Here’s a quick round-up of what happened around the Steam Deck in the past 2 weeks.
Valve
Valve has released a few software updates for the Steam Deck – we are re-organizing them into proper categories to make it easier to follow:
New Features
- Added Game Resolution setting to App Properties, allowing players to override the max display resolution for games, on a a per-game basis
- Added mouse cursor (using right trackpad) for built-in web browser interactions when connected to an external display
Improvements
- Improved default aspect ratio behavior for external monitors – games will now default to 1280×800 for 16:10 external displays and 1280×720 for all other external displays
- Improved UI performance in game carousels
- Improved UI performance when connected to an external display
- Improved controller order when using external gamepads to assign the controller slots by the order of input. This should help with compatibility in games which locked onto the Steam Deck controller.
- Improved performance for the Home screen Recent Games carousel
Fixes
- Fixed ‘Enable updated fan control’ toggle not remembering its state across reboots
- Fixed Bluetooth controllers not working on the lock screen
- Fixed some formatting issues on the Steam Deck Chord Summary page
- Fixed issue preventing deletion of some controller layouts
- Fixed issue which was causing slow login for some Steam Decks with multiple user accounts
- Fixed boot glitching and crashes experienced by some customers
- Fixed Quick Access volume sliders not working after suspend/resume
- Fixed an issue in the controller reorder screen where moving to a controller slot higher than the current number of connected controllers would show as ‘!’ until the Quick Access Menu screen is re-opened
WIP
- Temporarily disabled adaptive brightness toggle, as it was causing performance and stability issues. Big thanks to the community for catching this weird bug – we’re working on a fix for it now.
Dock for the Steam Deck
Valve is delaying the Dock planned for the Steam Deck since the manufacturing partner has been experiencing disruption following the COVID developments in China (and closures/lockdowns), as described in a recent newspost. Note that this has apparently no impact on the Steam Deck itself:
We’re working on improving the situation and will share more info when we have it. This has no effect on production schedule and reservation windows for Steam Decks (different parts, different factories).
If you are looking for a dock anyway, there’s now other options, as shared on Reddit:
Here’s the said Dock in action:
It’s from an independent manufacturer and available at JSAUX for about 40 USD (the price includes VAT in the EU, but probably not outside). Before you ask, we are not affiliated with them and this is not paid advertising either. This is just to share information in case there are users out there who do not wish to wait for the official Dock:
https://www.jsaux.com/collections/steam-deck-accessory
User Highlight
As seen on Reddit, one user has connected a drawing tablet with the Steam Deck and installed Clip Studio to produce this piece of art! Fairly impressive (while most of the credit is to the drawing tablet and the artist themselves, the Deck acting only as the computer powering the setup):
Clip Studio is, by the way, a piece of software available on multiple platforms, but not Linux. You can use Lutris to try installing it: https://lutris.net/games/clip-studio-paint/ if you are interested.
That’s all for this time!
You might want to check out the following articles too!
BoilingSteam lets you access our content for free, but writing articles is a constant investment. We don't use ads or sponsporship, help us make our activities sustainable by donating via Patreon or LiberaPay if you prefer it anonymous. You can follow what we do via our newsletter, our RSS feed, our Mastodon profile or our Twitter feed. We also have Peertube, Youtube and LBRY channels. If you'd like to chat, you can also find us on #boilingsteam:matrix.org. (what is Matrix?)
