Steam Deck OLED - Upgrade or Wait?

[BLUEVOODU]

If you had a Steam Deck and you were thinking of upgrading to the Steam Deck OLED... would you buy the Steam Deck OLED OR would you wait at this period in time?  Why?


Thoughts... comments... Post it up!

[CreepinDeth]

I'm going to wait. Thought about it a bit but at this point the Steam Deck is starting to struggle a little bit with newer titles (especially Unreal Engine 5 games.) I'll wait for Steam Deck 2.

However, if you don't own one, I would recommend it if you don't play the latest and greatest titles.

[BLUEVOODU]

@CreepinDeth - I think that's where I am at right now.  I had a conversation with @SpartanEvolved on this the other day.  I think I'm waiting for the Steam Deck 2 as well.  There are cool alternatives as pointed out by spartan... IE the Rog Ally.   However, I think I'm going to hold out for the Steam Deck 2.  My Deck 1 is doing alright.  It would be nice to be able to capitalize on the better battery life of the OLED

[CreepinDeth]

Personally, if I were to get an alternative, I would still want it to run SteamOS and not Windows. I'm glad there are more of them coming to market and Valve working to make it compatible with other handhelds.

It's all a compromise though. Those alternatives might have better specs, but battery might be worse, or they run Windows, or they're so big they probably shouldn't be described as a handheld. It's nice that there's more choice though.

[BLUEVOODU]

What part of Windows Gaming do you not like?  Actually... as I was thinking about this, I made a post lol:
https://www.chickendinnergaming.com/forum/pc-rigs-builds-and-peripheral-devices/windows-versus-linux-gaming/

Really... Steam OS just uses the KDE Plasma desktop on top of Linux. KDE Plasma is decent.  I think it is fairly slick looking though.

The Deck 2 seems to be fairly far out at this time.  And you're right about the compromise... There seems to be a lot of that these days.

[CreepinDeth]

What part of Windows Gaming do you not like?  Actually... as I was thinking about this, I made a post lol:
https://www.chickendinnergaming.com/forum/pc-rigs-builds-and-peripheral-devices/windows-versus-linux-gaming/

Well, there's quite a few things, it's not all about gaming but Windows in general.

DirectX12 is just not a great API. On paper, it sounds good to give the developers more control in order to squeeze out more performance from a game, but the reality is that when developers are forced to make compromises due to budget and/or timing, performance and optimzation are the first to go. It's caused PC games to regress a bit in that area. It's to the point where some games even gain performance on Linux because Vulkan handles things better.

On top of that, Windows is just bloated with unnecessary pre-installed apps that don't need to be there. Why do I want a LinkedIn app already installed? Also, AMD CPUs are being short-changed in performance. These are the best gaming CPUs and Windows does not schedule them well (I'm not sure if this has been fixed though. Don't think I've heard that it has.) Linux however gives you the full performance out of the box.

Then there's Copilot. I DO NOT WANT COPILOT on my machine. I understand why it's pre-installed but I don't need it at all and I hate that's it's being forced down our throats for every little Microsoft app.

Microsoft is also forcing people to have a Microsoft account just to use the OS. The only reason I have one is because my Xbox account automatically became one. So I use that, but they're starting to close down all methods and loopholes that allow you to just have a local account.

There's also their recall software that's supposed to take a snapshot of everything you do on your computer. No thank you. I know that right now it's only certain PCs that have it and it's opt-in but I fully expect MS to go back on this and force it on people. It's just asking to be hacked and it will be.

Microsoft also just announced that the Teams software will become monitoring software. Yeah, that's another hard no from me.

And there's still more but it's not for this forum.