I'm a new Deck owner, recieved unit in May and played sparingly for the past 2ish months.

Overall really liking it, gushed about it everywhere to everyone, and big fan of Valve. But two days ago, one of the Deck shoulder buttons stopped working suddenly. Reached out to steam and they're having me send it in, which is what I would expect. But the way they phrased it kind of souring my initial high of owning the Deck:

Based on the information you have provided, we believe it is unlikely that the current issue reflects a problem with this device as it was delivered to you. It may instead be related to your particular use of the product. Regardless, we would like to offer complimentary service as a gesture of goodwill.

So it's one of those kinds of warranty that excludes regular use? Is this one rep just awkwardly placing blame on me or is that their overall vibe? In contast, I have PS1, PS2, xBox original/360 controllers that still have all the shoulder buttons functioning normally, along with super old PSPs, DS, DS Lites, 3DS, Switch'es and none of them have failed aside from the infamous Switch drifts. Nintendo, for their part, fixed the drifts without implying it was my fault.

Anyone else dealt with Valve customer service and warranty?

I recently had a hankering to return to one of my all-time favorite games: FUEL. I couldn't stop thinking: how cool would it be if I could revisit the game from the comfort of my Steam Deck?

That was my dream, but a few problems stood in the way:

1. FUEL was released in 2009 and was delisted from Steam in 2013. (Thankfully, I have a copy of it in my library, but we're talking about an installation build that is over a decade out-of-date at this point.)

2. FUEL still has Securom DRM.

3. FUEL still requires Games for Windows Live, which was also shut down in 2013.

4. FUEL is pretty mediocre unless you install the REFUELED mod.

So, I sat down with my Steam Deck and a hope and a prayer that maybe, somehow, I could get this game working?

Hurdle 1 wasn't even a hurdle. Proton is so damn good now. The game installed and ran flawlessly. I honestly never should have second-guessed it in the first place!

Hurdle 2 was also, surprisingly, a non-issue. Either the Securom servers are somehow still live and actually checked my CD key, or the dialog box lied to me as part of an offline fallback and told me I was cleared anyway (I'm thinking this is more likely?). Either way, I was happy.

Hurdle 3 was the first actual block. The game crashes when trying to pull up GFWL, which is pretty much what I expected -- the service has been down for over a decade now. Thankfully, there's an unexpectedly easy fix. Xliveless is a DLL that bypasses GFWL and lets the game boot (and save) without it.

Hurdle 4 isn't really a hurdle per se, but that's only because the Steam Deck lets you boot into Desktop Mode and get fully under the hood. I downloaded the mod, dumped the files in the installation folder, ran the mod manager through Protontricks, and then set up all of my mod choices. I then jumped back into game mode, and the game is flawlessly running -- mods and all.

I should also mention that I did all of this on-device. I didn't need to break out a mouse and a keyboard or transfer files from my desktop or anything. From the first install of the game to running it fully modded took me maybe ten minutes total? It was amazingly quick, and most of that time was me searching up information or waiting for the Deck to boot over and back between Desktop and Game Mode.

I realize that, in the grand scheme of game tinkering, this doesn't sound like a whole lot, but that's honestly the point. The fact that this comes across as sort of mundane and uneventful is, paradoxically, what makes it noteworthy. If we're keeping score here, I am:

• playing a 2009 Windows game,
• that was delisted in 2013,
• on a Linux handheld device in 2024.

I also:

• somehow passed the game's decade-old DRM check,
• bypassed the game's second DRM system that has been officially shut down for over a decade,
• modded the game in literal seconds,
• and did all that using only a controller -- while lying on my couch.

From a zoomed out perspective, I shouldn't be able to play this game. FUEL should be dead and buried -- nothing more than a fond memory for me. Even if I turn the dial a little more towards optimism, it really shouldn't be this easy to get up and running. I thought I was going to spend hours trying to get it going, with no guarantee that it ever would. Instead I was driving around its world in mere minutes.

I'm literally holding FUEL and its massive open-world in my hands, fifteen years after its release, on an operating system it's not supposed to run on, and on a device nobody could have even imagined was possible when the game released.

We really are living in the future. I remain in absolute awe of and incredibly grateful for all the work that people do to make stuff like this possible.

