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This is a post I wish I never had to make. Forgive my grammar and spelling as I am a bit emotional.

My Steam Deck was stolen and I just had it for less than 2 months.

It has been more than 2 weeks since it happened but it still hurts the same. I wanted to make this post because it was a very costly mistake from my side and I don't want it to happen to anyone else.

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It happened when I was shifting from one house to another house and there were lots of maintenance workers at the destination house. After I kept my luggage inside the house, I left to buy some essentials. My mom was the only person left who was watching over the stuff. By the time I came back, the workers had left. I thought I have some free time so decided to pull the Steam Deck out but it was missing.

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I was absolutely devastated; I can't even begin to explain in words what it felt like. I asked, through the person who hired the workers, if they took it. But all the workers refused. I was just crushed; I could feel my heart dropping into my stomach. Even now, as I am typing this story, that emotion is replaying.

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After this happened, I removed all payment methods from my Steam account (Steam Guard 2FA was already active). I saw after 5 days that the Steam Deck was online for a brief period of time, via Steam Guard. I purposefully didn't sign out of the device because I wanted the thieves to make the mistake of signing in and giving me some clue about their location; the Steam Deck was still inside my city. I took the IPs and submitted it to the police and asked them if they could track it. They said they will try their best since getting the customer details from an IP is a "lengthy and time-consuming process". But at this point, I can't do anything; it's not possible for me to visit all the worker's home individually and check as I don't have the authority. I gave up and convinced myself to move on.

</story>

This taught me a lot of things and I wanted to share with the community, now that I have slightly recovered mentally.

Secure your luggage when moving

When you are moving, you usually have a million thoughts in your head. This can cause you to neglect your luggage's safety. If you are going to unload your luggage temporarily, KEEP IT IN A SECURE MANNER FIRST and then do everything else.

A secure manner could mean

• Under someone's watch
• Putting it far away from the exit
• Putting a lock on the luggage
• Putting it inside a cabinet and locking it

Don't just unload the luggage and start doing something mentally involving.

Be wary of outsiders

Sometimes, there will be outside people in your home. It's crucial to keep the Steam Deck out of reach of everyone. Not everyone is a thief but different people have different moral standards. Don't create a tempting scenario for others. Keep it secure when there are guests/workers at your place.

Put some form of tracking on the device

The Steam Deck is like a traditional laptop; it has no SIM or GPS. Once it's lost, it's really hard to get it back. There are methods by which you can track the Steam Deck (Steam Guard) but it involves IP and it's not enough to get an exact location. Other than law-enforcement, no one can find the customer details associated with an IP address.

An alternate approach, which can be slight pricey, is to put a Tile tracker on the device. There are tutorials on how it can be attached to the device.

Note: I'm not associated with Tile in any way.

Get the official Serial Number and MAC ID of the device

It will help you to uniquely identify the device IF it gets stolen. You may find the serial number on

• The bill of purchase
• Inside the Steam Deck settings section
• On the Steam Deck package
• You can ask Steam support for the serial number once it's associated with your account The MAC ID is present on the Steam Deck settings page (and also on your access point logs if it has connected even once).

I hope this post is educational and makes you wary of the physical dangers around us. Please keep your handhelds or any valuables safe

<vent>

What hurts even more is that the Steam Deck, which was the 1 TB OLED model, was a gift from a very special person and I feel like I have betrayed that person by losing it. I had lots of plans with the device, like making a couch plug-and-play setup, a retro gaming setup, a productivity device by using desktop mode, etc. But all my plans were shattered in an instance. I'm now convincing myself to move on to something else.

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Edit: As of 20th August, I can see via Steam Guard that the device was logged into a few hours ago (2 weeks post the burglary). I know the risks involved in keeping my device signed in. I'm counting on the person's stupidity. Any proper thief would have formatted the device.

Hello all groovy people –

I released my Renoise controls for the Steam Deck to Steam today as 'RenoiseDeck'. Not perfect, but pretty usable. Here's how:

– Left shoulder button = Edit on / off (Esc). Toggles entering notes. – D-pad = Arrow keys, move around. – (X) = delete. (A) = play / stop. (Y) and (B) = notes C and G for jamming, entering notes, previewing sounds etc.

– Left mousepad = 4 x 4 grid with a chromatic octave of notes starting at C on the top left. On top of of the 12 notes, there's the stopper (Caps Lock) and a couple of useful hex values. Right shoulder button shifts the grid to numbers and more hexes and effect command letters.

