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Interesting, I assumed that it would flop or at best be a very niche product. It doesn’t seem like a very interesting device to me. I don’t see the appeal at all.

I guess it’s nice to hear that it’s so successful, considering how much it has done for linux gaming.

Tell me you haven’t tried a steam deck without telling me you haven’t tried a steam deck.

Not the person you replied to, but I have a Steam Controller and a streaming device for my main library on my desktop, so I’m honestly torn.

What do you think makes this better than such a setup? From my perspective, it seems like the main benefit is “Steam Controller with screen attached,” so it’s portable, and it has some limited capabilities to install and play games locally.

I’m not trying to detract, but having used my own setup for over five years, I wonder what it is I might be missing. What do you think?

Limited capabilities? I haven’t found a game in my library it couldn’t play locally. The ui is great, the controls work well, and it can even be used to run desktop apps.

I should have qualified: *Limited compared to latest-gen desktop hardware.

Because let’s be honest, no amount of tweaking will get you to that same level. But it’s obviously enjoyable and more than “just playable,” else we’d hear about it from a lot more people. My question was more geared towards “what is it that I’m missing out on” compared to what I have, not to passive aggressively wrinkle my nose at the console.

Well, it’s a great machine for emulators, for one. I setup Retrodeck as a single flatpak, then was able to dump my ROM collection into some folders and it used EmulationStation Desktop Edition combined with some pre-defined mappings and pre-configured emulators to have a retropie-style interface with almost no setup effort on my end (and the setup you do do is well documented on their site).

Now I have my entire library of games, new and old, available to play on a machine with super comfortable controls built-in, in a smaller form factor than a laptop plus controller.

And this is coming from a guy with Moonlight installed on my AndroidTV so I can stream my main gaming rig to it.

@entropicdrift @Telorand why did you choose retro deck over emu deck ?

Couple reasons:

RetroDeck is a flatpak and EmuDeck is basically a script that installs a bunch of custom stuff directly and configures it. I like the flatpak ecosystem and it makes more sense to me to do it that way so it’s self-contained. Seems like it’d be cleaner to remove/update/move the installation and less likely to break due to a SteamOS update

EmuDeck is working on Windows/ROG Ally support, while RetroDeck is just for Linux and dev priorities are still fully focused on the Deck

RetroDeck supports a couple fewer systems than EmuDeck, but they both cover all of the ones I care about personally.

RetroDeck is also more closely partnered with EmulationStation-DE

@entropicdrift is retrodeck ready for use? I haven’t really heard of it compared to emudeck.

IMO it is. They put a bunch of “oh it’s still early days” kinda warnings on their github page but for me it was pretty much plug and play

Hey, I’m not the guy to ask. For one, I don’t have any PSX games on my deck yet, but also I haven’t had to troubleshoot retrodeck yet.

If I were you I’d ask for help on their discord