Maximize your Steam Deck (Windows and Playnite)

so do you have a steam deck or you think about getting one have you tried running Windows on this thing or you've just had compatibility issues with some of your favorite games on Steam OS well today I'm going to talk about how on the steam deck I primarily use Windows when I'm playing it now I do dual boot Steam OS but most of the time I'm on Windows now before we get started if you like this video I would be very grateful if if you would hit that like And subscribe button and you can follow me on Twitter at AVG Halo gamer now the steam deck is an interesting device because when it came out you know it it runs dmos which is a great operating system and I have nothing against Linux I work with Linux on a professional basis but I have not hidden the fact that I use Windows on this thing I even put out a video a little while ago about it now first I want to talk about why we would you want to use Windows so there's a few reasons for that as great as Steam OS is there are definitely some compatibility issues with with games particularly once you leave the steam ecosystem you know steam anything you download from Steam works great with proton well not anything but it handles a lot of that for you but if you have any games from the epic game store or particularly and if you're following me you most likely follow within this group if you want to play games through Xbox game pass now you can stream xcloud to your steam deck but it's not the same experience it's not running natively and especially if you want to play games like Halo it's not an ideal experience doable but that extra latency just isn't worth it so there are good reasons that you would want to run a when windows on the steam deck and I think that there are also good reasons that you know two of the biggest most popular steam deck Alternatives that come out have come out recently like the legion go or the Asus rag Ally are running Windows they're not running Steam OS and of course there's the fact that about a year ago I tested the performance difference between Steam OS Windows 10 and a debled Windows 10 instance and I got better performance and better battery life in Halo infinite now I'll talk a little bit later about what I mean by Deep loaded instance but that's still an important metric and sure I didn't test in other games other than Halo infinite but I don't really have any reason to believe that other very resource intensive games wouldn't have a similar performance benefit now this is not going to be a super comprehensive video this is meant to be covering some Basics and I'm focusing on the UI here now Windows is a flawed operating system I personally I don't like Windows uh I use it as a necessity but not because it's my operating system of choice my operating system of choice is actually a Mac on a professional standpoint when I'm working with servers it's Linux all the way but for me I care about what the performance is while I'm playing game I care about being able to play the games it's the I feel the same way with consoles I might prefer an Xbox I sure as held by a PS5 at launch I wanted to play those games I wanted to play Ratchet and Clank so for me what games I can play what The Experience is while I'm playing the game ultimately is higher than any of my opinions regarding um the operating system why do I care about the operating system when I'm playing a game I don't see it I don't really interact with it so to me that is what it's most important but like I was saying Windows is a flawed operating system particularly on a device like this it is not optimized for a screen this small it is really only just barely optimized for touch and it wasn't meant that the primary way of interacting with the operating system is essentially a controller there is a touch screen on here but again Windows is not the most touch friendly OS which makes sense most people who use Windows interact with it with a keyboard and mouse so that means that we need a better way of using Windows on here if we have already decided that the compatibility issues or Game Pass or just wanting to not worry about where your games are from is an important factor to you then we need to make windows work on a device like this let's figure out how we're going to do that now let's talk about what my setup is on windows before we dive into this because I want to make an important caveat here now like I mentioned earlier when I was doing the testing in Halo infinite on my steam deck I was using a debled Windows 10 installation by debloated I mean I ran a script that got rid of a lot of things that I didn't need on windows for a dedicated gaming device since making that video I have however moved off of that I am now using Windows 10 LTS this is a special version of Windows that is meant for Enterprise and what that means is it comes with very little it doesn't even have the the Windows store installed by default now those things can be very easily installed for example I downloaded the Xbox app and it downloaded the Windows store for me it did prompt me but a lot of things are missing here it is also not the most up-to-date Windows version it doesn't get updates constantly and you're currently stuck on Windows 10 which for me on the steam deck is Aon issue I don't need the latest features from Windows 11 because steam deck to my knowledge can't handle them it's not like we're about to do rage racing on the seam deck so I wanted to make that important caveat because I'm going to be talking about performance in this video now this is not a super in-depth performance video but I feel like just to be fully upfront about what my setup is I need to be open about that information so I wanted to make that important caveat because I'm going to be talking about performance and other things that are impacted by my choice of operating system on this if you're running a standard Windows 10 or 11 installation on your steam deck your base CPU and memory usage is already going to be higher than mine before you even start playing your games I do also want to mention that I am using the steam deck tools on here what that means is the steam deck tools is a