In the Q4 category while waiting for your Deck, yet somehow you still got an email? It’s not a mistake! Valve’s Lawrence Yang mentioned on Twitter: Hi all, a few of you may have received an order email for your “Q4 window” Steam Deck reservation today. This wasn’t a mistake! Production has outperformed our estimates, and we’ll be moving more Q4 folks into the Q3 window. Wow. Production is scary fast.

So what can I say about the Lifesaver accessory for the Deck? Though it may be a simple, 3D-printed piece of plastic, it works wonders when it comes to keeping the Deck from slipping out from its case. Steam Deck HQ recently did a review on this, and now that I’ve got one, here’s my take on it. Your browser does not support the video tag. Let’s face it: any of you Steam Deck owners out there have probably gotten lazy at one point and put the Deck in the case without zipping it up.

A little over a week ago Valve pushed an update to the Preview branch that reverted a VRAM workaround for Red Dead Redemption 2 and fixed some issues regarding random stutter and performance drops if the performance HUD was enabled. Well, that update is now available in the Stable branch, starting today. There’s also improved performance for Forza Horizon 5 from a beta update that shipped a couple of days later.

The past few beta updates to the Steam Deck client have now been pushed to the stable branch. Notably, some fixes were added to Offline Mode, a couple of fixes to the on-screen keyboard have made it in, and the hot/cold temperature notification has temporarily been disabled “while we address issues with false postives.” Patch notes are as follows: Offline Mode Fixes We’re continuing to look at making the user experience of playing games without an Internet connection a better, more intuitive experience.

Small update out for Beta and Preview Steam Deck-ers. Today’s Deck client update (beta) mostly focuses on improving the offline experience. Patch notes are as follows: Fixed issue where rebooting while in Steam Offline Mode would cause games to fail to launch Fixed the Cloud Sync error notification popping up when offline Disabled Steam Offline Mode button when not connected to the internet, as trying to do this currently gets Steam Deck into a bad state.

Seems like the voices of outdated packages on SteamOS have finally been reaching Valve’s ears. Firefox was replaced with the Flatpak version a few weeks ago, and now, my acquaintence Luke Short – the creator of WinesapOS – noticed that Valve has been at work rebasing their Neptune kernel from the current 5.13 to 5.19. On Twitter he mentions: #Valve #SteamOS #SteamDeck is currently working on rebasing their #Linux kernel from 5.

Small update out for those of you on the Beta and Preview channels on SteamOS. Primarily this focuses on fixes for the on-screen keyboard. Patch notes are as follows: Fixed styling for CJK keyboard glyphs so everything appears centered correctly on keys Fixed Recommended Layout not always showing up for the author of controller configuration Fixed CJK font issues in SteamOS updater when running on Steam Deck Fixed focus issue when tapping the show/hide password button Removed the gap between keys on the virtual keyboard for improved typing Those of you on the Preview channel should have also received a small update today containing a performance improvement for Forza Horizon 5.

Heh, sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun. One thing that always puzzled me is why Valve didn’t include a kickstand for the Deck. I’ll probably never know, but I can at least guess that it was likely a way to cut costs down during production. I’m happy to report I now have that accessory, which – to be quite honest – is essential for a device like the Steam Deck.

A few months back Gardiner Bryant showed off the Half-Life vinyl wrap that he got for his Steam Deck. Come to find out he got the skin from Moskeeto Designs. I really liked the Portal-themed skin that he has, so I got in touch and asked if he would send it over for review. Turns out he sent me all four of his skins (for some reason he’s not selling the Minecraft skin anymore; it has since been replaced with the Space Commander skin)!

EmuDeck version 0.17.6 just came out a few days ago. For those who aren’t aware, EmuDeck makes it incredibly easy to get emulation of retro to more modern titles set up on the Steam Deck. And what’s nice is combined with the Steam ROM Manager, roms can get added to the Steam Deck UI with nice cover art, and you can launch the game directly through this interface. At any rate, the latest update adds support for the Anbernic Win600 and some other goodies.