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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.

Genuine curiosity - how do you cope without the trackpads on the Deck? They're so useful in game for mouse based games (e.g. No Man's Sky and Guild Wars 2), and useful out of game for fiddly pointing e.g. when in desktop mode.
The Ally looks cool, but the absence of at least one makes it look like a non-starter (not that I'm trying toove on from my Deck anyway).
Well, I've never owned a Steamdeck, so I guess ignorance is bliss in this case; I don't know what I'm missing. I really try to find games that work best with a controller to play on my Ally. There are plenty of games that require a keyboard and mouse, and I'll either use my desktop or dock my Ally, but again, I got it for the controller games.
I never used the trackpad in NMS on the steam deck. Never even thought about it. I've generally found the SD trackpad too fiddly for mouse games and I usually get tired of playing them pretty quickly.
The trackpad are much more useful in desktop mode on the Steam Deck, and that's where I really feel them missing on the Ally. It's actually really tough, because the Ally is an amazing PC. Just as a straight up windows PC, it is incredibly fast, quiet, and has 4k120 output. It is better than any laptop I've ever owned. It runs Cinebench multicore at nearly 6x the speed as my Surface Book 2. Single core performance is comparable to my desktop with a 5900X. If it had a damn trackpad I would make it my only computer. As it is I'll probably return it because the steam deck is more pleasant to use as a handheld gaming machine.