Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
view the rest of the comments
A few notes:
First-party support for Steam Input's deep configuration is a big selling point for a lot of people, myself included. It also means the lack of some of the extra buttons you mentioned present on other premium controllers doesn't hurt so much, because there's already so many options for layering in more inputs. Not wanting to mess with most of that doesn't mean the controller is "not for you," but it does mean it's going to align less with what you value.
I absolutely love the Deck's touchpads. I consider them non-negotiable inclusions for any future PC handheld or controller I buy. I will agree though that they aren't ideal if your main use case for them was typing any more than a couple words at a time.
Citation needed on no one using grip-enabled gyro. It's not something you need a game to support to make use of. Also, touch-enabled gyro was awesome on the original Steam Controller, and grip sensing on the Index controllers enabled some cool functionality.
I don't think lack of console support or color customization are going to register as negatives for most people in the market for this. I can't even remember the last time I used a console.
Valve has a pretty good track record with ergonomics, so I doubt accidentally activating the touchpads will be a common problem. Even if you find yourself in that spot though, you can have Steam Input disable a pad under certain conditions like when its thumb is on a stick.
Symmetrical sticks being a downside is extremely subjective.