suite of tools for Windows I however only use the debugging software and I use the controller I have disabled the analytics you are going to see it in the video because I turned it on specifically for this video um but normally I don't use it so focusing on the UI as I mentioned working with Windows on here sucks so I found a piece of software called play night which is a game launcher now play night lets you uh it can give you a full screen application very similar to steam but steam I found gives has some trouble with running games from other loders uh it is possible but I always had trouble with it so I just gave up on that so that's what play Knight is play Knight is not an alternative to steam it is not an alternative to Epic gam store it still uses all of those stores you actually have to have them installed if you're going to use them but it just combines all of your games into a single full screen view so let's talk about how you install Play night on the steam deck now this installs like any other application there isn't really too much here to go over but we're still going to talk about it a little bit now obviously I search for play night now I can already see the comment yes I'm using Bing yes I'm using Microsoft Edge again this is a gaming Focus device I had no reason to install Google Chrome or change my default search engine it does one thing and let's play video games so that's why it's being a Microsoft Edge so we're going to pass forward through the actual installation of this so once you actually get it installed you then need to start setting it up and there are some basic setup steps that you need to do now for the purpose of this video I'm Only focusing on Xbox game pass but when you first set it up you choose what stores you want to use and you log into all of them so the application can track all of the games you have I'm cutting out the part where I put in my Xbox credentials but here you actually have to log into your Xbox app now obviously that's probably will give some people pause but tanite is open source now after I log in and authenticate with Xbox I actually mistakenly told it to track Xbox games which doesn't really have any value on here like why do I want to see the Xbox games on here I'm sure someone wanted this feature I don't really understand why so later on I actually disable this feature but I would recommend just don't turn it on unless for some reason you really want to see Xbox games that you can't play so once you finish the initial setup and you put in all your stores it's going to take a little bit for it to start showing you data you're going to see in the top right that it is scanning all of your stores now as you can tell this UI doesn't scale super well to the steam deck but we're not going to be using this UI once we get a setup and we'll be getting into that in just a moment so we're going to be changing some default play not settings now these are the settings that I use so it's completely up to you whether or not you want to do these yourself now I would highly recommend using play night in full screen mode so that's what we're going to do right now we're going to set play night to start when Windows starts and enter full screen mode when it starts that way you briefly see windows and then you ear play night which should serve most of the time that you're playing games on here the other thing that we're going to do is we're going to add a view to only see your installed games now I don't understand why this isn't a view that's already baked in especially in full screen mode like why why do I need to make this filter myself it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me but we're going to do it so we're going to create the filter and then we're just going to save it as installed um that way we can use it later so now if you exit plan KN and you relaunch it it will launch into full screen mode and as you can tell this is a mode that looks very similar to a any other full screen game mode you see your games and you can easily select them so there are a couple settings that we want to change here though now one of the weird things about plenty night is there are some settings that are duplicated between the normal UI and the full screen UI even if the setting itself is identical so you might try to change a setting in the normal UI but it doesn't effect the full screen UI I don't really understand that but I guess you know maybe there was a good reason for it so there's a couple settings that once you're in the full UI that I would recommend changing if you go into settings you can see show battery status and percent which considering this is a mobile device I highly recommend that way when you're about to launch a game you have some idea of how much battery life you have and the second one is the darken not installed games I do not understand how this is not default turned on because I find it really confusing when I go look through my games and it's like everything is bright and there's no easy way for me to see what games are not installed so yeah I highly recommend turning on this setting obviously again personal preference but I highly recommend it now one of the things I really like about play night is the fact that you can find games you don't have from the play Knight UI now it's not perfect so play night is going to send you to the store that your game is from so when I go to Disney Dreamlight Valley I click install it launches the Microsoft store now you can go into the Xbox app and change the settings so that it will instead go to the Xbox app which I highly recommend you do um but that's personal preference now the big thing that I was worried about when I was going to try this on my steam deck was performance the steam deck is already kind of tight on resources so I was really worried about you know when play Knight's running in the backgrounds how much memory and CPU was it going to use and I was very happy to see that it's only using about 1.7% of my CPU and about 150 megabytes of ram that's not nothing obviously and there are obviously some games that really tap out the CPU but I found that it really doesn't impact my performance and the