Steam Deck | 10 Tips & Tricks For New Owners!

hey guys what's up Nikki once again and today we're going to be going over 10 tips and tricks for every brand new steam deck owner so if you're brand new to this team deck or maybe you're still waiting for yours to come in the mail this is the video for you so let's get right into it if you don't want to sit through the entire video I totally understand if you got lives and you got things to do I'll have time stamps in the scrub bar below if there's a specific tip or trick you're looking for specifically that is a place to find it and go to it at your free will but starting out at number one the first thing you want to learn is the shortcuts and by default steam is very very nice at giving us some really cool shortcuts right off the bat so Within game mode here if you hold down the steam button it'll actually give you a list of different shortcuts right off the bat so you can actually if you have a controller like I do right now connected via Bluetooth hitting Steam and triangle will actually turn off your controller to save battery life you can force a game to shut down show the keyboard ready to go so if you're typing in something in the keyboard is not popping up automatically which by the way quick Hint it happens a lot just hit Steam and square and boom the keyboard will show up right away well in reality square is actually X I'm not sure why it's showing the Playstation controls but that might be because I have this connected but normally it'll have these controls set up automatically so it'll be steam and x and you will get the keyboard to show up right away same with a quick access menu toggle magnifier take screenshots all that is very very good to know so definitely keep these in your memory and just kind of use them from time to time to get them stuck in your head so you don't have to look at this menu every single time the next big thing to learn is the desktop mode so if we go to the settings we go down to power and we go down to switch to desktop it'll switch us over it's kind of funny that it's a little bit hidden in a way to find the desktop mode I'm not gonna lie when I first got my steam deck I had to look it up how do I get to the desktop mode I know it's there but I can now figure it out hopefully sometime down the road they might add an actual launcher within your steam library but it is what it is for right now at least now you know where to find it and from here we have a ton of different amazing things we can do and it's literally a full-blown desktop so from here you can download applications at your liking with a full-blown internet browser I have Firefox enabled but you can download any web browser of your liking as you can see I was checking out some ROMs for my emulator I probably shouldn't be showing that on YouTube don't don't tell on me uh but yeah it's a full-blown web browser so you can watch YouTube videos on here you can watch Netflix clicks you can download programs the whole shebang it's pretty awesome and this is running on Linux it's not windows so you will find from time to time some programs you might download that'll be Windows only and they won't work properly so you got to make sure you're downloading a Linux based application so that it'll work without a hitch like the Linux version of spotify and Discord I had to download and they work without an issue the cool thing was as well I actually found these by going down to the little discover area so in here we can actually look for Linux based applications that are perfectly already optimized for the steam deck so just by going up into the search area here hit the Steam and X buttons like I stated before we get up that keyboard and you can type in something like Spotify and we'll get the keyboard to go wait as you can see Spotify is right here and you can download it straight from there you don't have to actually go and look it up online or through the internet browser it's all right in the Discover area pretty amazing and that will go for a lot of different things such as maybe if you want to emulate from time to time wink wink that is where you would find that as well so the desktop is just like any other desktop you'd see on a computer you also have your folder system so you can go through here and look at your documents your downloads and really anything inside of the steam deck or within your SD card so I do have a 500 gig SD card plugged in as well as this is the 512 gigabyte model of steam deck so if I wanted to look at what's inside the steam deck or within the SD card you can do that on separate pages just like you could like in Windows so pretty amazing the desktop mode is definitely something you don't want to just disregard you should come in here from time to time and I'll get more into this in a little bit with my 10th tip and trick for my third tip we're actually going to go into the settings for this one and this is actually a brand new thing they just added with the most recent update which is pretty cool you might see this new security Tab and from here you can actually add a lock screen just like a smartphone on your steam Deck with a password so if you don't want it just anybody getting into your steam deck and playing it if you were to lose it or leave it behind you can do that which at the moment I don't have it just because it's staying at home but if I were to go on a vacation or a trip somewhere I would highly recommend putting a lock screen on your steam deck just in case you never know but that's pretty cool that we do have the option to do that now the fourth tip also involves going into these settings and this is a pretty big one that a lot of people seem to