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DC Gamer Club / Re: Valve Announces Steam Deck: A Handheld PC
« on: December 06, 2022, 06:55 PM »
The last couple of updates have made things less convenient for me.
Two updates ago, suddenly docked mode "broke" for me. Any time I change accounts or switch from Desktop Mode to Gaming Mode, video output stops. I don't know why, but the Deck refuses to display anything on my TV when the user selection screen is up. And just blindly navigating doesn't fix it. I have to disconnect and reconnect the HDMI cable from the dock before my TV recognizes any output from the Deck again.
To be more precise, the display just freezes before it gets to the account selection screen. The first couple of times it happened I thought the Deck itself had locked up and I pressed the power button for several seconds to hard reset the device. But then I realized I can still hear audio after the display freezes, and then I realized I can still do stuff with an external controller, or even using the controls on the Deck itself. But the display on my TV doesn't start working again until I disconnect and reconnect the HDMI cable from the dock. Or reconnect the Deck itself to the dock via the USB C cable.
A few days later there was another update (which I believe is the most recent Stable update) which made things even more inconvenient! Now there's a confirmation dialog that pops up every time I ask the Deck to switch accounts. And the confirmation prompt doesn't even really make sense. It warns me that it will close my running game to allow switching accounts. That might be useful if I was ever actually running a game when it happened, but I have never tried to switch accounts when I still had a game running, so the confirmation prompt is not only useless, it's inconvenient and a little aggravating. There are multiple people in my household who use the Deck, so switching accounts happens somewhat frequently. Sometimes even when we're playing together on the same machine, because one of us have made more progress on a certain game, so we want to play on that account. Or maybe we want to progress the story or unlocks of a specific account's save data, so we switch to that one.
I've never been very pleased with how Steam handles multiple user accounts (even on Windows machines), but recent updates to the Deck are making it worse.
Two updates ago, suddenly docked mode "broke" for me. Any time I change accounts or switch from Desktop Mode to Gaming Mode, video output stops. I don't know why, but the Deck refuses to display anything on my TV when the user selection screen is up. And just blindly navigating doesn't fix it. I have to disconnect and reconnect the HDMI cable from the dock before my TV recognizes any output from the Deck again.
To be more precise, the display just freezes before it gets to the account selection screen. The first couple of times it happened I thought the Deck itself had locked up and I pressed the power button for several seconds to hard reset the device. But then I realized I can still hear audio after the display freezes, and then I realized I can still do stuff with an external controller, or even using the controls on the Deck itself. But the display on my TV doesn't start working again until I disconnect and reconnect the HDMI cable from the dock. Or reconnect the Deck itself to the dock via the USB C cable.
A few days later there was another update (which I believe is the most recent Stable update) which made things even more inconvenient! Now there's a confirmation dialog that pops up every time I ask the Deck to switch accounts. And the confirmation prompt doesn't even really make sense. It warns me that it will close my running game to allow switching accounts. That might be useful if I was ever actually running a game when it happened, but I have never tried to switch accounts when I still had a game running, so the confirmation prompt is not only useless, it's inconvenient and a little aggravating. There are multiple people in my household who use the Deck, so switching accounts happens somewhat frequently. Sometimes even when we're playing together on the same machine, because one of us have made more progress on a certain game, so we want to play on that account. Or maybe we want to progress the story or unlocks of a specific account's save data, so we switch to that one.
I've never been very pleased with how Steam handles multiple user accounts (even on Windows machines), but recent updates to the Deck are making it worse.