– Left hand back buttons: Top = F4 (Copy), Bottom = F5 (Paste). – Right hand back buttons: Top = Alt, Bottom = Ctrl. – Right shoulder button = Shift.

With these, you can: – Shift + arrows = make selection in the editor. – Alt + arrows = select instruments. – Ctrl + arrows = manipulate the pattern sequencer.

– Alt + copy / paste = Copy / paste selection in pattern. – Ctrl + copy / paste = Copy / paste pattern. – Shift + copy / paste = Copy / paste track.

One of the analog sticks acts as a slow mouse for precise control of sliders.

SteamOS 3.6 is live on the "main" update channel, and it is very buggy. (Note: the most bleeding edge update channel is called main. 3.6 is only live on the "main" channel, not any of the stable or beta channels).

I had switched to main to get 3.5 early, and 3.5 had spent so much time in the main channel that it's been very stable for the last few months. However 3.6 has been rough, game mode would crash and restart everytime a decky plugin did something, and it broke my desktop mode completely. I've downgraded to beta-candidate (which is still 3.5) and things are much better.

I know that staying off the most bleeding edge update channels if you want a stable experience is common sense, but I think a lot of people got impatient for 3.5 and may have been lulled into a false sense of security by how stable the 3.5 main update builds were recently.

Easiest way is by using remote play, you'll want to change settings to enable audio on the host, and possibly lower stream bandwidth.

The guide also has another more in depth method.

Btrfs is a filesystem (like FAT, NTFS, and ext4), but has some distinct advantages:

• Increased storage - thanks to compression and file deduplication, Btrfs can save you considerable amounts of storage. I have 517G of files on my Deck's SSD, but it only uses up 410G of storage to hold those files. Compressing your filesystem can also shorten load times, especially for slower memory devices like the SD card.

• Snapshotting - save snapshots of the file system and easily roll back if there's a problem.

Converting to Btrfs is easy to do, and doesn't require having you to resetup/reconfigure your deck. The linked gitlab project will do the conversion, keep all your existing files and settings, and set all the Btrfs configurations for you. The file conversion will persist through updates, and it will setup automatic deduplication of files on the drive. It also allows the Deck to automatically mount Btrfs converted SD cards, and to format new cards in the same format.

Only potential downside I know of is that Btrfs is case sensitive, where the default ext4 on the Deck uses casefolding. Basically this means that Btrfs will treat File.txt and file.txt as two different files. I've never run into any issues with this, but I've heard it can cause issues with some specific mods that inconsistently capitalize their files. There's also always some risk whenever you make dramatic changes to your filesystem, but I haven't really heard of anyone having problems with this. You do have to make sure you have at least 10-20% of your storage free (and a min of 10-20GB free for smaller drives) to make sure it has room for the conversion.

Overall I've been using Btrfs for over 6+ months on my deck, and it's been great. I highly recommend it. I'm not an expert on it, but I'll do my best to answer any questions on it.

Not sure if this has been posted previously, but it seems that sometimes games/applications can get muted from desktop mode. I

I launched Persona 5 Royal this morning and was surprised to see the audio not working. After doing many things such as trying different layers of proton, I went into desktop mode and saw that the game had been muted. After un-muting it, it works again. I do play Persona 5 in desktop mode sometimes when I feel like streaming it for some friends to watch. But I'd never run into this muting issue before. I must have pressed something and it made some combination that would mute the 'application.'

Anyhow, everything works fine now. Hope this helps someone.

TLDR; Games might get muted from desktop mode. If audio isn't working in a game you are playing, go into desktop mode and launch the game. Then click on the sound icon and look under applications to see if the game has indeed been muted.

Useful information about SD cards.

You can open desktop mode inside of gamemode, just like any other game or application. I find it easier to use most desktop apps this way instead of adding them individually to steam.

To do this, download this script. Save it as a script and make the script executable. Finally right click the file and "add to steam".

Some important notes with this: You can't exit steam while running the desktop this way, so apps that require closing steam (like steam rom manager) won't work. There are also a few apps that do weird things, like cryoutilities shows up super tiny this way. But generally most everything works.

This is probably old news to most people but I'm posting here in case it helps anyone else! Turns out there's a power management setting you can disable that really improved the wireless reliability for me.

You first have to enable Developer Mode in Settings > System. Then you should see a new menu right at the bottom of the settings list called Developer. Under Miscellaneous you should see the option Enable Wifi Power Management.

Turning this off completely solved the problems I was having with Wifi being either really slow or dropping out completely to the point where it was almost unusable.