According to SteamDB, at the time of this posting:

• There are 5,006 Verified games.
• There are 10,240 Playable games.

I thought this was a noteworthy milestone worth sharing -- The Little Linux Handheld That Could now has a definitive library of >15,000 games!

(The actual library size is significantly larger when you consider how many games run on it that don't yet have a rating, and even that's saying nothing of non-Steam games and things like ROMs as well).

I've been running Linux full-time pretty much since Valve released Proton. I remember submitting reports to ProtonDB back when it was just a shared Google Sheet! In the years that followed I made it a point to test and report out on different games as new versions of Proton were released and support improved. I thought it important that we have a good data set for what worked and what didn't. Over those years I tested hundreds of games and submitted as many reports to the database.

In thinking back over my gaming in 2023, however, I realized that I fell out of the habit of submitting reports because I'm so used to Proton working that it's stopped occurring to me that it might not.

That doesn't mean that there aren't some games that don't work -- it simply means that the success rate that I used to have (maybe 30-50% on average) has risen high enough that I'm genuinely surprised if something doesn't work (it's probably somewhere around 95% for me now, though that's biased by the types of games that I play). I actually tried to remember the last game that didn't work, and I genuinely couldn't tell you what it was. Everything I've played recently has booted like it's native.

Honestly, I genuinely don't even know which games are native and which run through Proton anymore. I've stopped caring!

I got my Steam Deck halfway through 2022. It was awesome, but it was definitely a bit rough around the edges. There weren't that many compatible games. The OS had some clunkiness. It matured though, and has gotten better. Among my friend group, I'm the only person who cares even a little bit about Linux. If you asked any of them to name three different Linux distributions they'd stare at you blankly because they wouldn't understand the question. Nevertheless, of my friends, SIX of them have Steam Decks and are now gaming regularly on Linux.

There are currently ~4,300 Deck Verified games and ~8,700 Deck Playable games according to Valve. On ProtonDB, ~8,600 games have been verified as working on Linux by at least three users, while ~19,700 games have been verified by at least one user. There is SO much variety available, and the speed with which we've gotten here has been pretty breathtaking.

This was my device breakdown for my Steam Replay for 2023:

• 55% Steam Deck
• 32% Linux
• 10% Virtual Reality
• 4% Windows

The only non-Linux gaming I did was VR and some local multiplayer stuff I have on a Windows machine hooked up to my TV.

I don't want to proselytize too much, but if you have a general interest in gaming, you could probably switch over to Linux full time and be perfectly happy with the variety of games you have available to you. Not too long ago, making the jump felt like a huge sacrifice because you'd be giving up so much -- SO many games were incompatible -- but it no longer feels that way. You can transfer and most of -- probably almost all -- your library will still work! Also, if a particular game doesn't work, there isn't too much sting because, well, there are thousands of others you can give your attention to.

If you have a specific game that you must play, then it's possibly a different story. If you love Destiny 2, for example, then full-time Linux definitely is not for you. The same goes VR -- it's simply not up to snuff on Linux yet. There are other niches too that don't transfer over as well (modding, racing sims, etc.) so, of course, this isn't a blanket recommendation and everyone's situation is different.

But for a prototypical person who's just your sort of general, everyday gamer? It's reached a point where they could be very happy on Linux. In fact, as proven by my friends and their Steam Decks, it's reached a point where people can be gaming on Linux and not even know they're doing that. That's how frictionless it's gotten!

I don't really have a point to this post other than to say it's incredible that we are where we are, and I'm beyond appreciative of all the effort that people have put in to making this possible.

It has been one year since the Steam Deck officially launched.

At the time:

• you had to wait a long time, months even, to be able to get the hardware
• the number of supported games was low
• the software was still highly buggy and rough around the edges

Currently:

• it is available on-demand, though unfortunately not for all countries
• there are nearly 3,000 Verified and 5,000 Playable games on the device (with many more unconfirmed titles that work anyway)
• the software is much more mature and a healthy ecosystem of third-party applications and support has sprung up

For those here who have Steam Decks, let us know your thoughts on the device, this past year, and the future to come.

Happy Birthday, Steam Deck!