Mine… My Xbox 360 slim only costed 129 euro back in 2012 and to this day still work like brand new, you would think that the disc drive would stop working but no. Never had the need of open it or clean it’s insides. Still great, I just don’t use it anymore since I feel it’s outdated and loading speeds are better nowadays.
Ye. I still need an expensive PC for stuff like VR, 3d modeling and game dev, but it’s replaced my main PC for most games. Hell, I don’t even really need an expensive PC for the shooters I enjoy because most of them are either old or indie stuff that’d run on a $300 PoS from 10yrs ago. However, it’s definitely made me question the necessity of a gaming rig in this day and age. The convenience outweighs the visual downgrade by a long shot.
I do have a few things I wish the deck had, such as:
The ability to define and bind touch-screen gestures (like binding a two-finger pinch gesture to the scroll wheel to zoom in). The touch screen is a bit useless outside of using the keyboard. It’d be nice if it had more utility.
The ability to pick a cloud-storage provider to use for automatic 3rd-party game sync. It sucks that I can’t play a non-steam game on my deck and then resume on my desktop or vice versa.
An AMD-compatible version of DLSS or a DLSS capable processor. FSR is great, but let’s be honest, DLSS is higher quality.
The ability to suspend games to disk. Linux supposedly has this ability via CRIU, but they’d have to implement it. The ability to save-state like a console emulator would be sick.
However, I’ve been in love with my deck since I got it.
Admittedly it’s a bit of manual tech fiddling involved, but you can accomplish this by using network shares and some careful scripting. For example, I’ve got both my desktop and steamdeck with a launch script configured in Lutris on both. The script symlinks a network share path to the appropriate save game location for each game before running the game. Granted you have to figure out where each game wants it’s save to be stored, but that’s not too difficult once you get used to it.
Fiddly and nerdy for sure, and not for the non technical, but it’s pretty nice, I’ve found! Would be even better if there was some more automated solution though.