like oversight on this you can actually turn off and actually completely customize your notification settings while playing games so if you're new to steam or if you're if you're not really you may or may not know that little badges will pop up on the bottom right of your display while you're playing games showing if friends are online or they just joined a game or if they sent you a message or if you got an achievement or whatever anything to link that is sort and if you're like me they can get kind of annoying so from time to time I do come in here and completely disable notifications altogether if I'm playing like a really story based like heavy story based game where I don't want to get distracted by a random message popping up of someone going online you can come in here and completely turn them off or on which is very very helpful and going on to the fifth tip this actually correlates a little bit to the shortcuts I showed earlier one of the cool shortcuts is if you hold down the menu button over here and use the left analog stick you can adjust the brightness on the go so if I hold this down hit up as you can see the brightness goes up and same if I go down I'm going to leave it at where I was but you can also go in to the settings here and you can change it to an Adaptive brightness which I think is honestly the way you should have it on so I believe this was off by default I recommend leaving this on and it has a sensor in the display to show your surroundings or at least see your surroundings and it'll adjust the brightness to what it thinks it would be the best for your viewing pleasure so if you're in a very dark environment it'll dim the brightness for you automatically and if you're outside with glaring light on your display you're going to probably want it brighter so it'll automatically put it at full brightness so again having the Adaptive brightness does help not only for visual Fidelity but also for your battery life so highly recommend keeping that on moving on to the sixth tip this one is actually super important that a lot of people seem to forget if you're like me and you have an SD card with your steam deck you're not just using the storage on the device itself you can actually go into these storage settings and choose which device you would like your games to be installed on or where your favorite place to be would be so by default when you plug in an SD card it actually changes that to your favorite storage medium so every time you install a new game it'll go right to your SD card which is pretty cool and it does save up a lot of space on your actual SSD built into the device now if you don't want that to be the case if you want your SD card to be your backup so to say you can go in here and click on the internal drive and you can see little star appear right up there where that will indicate that is your favorite place to send data to so as you can see I did set my internal drive to my favorite storage medium because I only have 50 gigs left on my micro SD card and I don't want to fill it up completely so but yeah it's pretty cool that they give you the option for that and this is a cool little trick that not a lot of people talked about number seven and this is another quick little tip that apparently nobody really talks about and I feel more people should you can have multiple steam accounts on one steam deck and you can switch between them on the Fly you don't have to log out to log into another one so if you go and click on your little profile up here and scroll all the way down you can go to change account and from here it'll ask you are you sure you want to shut down and change accounts basically if you're playing a game it will shut the game down in order to change accounts which is fine so we're going to continue and on this steam deck me and my wife both use it so we have both of our steam accounts on here and yes it does also take into account your libraries so when I log into her Steam account it actually show all of her Steam games from her steam library and vice versa if I'm in mine which is pretty amazing so you can download a game from someone else's Steam account and play it on the other account so if I were to go in here and which she already did she installed dreamlaid Valley on the steam deck but if I were to switch back to my account I could actually play Streamlight Valley because her account is logged into on the same steam deck so it's basically a really easy way to share libraries with people and you can do that right on the go right on the fly without really a hitch and as you can see it's pretty quick too it doesn't take very long to switch between the accounts it does restart the device to do so but other than that it's pretty quick and easy and very painless so good on you steam moving on to the eighth tip this is a super important one if you want to see stats for your games while you're playing them such as your frames per second so if you're in a game like recfest for instance right here you can actually click the little menu button on the right you get this little menu of pop out which from here you get quick access to your brightness your audio settings your microphone Bluetooth all that fun stuff but if you actually go up or down you get a few other options so going up you can see your friends list notifications and then going down you can see your performance now from just the get-go this might be a little confusing it doesn't really give you any clear indication of this is where you can see what's going on in your game but from right here the performance overlay level if you click into this you can then drag it over to get different amounts of information level one