You should also definitely consider battery life and how important each “upgrade” is. Windows supports a few extra games but isn’t optimized for a handheld like SteamOS. A better screen or more performance would be cool but not if it costs an hour of battery life.
One thing that ended up surprising me is how little I’ve cared about performance on the Deck. It’s kind of the nature of a handheld that you play games like Hades and not RDR2 or whatever. So, it ends up being less of a problem. Big, beautiful games tend to call for a big screen and a few hours whereas a portable is like, “I have 30 minutes to kill. I’ll play Tetris Effect.”
That’s such a big thing. Linux is better for a handheld. I used to own a couple of GPD Win’s and Windows made it so frustrating so I just sold them. With my Steam Deck I have found very few games I couldn’t play on Linux. I actually can’t think of a single example that isn’t a competitive multiplayer game. But, personally I didn’t buy a handheld for competitive multiplayer…
You should also definitely consider battery life and how important each “upgrade” is. Windows supports a few extra games but isn’t optimized for a handheld like SteamOS. A better screen or more performance would be cool but not if it costs an hour of battery life.
One thing that ended up surprising me is how little I’ve cared about performance on the Deck. It’s kind of the nature of a handheld that you play games like Hades and not RDR2 or whatever. So, it ends up being less of a problem. Big, beautiful games tend to call for a big screen and a few hours whereas a portable is like, “I have 30 minutes to kill. I’ll play Tetris Effect.”
That’s such a big thing. Linux is better for a handheld. I used to own a couple of GPD Win’s and Windows made it so frustrating so I just sold them. With my Steam Deck I have found very few games I couldn’t play on Linux. I actually can’t think of a single example that isn’t a competitive multiplayer game. But, personally I didn’t buy a handheld for competitive multiplayer…