benefit of having play night outweighs that one of the things I might be interested in looking at some point is do I still have the performance gains that I had before with this running yeah I think that'd be an interesting test right now I think the trade-off is worth it because ultimately compatibility is a major driving force for me to use Windows and the last thing I want to call out here is how much you can do from within play night from play night when you go into the system menu you can obviously turn off play night but you can also restart and shut down your steam deck so you don't actually have to go back to Windows to turn it off you don't have to hold down the power button you can do all of that from play night and at autum so with all of that installed and all of the configuration things that I would encourage you to do done let's talk about what play night isn't and where I think it falls a little bit short as I mentioned earlier play Knight does not install the games for you it isn't like heroic launcher in that case heroic launcher I use on the Steam OS side or I tried to use on the Steam OS side for installing epic gam Store games on Steam OS that is not what play ey is you have to have all of the launchers that you want installed and uh if you don't have them installed in some cases they can still pull in the data but you obviously can't install it uh that also means that you have to have multiple things running in the background so if you you know that means that you could have a ton of launchers running in the background now for me I don't even have steam installed on the window side that's probably going to change for me really soon but I only use the window side for Game Pass and it just happens that the games I play on Game Pass are most of the games I play on my steam deck not all of them but most of them so the big question is does this alleviate all my problems with Windows and no it doesn't and that's not play Knight's fault it can't unless play night was a complete reskin of windows it's not really possible Windows still is not made for a device like this but yeah we saw those leaks of a handheld gaming focused uh Windows UI but we don't know if that's ever going to happen and it probably won't look the way that we saw from those leaks but it does a really good job it fixes the UI problem especially once you have the games installed you're going to have to leave play night to install games but assuming you used the same games often on your steam deck or you're just not really installing games that often it still is a better experience than what you had before on windows with none of the compatibility issues of Steam OS and you can use Game Pass so do I recommend play night I feel like if you've gotten to this point you probably realized that I'm pretty happy with play night I might keep an eye out for Alternatives but this does most of what I wanted from a launcher sure it would be great if it could actually replace steam actually replace epic games but even just being a better rapper around launching and playing games is huge but of course there's still the open question of play night on Windows 10 or Steam OS and this is where things get complicated because I am highly technical I understand how to install these tools I understand how to use them and installing Windows on a steam deck while not hard is not the easiest thing it's a little weird how you install the drivers Windows update is not going to pull a lot of things for you and there's already been some issues around an outdated driver well I do highly recommend using Windows 10 especially if you can figure out how to get the LTS version which I'm not going to explain in this video and if you Google it you'll find out why if you can figure out how to install that and you can get play night installed and especially if you can figure out how to properly dual boot and there are some great guys out there on how to do exactly that then I do recommend it it is it removes any compatibility issues that you need to worry about with playing any game I've yet to see an experience that a game would run on Steam OS and it wouldn't run on Windows the only weird catch that I could see with that is if some game has special code in it that only runs on CMOS to maybe work on a smaller screen I'm not entirely sure why that would be the case I recommend it keep Steam OS though you might have some weird game obviously I not tested every game most of what I play on here is Halo uh I do play a few other games like I play Kingdom Hearts Dream light Valley which is actually on my Steam OS side but that's probably going to move very soon especially though if you have Game Pass if you have Game Pass you're wasting your money if you're buying your game again on Steam just because you want to play it on your steam deck just install Windows it is not that bad and play night makes it infinitely better this was kind of a weird video to put together because there are a lot of people that are adamant about Steam OS and I get it Windows has a stronghold on the gaming market and while I'm all four trying to remove that stronghold as I said earlier what I care about is being able to play games if I have a worse experience playing the game that isn't a solution to me that's not how we fix the problem because then we're just pushing people back to Windows I hope that Steam OS gets better I hope that proton becomes better I hope that steam makes it easier to leave the steam store but they're not financially incentivized to do that and there are competitors like the legion go like the Asus Rog Ally that is putting out windows devices that are going to get steam Decker run for its money especially if they can properly optimize the operating system which is possible with the LTS version so if you enjoyed this video please consider hitting that like And subscribe button and you can follow me on Twitter at AVG Halo gamer thank you so much for watching

Channel: BeyondTheRing

Views: 7,706

Keywords: steam deck, steam deck windows, playnite, playnite steam deck, valve steam deck

Id: AvLXBf4RpK8

Length: 19min 50sec (1190 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2023