as you can see up in the left corner is just your frames per second level two you get a little bit more information you can see your GPU load your CPU load your battery life how much life is left how much wattage is being used your drive performance and then if you go to the right you get even more and so on and so forth you can see pretty much every little bit of information you'd ever need to see from a gaming PC while the games are running this is perfect for benchmarking and of course just to make sure your system is running the way it's supposed to I'm going to leave it just on frames per second so you can get an idea of what it looks like because you can completely exit out of there and it'll stay up on the screen and you can play your game as normal and see your frames so this is without editing anything running at high specs on on recfest and we get yeah on average maybe 55 frames a second not amazing but it's definitely playable but what I like to do and this is going on to my next tip is if we go back into that same menu we go over to Advanced View you get a ton of options here to actually manipulate how the game is ran on your steam deck to hopefully get better performance so what I'm going to do I'm going to lower the frame rate I actually would start out with the refresh right I'm going to lower the refresh rate down to 40. you'll see a little Flash and I'm going to move this down to 40 frames a second with a frame rate limit this might seem extreme and you're like man why are you going that low on your frames it's going to look terrible in my experience though on this display 40 frames a second at a 40 refresh rate honestly feels like 60 frames a second it really is not that big of a change and it really helps on not only your battery life but also your performance in general and you don't really have to mess with anything else here but the options are here if you'd like to change like your GPU clock control which is pretty awesome you can change the megahertz and yada yada if you're ever experiencing any issues or hiccups with your game going in here and changing some of these settings will actually help the performance so with that let's exit out of the menu and continue to the game and you'll see up there in the corner we're getting a steady 40 now and this game is running smooth as butter and for the 10th and final tip this is pretty important and it's kind of weird that it's not automatics that's why I'm giving you guys this tip now so you don't run the same issue I did where if you have an application on the desktop mode it actually will not update automatically in the background so what I'm recommending to everybody here is to check or at least switch desktop mode at least once every time you turn on your steam deck the main reason for this is because every time you go into your desktop mode it automatically will search for updates for any of your applications that you may have within the desktop mode such as Spotify Discord you name it right now these applications as stated before will not update automatically you have to go to the desktop mode and boom look at that updates are available so we're going to click on view updates and from my experience I get an update almost once a day they're very very fast and they they show up all the time so again I recommend I wouldn't say you have to log in here daily but if you use your steam deck daily at least once every time you turn your steam back on go into the desktop mode just to check for updates to see if any are available you're going to go to update all and just let it do its thing nine times out of ten these are super quick updates that take less than a minute to get done but it's highly recommended you do this because again they will not automatically install without you going to the desktop mode so it's just something that not a lot of people talk about or at least I've seen and it's just from my experience and I hope that in the future valve will Implement some way of having the desktop mode applications updated from game mode that would be amazing but that is pretty much it so those have been my top tips and tricks for any brand new steam deck owner if there's anything that maybe you're a steam deck owner yourself and you're checking out this video and you want to give somebody advice or maybe something I completely missed or if I messed up in this video let us all know in the comment section below to help anybody out if you are brand new to the steam deck first of all welcome to the club I'm so happy for you I'm excited to see what you're gonna do with it and if there's any ideas you have for future videos or any questions you have for something on the steam deck that I did not cover in this video let me know in the comment section below and I'll hopefully get back to you as soon as I can or if I end up making an entire video on it I will give you a shout out in the next video so with that lead letter support as always subscribe so you don't miss the next one and we'll hopefully see you in the next one peace out foreign [Music]

Channel: VicariousNick

Views: 91,105

Keywords: nick, tech, comedy, live, stream, gameplay, talk, review, gaming, mic, thiccnick, highlight, technology, streamer, vicariousnick, vicarious nick, vicarious, Commentary, VicariusNick Gaming, News, rant, opinion, steam deck, valve steam deck, steam, deck, steam deck tips and tricks, tips & tricks, steam deck tips, steam deck help, steam deck new owner, steam deck desktiop mode, steam deck 10 tips, steam deck show FPS, steam deck shortcuts, Add Extra Steam Accounts, steam deck multiple steam accounts

Id: 8-sLwS5Vwzw

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 14 2022