, it took like thirty years but you made a good OS.

The caveat is I don't do anything highly specialised like high-end video-editing, which is where I hear the big gaps still are.